The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

The Saffron Scourge. The Bloody Flux. The Breakbone Fever. The Blue Death.

Just dont na.e diseases like we used to

The conflict became known as the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

The names of other places in the region were equally unnerving: The Island of Desolation. The Port of Famine. Deceit Rocks. The Bay of the Severing of Friends.

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.

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.