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One reviewer called it, " ressembling Conrad trapped in novel by Garcia Marquez". Hyperconnected, exhaustingly charted story that takes place over 2 years involving shipwreck, battles with pride, struggles for survival. As the author notes, "we have not lived what these men lived" and asks us to respect that this is a work based on washed out log books, moldering correspondence, half-truthful journals with conflicting accounts. Let History be the judge.
Well... I LOVE the opening sentence. "The only impartial witness was the sun."
He quotes Mary McCarthy, "We are the hero of our own story" and William Golding (Lord of the Flies), "Maybe there is a beast. Maybe it is us."

I really struggled with reading it, it was horrifying to me and depressing. I might not have stuck with it, but wanted to finish it for discussion of my book club. A perfectly dreadful (but well told) story of deceit, murder, mutiny in the days of the British Empire, sending out its "wooden cities" i.e. 250 men in Sailing Vessels to navigate the high seas, acquire more land, plunder Spanish Galleons filled with silver, etc. It does not endear me to this species called "human beings". I learned a lot about what it must have been like to live the marine life in 1740-- whether as gunner, captain, or seaman.. David Grann provides a vivid description of what these "Man o' War" ships were like, and gripping descriptions of battles, whether braving the horrors of Cape Horn or firing cannons at close range.