Taking to The Sea, or Not

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. David Grann. 2023.

I never want to go to sea. I look at the ocean as only slightly less terrifying than outer space. A few weekends ago I went on the water taxi with my kid, which only goes across the Baltimore harbor, and I didn’t even really like that. It was fine, it was a nice day, but I couldn’t relax. On some deep level I don’t think we were meant to go to sea. What happens there is not our business.

I’m lucky, I know, that my ancestors either didn’t share this fear or got over it. The world is probably better because people, once, took to the sea. But I will probably always think of water as something you either look at appreciatively, or cross as quickly as possible on the way somewhere else. I say all of this to explain why I started this book understanding it as something like horror, which it wasn’t. I’m still not sure what it was.

This was a strange book, and it wasn’t what I expected. I think I expected more of a courtroom drama, and the problem is that there wasn’t much of one. It seems that the powers that be wanted the whole matter to go away, so the trial lasted as little time as possible. We don’t really know who was right; both sides of the apparent mutiny broke laws and both sides suffered and showed some bravery.

So what are you left with, in story terms? I’m not sure there’s much - or maybe there is, but we’ll never know. The survivors were understandably cagey and occasionally evasive. There’s drama in the shipwreck itself, but it’s not like the Franklin expedition or something, full of existential horror and the specter of imperialist sins being finally, in a small way, paid for. Grann didn’t find the horror here and he didn’t really find the drama - the trial makes up only the very end of the book, probably again because there wasn’t much to it.

I wanted to like this. But there ultimately wasn’t a lot there.