The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
by David Grann
30 popular highlights from this book
Key Insights & Memorable Quotes
Below are the most popular and impactful highlights and quotes from The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder:
“nautical language was so pervasive that it was adopted by those on terra firma. To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals. A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.”
“We all impose some coherence—some meaning—on the chaotic events of our existence”
“Bold were the Men who on the Ocean first Spread the new Sails, when Ship wreck was the worst: More Dangers Now from MAN alone we find, Than from the Rocks, the Billows, and the Wind.”
“As the writer Janet Malcolm once observed, “The law is the guardian of the ideal of unmediated truth, truth stripped bare of the ornament of narration….The story that can best withstand the attrition of the rules of evidence is the story that wins.”
“hunger is void of all compassion.”
“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.”
“We all impose some coherence—some meaning—on the chaotic events of our existence. We rummage through the raw images of our memories, selecting, burnishing, erasing. We emerge as the heroes of our stories, allowing us to live with what we have done—or haven’t done.”
“Persons who have not experienced the hardships we have met with,” Bulkeley wrote, “will wonder how people can be so inhuman to see their fellow creatures starving before their faces, and afford ’em no relief. But hunger is void of all compassion.”
“The authors rarely depicted themselves or their companions as the agents of an imperialist system. They were consumed with their own daily struggles and ambitions—with working the ship, with gaining promotions and securing money for their families, and, ultimately, with survival. But it is precisely such unthinking complicity that allows empires to endure. Indeed, these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving—and even sacrificing themselves for—a system many of them rarely question.”
“Presence of mind, and courage in distress, Are more than armies to procure success.”
“Indeed these imperial structures require it: thousands and thousands of ordinary people, innocent or not, serving - and even sacrificing themselves for - a system many of them rarely question.”
“A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.”
“desperation can also breed unity”
“Death is at all times solemn, but never so much so as at sea,” one sailor recalled. “The man is near you—at your side—you hear his voice, and in an instant he is gone, and nothing but a vacancy shows his loss….There is always an empty berth in the forecastle, and one man wanting when the small night watch is mustered. There is one less to take the wheel, and one less to lay out with you upon the yard. You miss his form, and the sound of his voice, for habit had made them almost necessary to you, and each of your senses feels the loss.”
“Just as people tailor their stories to serve their interests - revising, erasing, embroidering - so do nations. After all the grim and troubling narratives about the Wager disaster, and after all the death and destruction, the empire had finally found its mythic tale of the sea.”
“Presence of mind, and courage in distress, Are more than armies to procure success. Bulkeley knew that none of them would survive much longer without additional sources of food.”
“(When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be “under the weather.”)”
“To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals.”
“Sir Walter Raleigh had envisioned: “Whosoever commands the seas commands the trade of the world; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world.”
“the poet John Dryden: Presence of mind, and courage in distress, Are more than armies to procure success.”
“By portraying the natives as both magnificent and less than human, Europeans tried to pretend that their brutal mission of conquest was somehow righteous and heroic.”
“During Ferdinand Magellan’s expedition—the first to circumnavigate the globe, in 1522—a scribe onboard wrote that the pilots “will not speak of the longitude.” Longitudinal lines, which run perpendicular to the parallels of latitude, have no fixed reference point, like the equator. And so navigators must establish their own demarcation—their home port or some other arbitrary line—from which to gauge how far east or west they are. (Today, Greenwich, England, is designated the prime meridian, marking zero degrees longitude.)”
“As Samuel Johnson once observed, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”
“Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they”
“each man’s life depended on the performance of the others. They were akin to the cells in a human body; a single malignant one could destroy them all.”
“Was God seeing the things they did out here? Bulkeley still sought solace from The Christian’s Pattern, but a passage in it warned, “Hadst thou a clear conscience, thou could not fear death. It were better to avoid sin than to flee death.” Yet was it a sin to want to live?”
“Unlike on a battlefield, there was no fixed position at sea: a ship was always shifting with the wind and the waves and the currents.”
“At sea, beyond the reach of any government, he had enormous authority.”
“Yet they were compelled onward by that mysterious narcotic: hope.”
“It is impossible to know for sure what transpired behind the scenes, but there were certainly reasons for the Admiralty to want the case to disappear. Ferreting out and documenting all the incontrovertible facts of what had happened on the island—the marauding, the stealing, the whippings, the murders—would have undercut the central claim on which the British Empire tried to justify its rule of other peoples: namely, that its imperial forces, its civilization, were inherently superior. That its officers were gentlemen, not brutes.”
