Grann sails high seas to reconstruct mutiny tale
‘Wager’ equal parts adventure, exploration of narratives’ power
Journalist David Grann was rummaging through the electronic files of a British archive in 2016, researching one of his pet obsessions — mutinies — when he came across an astonishing tale.
Written in florid, 18th-century prose by a midshipman named
John Byron, the journal told the story of a British warship that sank off the coast of Chile, leaving its survivors marooned on a desolate island, where they descended into chaos, starvation, sedition and murder.
Byron, grandfather of poet Lord Byron, was one of just a few dozen castaways who escaped the island and survived, out of some 250 who first set sail on a quest to seize a treasure-filled Spanish galleon in 1740.
“When they’re on that island, it became almost like a laboratory, testing human nature under extraordinary circumstances,” Grann said. “This is a story about the disintegration of a floating civilization.”
The account had largely faded from public memory, even though it was documented in popular accounts by Byron and other survivors, and went on to influence philosophers such as Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu, and inspire novelists Herman Melville and Patrick O’Brian.
Grann set out to reconstruct the story. After six years of research — including his own harrowing journey to the inhospitable island where the castaways washed up — Grann has
delivered what will likely endure as the definitive popular account of the demise of the HMS Wager.
An engrossing survival story, “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder,” is a knotty tale of moral compromises and betrayal and a metaphysical inquiry into the elusive nature of truth and the power of stories to shape history and our perceptions of reality.
The book, which Doubleday recently released, has drawn enthusiastic early reviews. It is being adapted into a feature film by director Martin Scorsese and actor Leonardo DiCaprio — who also teamed up on a forthcoming movie based on Grann’s book “Killers of the Flower Moon.”
Grann, 56, who has been a writer for The New Yorker for 20 years, is known for crafting nonfiction narratives that have the unpredictable twists of a detective novel or an espionage thriller. He has told the stories of largerthan-life adventurers and impostors, of a deathsquad-leader-turned-NewYork-real-estate-broker and a scientist on a quest to capture a giant squid, and of doomed expeditions to the South Pole and to the Amazon.
Grann has a reputation for being a meticulous, tireless reporter who will travel the ocean or go deep into the jungle to track down the perfect details for a story. To those who know him, his swashbuckling escapades can seem at odds with his low-key, bookish persona.
“He’s obsessive about getting the facts right,” said Bill Thomas, editorin-chief and publisher of Doubleday. “To my mind, his neuroses are his super power.”
With “The Wager,” Grann tested his ability to create narrative suspense from a spotty and often contradictory historical record. He pored over faded ship logbooks, correspondence, journals, records from the court-martial hearings, newspaper reports, sea ballads and accounts published by survivors.
Just how far Grann tumbled down the research rabbit hole was evident during a visit to his home in Rye, New York.
His bright, spacious office is crammed with books, boxes of files, and towering piles of manila folders full of photocopied maps, reproductions of old engravings and diagrams, muster books (lists of a ship’s personnel) and other nautical paraphernalia.
His bookshelves are filled with naval histories, seamen’s accounts, books about piracy and 18thcentury medical texts, including a photocopy of an illustrated guide from 1743, with alarmingly simple instructions on how to
amputate a leg. More piles of books and folders are scattered across the floor.
On a table near his desk, Grann has a model of the Wager, complete with 28 tiny canons, a captain’s quarters and tiny transport vessels.
Even when he had a coherent narrative based on scrupulous documentation, Grann said, he was unsettled by the feeling that he was missing something.
“You always have that gnawing doubt of what you don’t know,” he said. “I started to fear I couldn’t fully understand what these castaways went through.”
So in summer 2019, he traveled to Chiloe Island, off Chile’s west coast, and hired a captain to take him
on the roughly 350-mile journey by sea to Wager Island. The small boat took them through the Golfo de Penas — the Gulf of Pain, where the Wager succumbed to punishing winds and shattered against rocks.
When they finally got to the barren island after about a week at sea, Grann couldn’t believe that the men survived there for months.
A wet, freezing wind whipped the shore; the mountains were shrouded in gnarled vegetation. There was nothing to eat but limpets, seaweed and wild celery, which was bitter but had cured the shipwrecked sailors’ scurvy.
As Grann and his
companions explored, they found a few rotted wooden planks lodged in a frigid stream — the remnants of the ship.
“It remains a place of complete wild desolation,” Grann said. “I was like, OK, I now understand why a British officer described this as a place where ‘the soul of man dies in him.’ ”
On the way to the island, the captain had pointed out four small islands — Smith, Hertford, Crosslet and Hobbs. Grann recognized the names instantly. They were four men who were left behind because there wasn’t room in the boat for them.
As their crewmates left them, they yelled, “God bless the King,” and were never seen again.