The Wager is the name of a ship launched by the British Navy in 1742. It was part of a small fleet sent to the southern seas to chase down a Spanish galleon loaded with plundered riches. Aside: it is difficult to know for whom to root in a situation where two colonial powers pillage indigenous populations and then attack one another’s ships in a game of never-ending one-upmanship (one-upmanships?).
The Wager was poorly built, led by inexperienced captains, and crewed by criminals and sailors who could not escape press-gangs. Scurvy destroyed many and the weather was horrible. Rounding the dangerous seas south of Cape Horn, the ship foundered. What was left of the crew washed up on an isolated island off the coast of Chile. For weeks and then months, surviving crewmen starved, froze and and turned upon one another, weapons drawn.
Remarkably, a small handful of survivors cobbled together a boat and floated to safety 1,500 miles up the Atlantic coast of South America. An opposing set of survivors floated up the west coast of South America. Enough documents of the captain and crew were carried back to England that a court martial was engaged to determine whether the captain had failed his crew or the crew had committed the most heinous of crimes: mutiny. A decent adventure, but missing some of the edge since we learn about the outcome in the opening pages.