Excerpt from The Wager by David Grann, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Cheap knew what a cracking ship the Centurion was. Swift and stout, and weighing about a thousand tons, she had, like the other warships in Anson's squadron, three towering masts with crisscrossing yards—wooden spars from which the sails unfurled. The Centurion could fly as many as eighteen sails at a time. Its hull gleamed with varnish, and painted around the stern, in gold relief, were Greek mythological figures, including Poseidon. On the bow rode a sixteen-foot wooden carving of a lion, painted bright red. To increase the chances of surviving a barrage of cannonballs, the hull had a double layer of planks, giving it a thickness of more than a foot in places. The ship had several decks, each stacked upon the next, and two of them had rows of cannons on both sides—their menacing black muzzles pointing out of square gunports. Augustus Keppel, a fifteen-year-old midshipman who was one of Anson's protégés, boasted that other men-of-war had "no chance in the world" against the mighty Centurion.

Yet building, repairing, and fitting out these watercraft was a herculean endeavor even in the best of times, and in a period of war it was chaos. The royal dockyards, which were among the largest manufacturing sites in the world, were overwhelmed with ships—leaking ships, half-constructed ships, ships needing to be loaded and unloaded. Anson's vessels were laid up on what was known as Rotten Row. As sophisticated as men-of-war were with their sail propulsion and lethal gunnery, they were largely made from simple, perishable materials: hemp, canvas, and, most of all, timber. Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.

Excerpted from The Wager by David Grann. Copyright © 2023 by David Grann. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.