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On 28th January 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon, the Wager was wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The crew, marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing 2,500 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes.

But then, six months later, another even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways and they had a very different story to tell. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes - they were mutineers. The first group responded with counter-charges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous captain and his henchmen. While stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death, for whomever the court found guilty would hang.


From David Grann, the international bestselling author of KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON and THE LOST CITY OF Z, a mesmerising story of shipwreck, mutiny and murder, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth.


Written by David Grann
Abridged by Richard Hamilton
Read by Luke Treadaway
Produced by Elizabeth Allard
First broadcast on BBC Radio 4 in January 2024

No MP3s found. The MP3 files used by this podcast appear to be missing. They may have been removed permanently from their source location.

1. Preparations for a Secret Mission (403 forbidden)
2. Daily Life On Board a Man-of-War (403 forbidden)
3. The Supreme Test of Seamanship (403 forbidden)
4. Sailing into the Gulf of Pain (403 forbidden)
5. A Fight for Survival (403 forbidden)
6. Friends or Foes (403 forbidden)
7. Hope and Peril (403 forbidden)
8. Escaping Wager Island (403 forbidden)
9. A Journal Is Published (403 forbidden)
10. The Court-Martial (403 forbidden)

MP3 files hosted by archive.org.