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.
اضافة اعلان
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.
‘The Wager’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” 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.
An engrossing survival story, “The Wager” 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 released on Tuesday, 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 larger-than-life adventurers and impostors, of a death squad leader turned
New York 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.
The author’s journeyGrowing up in Connecticut, Grann inherited his love of
reading and writing from his mother, Phyllis Grann, a pioneering publishing
executive who edited works by Tom Clancy and other blockbuster writers.
He was determined to become a writer, and tried poetry and
fiction — “All of which was pretty terrible,” he concedes — but found he had a
knack for nonfiction. He got a job as a copy editor at The Hill, in Washington,
DC. In 2003, he joined The New Yorker, where he proved adept at finding stories
that combined the propulsive qualities of an airport thriller with deeply
reported investigative journalism.
“He looked for stories in which an artful manipulation of
the reader was an appropriate way to illuminate the story,” said Daniel
Zalewski, Grann’s longtime editor at The New Yorker. “Sometimes they were dark
entertainments, but because the stakes were real, there was a gravity to them,
and a morality to them.”
To the ends of the earthGrann 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.
To research his 2017 book, “Killers of the Flower Moon”,
which chronicled an investigation into a series of murders of wealthy members
of the Osage tribe in Oklahoma, Grann interviewed the victims’ descendants,
collected oral histories from the Osage Nation, and studied thousands of pages
of FBI files, Justice Department memos, secret grand jury testimonies, crime
scene photographs, court transcripts, and field reports from the Bureau of
Indian Affairs.
“He looked for stories in which an artful manipulation of the reader was an appropriate way to illuminate the story.”
“He’s obsessive about getting the facts right,” said Bill
Thomas, editor-in-chief and publisher of Doubleday. “To my mind, his neuroses
are his superpower.”
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 18th-century
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.
“That’s one of their castaway boats,” he said, pointing at
one of the smaller vessels on the model ship’s deck. “You can imagine them all
packed into that thing, not even able to move, dozens and dozens of them on a
3,000 mile (4,800km) journey.”
Off to Wager IslandEven 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.”
“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.’”
So in the summer of 2019, he traveled to Chiloé Island, off
the country’s west coast, and hired a captain to take him on the roughly 550-km
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. The seas were so rough that Grann could not stand, so
he sat on the floor, listening to an audiobook of Moby Dick, “half drugged on
Dramamine”, he said.
When they finally got to the barren island after about a
week at sea, Grann could not 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 was not
room in the boat for them.
As their crewmates left them, they yelled “God bless the
King”, and were never seen again.
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