Imagine: you are just 16 when you set sail for the British crown to wage war once morest the Spanish. Your mission should also strengthen the myth of the Empire as a sea power and as a colonial ruler in South America.
In return there is camaraderie and perhaps an above-average salary. Only instead you’re stuck with a group of survivors on an uninhabited island off the coast of Chile. Your captain’s authority is eroding like the souls and bodies of your colleagues. Out of agonizing hunger, even the flesh of deceased sailors is eaten. And although your sailing ship crashed in a storm at Cape Horn (Chile) in May 1741 and got stuck between rocks, it is winter there: it storms, hails and rains when it doesn’t snow.
What sounds so unbelievable that it can’t be true actually happened. In his book “The Sinking of the Wager”, published in German, US author David Grann describes the events before the shipwreck, on the island to which the survivors were able to escape, and the followingmath, especially from the perspective of the young ensign John Byron. Much later – he had made it back to London from Patagonia at the age of 22 – he became the grandfather of the great poet Lord Byron.
Hollywood already has the rights
But Grann, who compiled this material with forensic precision over years of research and put it into literary form, doesn’t even begin with the captivating stranding. It’s a bigger bang: It wasn’t just Byron who, with two other survivors, including “Wager” captain David Cheap, reached a safe shore at the end of 1742 on a makeshift boat. In January 1742, 30 men were able to leave the island’s hell just as successfully – led by master piecer John Bulkley. The splinter group was formed when Cheap fired a fatal shot on the island. The question that then plagued the public (press, books, salons) and the court martial was a central one: Did Bulkley and his men mutiny? Grann cleverly uses them to draw parallels to our “post-truth” times, in which people are often as unable to agree on one truth as the contemporary witnesses in the Wager case once were. And otherwise? Grann created a work full of outrageous twists and turns in the tradition of literary factual reporting that is hard to put down.
At its core, it’s regarding people, men who believed that values like honor and hierarchy would make them indestructible as a group – until nature came along. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio have already secured the rights to Grann’s book. Her most recent Oscar film, “Killers of the Flower Moon” (2023), is based on one of his works.
David Neighbor: “The Fall of the Wagers”, C. Bertelsmann, 432 pages, 26.50 euros
OÖN rating: five out of six stars
Author
Nora Bruckmüller
Culture editor
Nora Bruckmüller
