The sheer audacity and brutality of the age of European imperial expansion is on full display in The Wager. It was a time when Europeans would take what most of us would regard as insane risks by venturing into the furthest reaches of the Earth in fragile vessels riddled with disease and decay and try to navigate the most dangerous seas without accurate charts or even a reliable way of calculating longitude.

A typical timber ship required hundreds of trees to build but would last only a few years due to wear and tear at sea, as well as termites and the other creatures steadily devouring the structure.

Grann notes that not only did “these vessels have to traverse some of the roughest seas on Earth; most of the men attempting to pull off this feat were already near death”. There was no understanding of diseases such as typhus and scurvy, which combined to kill more of the crew than the loss of life caused by any of the actual fighting, shipboard accidents or the extreme conditions.

To survive such a voyage required physical stamina and mental toughness that in our age of jet flight and GPS is hard to credit to ordinary human beings. Broken limbs typically were hacked off without anaesthesia using a bone saw.

The tiny ships were crowded with people with a wide range of backgrounds, skills and duties whose ages ranged from teenagers to the elderly. The death rate among the voyagers, many of whom had been forced on board by press gangs, was staggering.

Grann, a staff writer at The New Yorker whose previous books include The Lost City Z and Killers of the Flower Moon, which has been turned into a film by Martin Scorsese, is a self-described landlubber who is happiest shifting though boxes of old documents in temperature-controlled archives. Moreover, he does not pretend to comprehend the mindset of 18th-century British imperialists.

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This was a period when piracy still formed part of British naval strategy and the global slave trade was being established on an industrial scale. The Wager survivors were helped by local Indigenous people whose traditional way of life would soon disappear.

The loss of the Wager led to an inquiry that could have laid bare one of the most shocking episodes in the history of the Royal Navy. “The trial threatened to expose the secret nature not only of those who were charged but also of an empire whose self-professed mission was spreading civilisation,” writes Grann.

It is regrettable, though not surprising, to learn that the relevant authorities preferred to contrive an official cover-up rather than publicly confront the full horror of all that had happened.

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