cover story | david grann
A real-life Lord of the Flies In David Grann’s latest narrative nonfiction masterpiece, he revives an 18th-century tale of shipwreck, mutiny, murder and “fake news.” In 1740, a ship called the Wager departed from England to pursue a Spanish galleon filled with treasure. However, before the crew could accomplish their mission, they wrecked on an island off the coast of Patagonia. What happened next—from the men’s harrowing survival to the unexpected fallout once they returned to England—is expertly told by National Book Award finalist and Edgar Award winner David Grann in The Wager.
logbooks but also moldering correspondence, diaries and muster books. Many of these records had somehow survived tempests, cannon battles and shipwreck. I was also able to draw on court-martial transcripts, Admiralty reports, contemporaneous newspaper accounts, sea ballads and drawings made by members of the expedition. All of these sources of information, as well as the vivid sea narratives published by many of the survivors, hopefully help to bring this gripping history to life.
What first sparked your curiosity about this story of a British naval expedition in You personally took a journey to the site the mid-18th century? of the shipwreck that stranded the crew of I came across an 18th-century eyewitness the Wager off the coast of South America. account of the expedition by John Byron, How did that experience enhance the tellwho had been a 16-year-old midshipman on ing of this story? the Wager when the voyage began. Though After a couple of years of doing the kind of the account was written in archaic English, research most suited to my physical abiliand the lettering was faded and hard to ties—that is, combing through archives—I decipher, it instantly sparked my curiosity. feared that I could never fully grasp what the Here was one of the most extraordinary castaways had experienced unless I visited sagas I had ever heard of: a crew battling the place now known as Wager Island. At typhoons, tidal waves and scurvy; a shipChiloé, an island off the coast of Chile, I hired wreck on a desolate island off the Chilean a captain with a small boat to guide me to coast of Patagonia, where the castaways Wager Island, which is about 350 miles to the slowly descended into a real-life Lord of the south and situated in the Gulf of Sorrows—or, Flies, with warring factions, murders, mutiny as some prefer to call it, the Gulf of Pain. After and cannibalism. several days of winding through the sheltered And that was only part of the saga. Byron channels of Patagonia, we entered the open and several other survivors, after completPacific Ocean, where I had at least a glimpse ing extraordinary castaway voyages, made of the terrifying seas that had wrecked the it back to England. (By then, Byron was Wager. We were caught in a storm, engulfed 22.) They were summoned to face a court- by mountainous waves, and our boat was martial for their alleged misdeeds and tossed about so violently that I had to hunker H The Wager feared they would be hanged. In the hopes of down on the floor; otherwise, I might have Doubleday, $30, 9780385534260 saving their own lives, they all offered their been thrown and broken a limb. Thankfully, own wildly conflicting versions of what the captain was extremely capable and led us History had happened, and this unleashed safely to Wager Island. We anchored for the night and at dawn climbed in an inflatable boat and went ashore. another kind of war: a war over the truth. There were competing narratives, planted disinformation and allegations of “fake The island remains a place of wild desolation—mountainous, rainnews.” So even though the story took place in the 1740s, it drenched, freezing, wind-swept and utterly barren. Unlike the castaways, struck me as a parable for our own turbulent times. who had only scraps of clothing, I was bundled up in a winter coat with gloves and a wool hat. Yet I was still bone cold. Near the area where the Your descriptions of what it was like to be on a British castaways had built their encampment, we found some stalks of celery, man-of-war or like the kind they had eaten. stranded on a “The Wager’s officers and crew, these supposed But there was virtually no other desolate island nourishment. At last, I grasped apostles of the Enlightenment, had descended why one British officer had called are so specific and vivid. What kind of the island a place where “the into a Hobbesian state of depravity, behaving research enabled you soul of man dies in him.” to write with this level more like brutes than gentlemen.” In an author’s note, you write, of detail and intimacy? “I’ve tried to present all sides, leaving it to you to render the ultimate I was amazed that, even after more than two and half centuries verdict—history’s judgment.” In the chapters that follow, you remain had passed, there was still a trove of firsthand documents about the calamitous expedition. They included not only washed-out scrupulous about allowing readers to decide for themselves what
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