On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men - they were survivors of His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built a flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days. They were greeted as heroes. Six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang.