When the opposing factions finally made it back to England, weathering even more abject hardships on the return, a flurry of books were published to back up their stories. The mutineers kept detailed journals, hoping to convince future courts martial that they were justified in usurping the ship’s glory-hungry captain, David Cheap. In fact, there is so much historical account of the Wager’s demise as to suggest a surfeit of testimony. He draws on other contemporary seafaring accounts to round out the narrative and splices in his own atmospheric descriptions of quaking seas and creaking hulls (Grann travelled to the site of the shipwreck as part of his research). Grann, who spent five-plus years working on the book, is expert at stitching together the available facts so deftly that we hardly notice the gaps. Even the more sympathetic figures, he notes, were complicit in a far greater crime than mutiny: upholding the structures of empire

Here the story of survival warps into a tale of mutiny, albeit a slow-motion one with numerous false starts. In addition to scurvy, which gave rise among the men to what one ship’s chaplain describes as “a luxuriance of fungous flesh”, the expedition was beset by pulverising storms, acute food shortages and internal dissent, which grew more pronounced after the Wager hit a rock, disgorging its crew on to a desolate island in Chile’s Golfo de Penas (Gulf of Pain). Nearly 2,000 men set sail, many of them unwilling conscripts pressed into service by armed gangs. Its real objective was far more mercenary: to raid a Spanish galleon loaded with treasure en route to the Philippines. HMS Wager was part of a fleet that set off from Portsmouth under Commodore George Anson, ostensibly to destroy Spanish ships and other holdings in the Pacific during the War of Jenkins’ Ear (1739-48).

The white darkness by david grann