David Grann, The Wager ****

The Wager is a non-fiction seafaring adventure tale. The title is the name of a British ship that wrecked on a desolate Patagonian island in 1741. A year later, a boatload of survivors arrived in Brazil, telling a story about the descent into anarchy on the island and their heroic escape. The following year, another group of survivors turned up in Chile with a somewhat different story. Who caused the shipwreck? Was there a mutiny? Did the captain commit murder? Perhaps the truth would come out at the court-martial proceedings for all of them.

The flap copy explains that the narrative has three distinct parts:

Grann's re-creation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaway's desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance, and his account of the court-martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller.

There is actually one further part of the story: the fate of the rest of the squadron of which Wager was a part. The book does not pay equal attention to each of these parts: the pre-shipwreck journey covers nearly half the pages, the court-martial just a single chapter. Grann's depiction of sailing on Wager is far more vivid than his accounts of the survivors' perilous journeys.

Grann tells the story in chronological order. I think he missed an opportunity to enhance the mystery and drama of his tale by interleaving chapters about the arrival of the survivors with flashback chapters about the disputed events on Wager Island. That's how Scott Turow would have done it,