He hunkered down on the ship's floor and popped some Dramamine on the way to the island. Grann and his crew endured the moody waters over a ten-day journey. So Grann flew to Chile, chartered a 52-foot vessel, and ventured to what is now known as Wager Island himself. He spent two years poring over archival records about the lives of 145 castaways from an 18th century British warship called The Wager but that wasn't enough for him, he told 60 Minutes correspondent Jon Wertheim. The stakes were life-and-death-for whomever the court found guilty could hang.Author David Grann does not think of himself as an explorer, but he'll travel to the ends of the earth to perfect the stories he tells. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. 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 counter-charges 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. Then, six months later, another, even more decrepit, craft landed on the coast of Chile. The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2,500 miles of storm-wracked seas. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, the Wager was 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. On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil.

From the international bestselling author of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE LOST CITY OF Z, a mesmerising story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.

The wager by david grann