The stakes were life-and-death-for whomever the court found guilty could hang. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth.
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. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous captain and his henchmen. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. This boat contained just three castaways, and they had a very different story to tell. six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. 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. 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. 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. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. "From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z, a mesmerizing story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil.
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