Shipwreck, survival, and savagery

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary story to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas.

This #1 New York Times bestseller from the author of Killers of the Flower Moon is a page-turning tale of human behavior pushed to the extremes.

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