MAROONED: Mutiny, Murder, and the Court-Martial That Could Hang a British Naval Hero

Two boats. Two crews. Two completely different stories of survival.In 1742, a battered raft of patched wood and torn sailcloth washed ashore in Brazil carrying thirty starving British sailors. They told a harrowing tale of shipwreck, hunger, and a desperate hundred-day voyage across nearly three thousand miles of open ocean. They were welcomed home as heroes.Six months later, a second boat reached the coast of Chile. It carried only three men. And they told a different story entirely: one of mutiny, abandonment, and a captain who shot one of his own crew.Marooned tells the true story of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, wrecked on a desolate island off Patagonia during a secret wartime mission, and the disintegration of order that followed among her stranded crew. Built from the survivors' own published journals and the original Admiralty court-martial records, this is a story of leadership, loyalty, and the question of what a man owes his country when his country has left him to die.