
"The Wager," by David Grann
The Millennialish Book Club discusses David Grann’s nonfiction account of the Wager shipwreck and the conflicting stories told by its survivors.
AI summary · From the event listing
November 8, 2026 · 3 PM – 5 PM
Cre8tive Space Studio 3-1, 134 West 29th Street, New York, Ny ·
Keep your plans in one place. Free account.
Discuss David Grann’s account of the Wager shipwreck, its survivors and competing accounts of mutiny.
AI · From the event listing
Organizer’s description
We have some nonfiction for November! The Wager by David Grann, author of Killers of the Flower Moon, is a true story about a shipwreck and mutiny off the coast of Patagonia. From Goodreads: On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale 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 during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," 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 2500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness.
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Hosted by The Millennialish Book Club
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