Mutiny and death in the Strait of Magellan, a book review

Grann, David. The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (New York: Doubleday, 2023) pp. 329. The title of this book effectively summarizes the riveting story about sailing in the Strait of Magellan, the most turbulent and dangerous seas in the world, in the 18^th century.

All this takes place in 1740 involving The Wager, one of Her Majesty Queen of England’s ships and its sailors who were assigned to sack and plunder Spanish properties in South America. This ignoble charge was part of yet another war between England and Spain at the time. In the broadest sense, The Wager offers but one more example of the maddening competition that statesmen of all nations have engaged in the name of one flag against another, mine against yours, all of it leading to horrible maiming and astounding loss of life not to mention property.

In this well documented novel-like report, the English sailors die due to the perilous voyage itself and not at the hands of their Catholic enemy. The description of the roaring polar winds and the giant crushing waves is riveting at the same time that the depiction of the Patagonian landscapes is equally astonishing. And the portrayal of human beings making their home in this forbidding part of the world is simply stunning, especially when it is contrasted with the stranded sailors who could not survive the cold and relentless rain and ice storms.

The Wager is scheduled to become a movie.

Empire of the Summer Moon: Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History, a book review

Gwynne, S. C. Empire of the Summer Moon. Quanah Parker and the Rise and Fall of the Comanches, the Most Powerful Indian Tribe in American History (New York: Scribner, 2010), pp. 371. This book is about war and the way it was conducted in American and northern Mexico territory between whites and Indians before 1875. For this reason, the reader will come across details that may be unsettling.

The overlapping drama in Empire of the Summer Moon is the riveting history of European-origin people overpowering native Americans, the Comanches in this case. They were the most powerful Indian tribe in North America, as the subtitle informs us, and they came to an end at the hands of white Americans moving west. Sad to say, it is but one of many such North American tragedies, not counting parallel calamities in the other parts of the western hemisphere marked by white people crushing dark skinned natives.

Even though I am familiar with the clash of cultures and civilizations in the Americas, Gwynne’s story entranced me nevertheless because of his contention that the Comanches arose in the late 1600’s as the most powerfully aggressive nation in the North American continent, more than the fierce Apaches. They could fight and kill on horseback more effectively than anyone else, including our Cavalry, at least up to the 1870’s. They employed this grisly facility to protect their buffalo hunting grounds in the Great Plains south of the Dakotas.

Comparing the war making capacity of American Indian tribes constitutes another fascinating subtheme in this book.

In between these powerful strands of early North American history the author artfully weaves the story of the Parker family which is intertwined with the descent of the Comanches. The Parkers, a prominent settler family, arrived in west Texas on the eve of this descent and two of them, Cynthia Ann and her son, Quanah, became braided-together with the Comanches in astonishing ways. Each played a role in what would be the Comanche’s finale as the lords of the Great Plains. This is truly an exceptional American story sadly ignored by most Americans.