Human beings surviving (or otherwise) in extreme situations is a recurring area of fascination for the American journalist and author David Grann. A virtuoso storyteller with a talent for archival research, he has tracked explorers through mosquito-ridden Amazonian swamps in The Lost City of Z, and across the howling wastes of Antarctica in The White Darkness, an outing that involved frostbite, broken teeth, bacterial peritonitis and eventually death.
Now he’s taken to the high seas with The Wager – and you can see why Grann was attracted by the tale of a scurvy-ridden British warship foundering on the shores of Patagonia during a spectacularly ill-conceived mission to round Cape Horn in the early 1740s.
