My guest this week is award-winning writer David Grann, whose new book, “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder”, is currently number one on the New York Times Hardcover Non-Fiction Best Sellers list.
It’s the tale of HMS Wager, a British warship that gets separated from the rest of its squadron while in pursuit of a treasure-filled Spanish galleon. The ship wrecks off the coast of Chile and the surviving crew members face off against each other amidst disease, cold and starvation – with deadly results.
The author’s website: https://www.davidgrann.com/
Our previous interview about his book “Killers of the Flower Moon”: https://www.mostnotorious.com/2022/04/14/mono-classics-oklahomas-osage-murders-w-david-grann/
Transcription of our conversation here:
Erik
Welcome, everyone, to another episode of the Most Notorious Podcast. I’m Erik Rivenes. So great to have you here with me, and it is so great to have David Grann here as well, back again. He is an award-winning New York Times best-selling author and staff writer at The New Yorker, whose book, Killers of the Flower Moon, listen to episode 144 if you’d like to hear our earlier interview, has been turned into a film and out later this year. And his new book is called The Wager: a Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. So great to have you back. Thanks so much for coming on.
David Grann
Oh, it’s my pleasure to be here again.
Erik
So not only congratulations on this book, of course, but also congratulations on the film. Have you gotten to see any of it yet?
David Grann
I got to see an early cut of it. I haven’t seen the very final version, but I’ll hopefully be seeing it in a couple weeks at Cannes for the premiere.
Erik: Oh, you must be so excited about that.
David:
I’m very excited about it. Yes, and you know for me the most important part was just that, you know, watching how they adapted the book with, you know, real care and sensitivity and real, you know, almost fierce commitment to the story. And they worked very closely with members of the Osage Nation in developing it and shaping the story and there are Osage actors in it and they use the Osage language in the film. So for me, that has been the most gratifying, rewarding part of the whole process.
Erik
Oh, amazing. So this book, The Wager, how did it come to be? Where did you first hear about these events?
David Grann
I was doing research on mutinies. Mutinies have always been one of my little pet obsessions. members that are in an organization that is designed by the state to be an instrument of order to suddenly disorder. And, you know, are they these kind of extreme outlaws or is there something possibly unjust in the system that would justify the rebellion? And so I was doing research on mutinies and I stumbled across a 18th century account by John Byron, who had been a 16-year-old midshipman when the Wager set sail. He would later go on to become the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, whose poetry, including Don Juan, was greatly influenced by what he referred to as my granddad’s narrative. And I was looking at this account, which is, you know, written in this kind of archaic English, the S’s were printed as F’s. And at first I go, wait, what is this thing? But I kept pausing and coming across these really remarkable and spellbinding passages about scurvy and shipwreck and cannibalism and court martial and you name it. And I realized that this, you know, old little journal really held the clues to one of the more extraordinary sagas of survival I had ever come across. So that was the first kind of, you know, clue. But what further compelled me to tell the story was not only what had happened, and I should just probably tell your listeners a little bit that, you know, it’s about a 18th century warship, the Wager – that is on a secret mission to try to capture a Spanish galleon filled with so much treasure. It was known as the prize of all the oceans and it set sail in 1740 but ultimately wrecks on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia and there these castaways had slowly descended into a real-life Lord of the Flies with murder and mutiny and cannibalism and basically you name it. But what was as fascinating to me was when I learned that some of the castaways had made it back to England and there they were summoned to face a court-martial for their alleged crimes on the island and so they began to release their competing versions of what had happened and this led to this furious war over the truth with misinformation and disinformation – allegations of fake journals – So this old little 18th century story felt like a parable for our own times. And that’s what really compelled me to do the book.
Erik
So would you tell us about the Wager? What kind of ship was it? Was it a seaworthy vessel?
David Grann
So yeah, the Wager was, it was known as a little bit – the ugly duckling in this squadron – that was setting off during an imperial war between Great Britain and Spain. Because it had not been born for battle, it had been a merchant ship and it was kind of remade and repurposed into a warship to serve and it was 123 feet long. It had three masts, it could fly as many as 12 sails at a time and these warships were in many ways the engineering marvels of their time. They were designed to be both murderous instruments for naval battle. T Wager had 28 cannons on board. And also at the same time, the home for scores and scores of seamen who were going to be living together in close quarters as a family. And yet the Wager, like other ships in the squadron, other warships at the time, as sophisticated as they were, were also very vulnerable to the elements because they were made of perishable materials which was primarily wood. It could take as much as 4,000 trees to build a single warship and so these would be you know – little sea worms would burrow into the holes and termites would eat at them and eat at the wood and rats would gnaw the ropes and the provisions and the sails. So they were very vulnerable to storm and element and these other forces.
Erik
To make things even more difficult, it was hard to find a reliable crew.
David Grann
Yes, it was. So and these ships would require first of all, they would require countless provisions, tons and tons of provisions. You know, a single warship would carry as much as 40 miles of rope, 15,000 square feet of sail, and a farm’s worth of animals, but most importantly they needed men and skilled men to operate these complex vessels. But Great Britain at that time did not have conscription and during the war it exhausted its supply of volunteers for the Navy and so it sent out the press gangs to try to round up mariners at ports and cities and towns and they would round about these groups, these press gangs, they were armed and they would eyeball you to see if you had any of the telltale signs of a mariner. You know, did you have a round hat or a checkered shirt? They would even look at your fingernails to see, well, does he have any tar under his fingernails? Tar was used on ships to make everything water resistant and if they deemed you a seaman they would essentially seize you and in effect kidnap you for this voyage and drag you unwillingly and even then the squadron was short of men. The Wager was supposed to sail with five four other warships and a scouting sloop and two small cargo ships. The squadron needed nearly 2,000 men and even after the press gangs had gone out they were short and so the Admiralty took the extreme measure of rounding up soldiers from a retirement home. And these men were in their 60s and 70s. Some were missing an assortment of limbs, and some were so ill they had to be hoisted on stretchers on board these vessels.
Erik
One of the oldest crew members was the cook, right?
David
Yeah, the cook on the wager was in his 80s.
Erik
Wow, and in 1740.
David Grann
Yeah, he was in his 80s. And these ships, you know, beyond just the pressmen, these ships were really like these floating towns or floating civilizations where they had people, you know, from all walks of life. You had boys on board who were in training to be seamen or officers. Some were as young as six years old. You had the cook on the Wager who was in his 80s. And then you had people of all different economic classes from all different social strata. You’d have aristocrats who would be officers and dandies. You had city paupers and free black seamen. And there was a free black seaman on the Wager named John Duck. You had professional craftsmen like carpenters and barrel makers on board the ship and, you know, the British Navy had developed a reputation ability to coalesce these fractious individuals into what they deemed a band of brothers. But the challenge on board the Wager and the other warships in this quadrant were enormous because so many of the men were oppressed and recalcitrant and sick.
Erik
Right, right. So amongst this ragtag crew, there were some very capable people. And one of the most capable was the gunner. Can you talk about him and his role on the ship?
David Grann
Yeah, John Bulkeley was the gunner on board the ship and he was in charge of all the munitions and the preservation, which during that period was an extremely important task. I mean, the Wager was carrying enough munitions to blow up a town and this was a military mission and gunpowder on a ship was also very volatile and dangerous. So, usually the gunner had to be someone who is responsible. John Bulkeley is interesting. We don’t know what he looked like because he came from the lower to middle classes. He could not afford to have had a portrait made of him, but we know his thoughts very well because he was a compulsive diarist. And he was in many ways the most skilled seaman on the Wager, and he was an instinctive leader. He was also very religious and devout. Yet he knew because he was not born into the aristocracy that it was unlikely he would ever become a commander of a warship that he was kind of stuck in his station as a gunner.
Erik
Right, right. So the first captain of the Wager is a man named Dandy Kidd and he’s replaced mid voyage by an officer named David Cheap, right?
David Grann
Yes, so Dandy Kidd, who was a very well-liked captain on the Wager, dies of sickness early on, which kind of sets off these musical chairs of promotions, and finally David Cheap is selected to become the captain. And David Cheap was a burly Scotsman. He was very tempestuous, kind of a volatile temperament, also very dutiful and consumed with these kind of obsessive dreams of glory. And on land he was somebody who was kind of embittered, he was plagued by debts and chased by creditors, yet in the wooden world of a warship he had always found refuge. And at last on this voyage he had attained what he had always dreamed of, what he had always longed for, which was a chance to captain his own warship and to possibly capture a lucrative prize.
Erik:
So the Wager and the rest of the ships in the squadron are beset by problems, one after another, and it’s unbelievable almost. I mean everything that could go wrong pretty much goes wrong, and ultimately amidst the drama, the Wager is separated.
David Grann
Yeah, so it’s coming around Cape Horn, which is at the tip of South America with a squadron. And these seas are among the most violent in the world. And that is because it’s the only place in the world where the seas travel unimpeded by land around the whole globe, so they travel about 13,000 miles, the waves accumulating power and you know you would encounter waves that could dwarf a 90-foot mast and the strongest currents on earth and winds that frequently accelerate to hurricane force that can reach as much as 200 miles per hour. Herman Melville, who later made a passage around the Horn, compared it to a descent into hell in Dante’s Inferno and as the squadron is coming around the horn they encounter what John Byron, the young midshipman, described as the perfect hurricane in his account and they are just battered day and night by these waves. The ships are breaking apart and also at that very time when they need every person on board these ships if they are to persevere many of them begin to suffer from mysterious illness with their eyes bulging and their hair falling out and their teeth falling out and the cartilage that holds together their bones seeming to loosen and come undone. And one seamen said the disease got into our brains and we went raving mad. And they were suffering what was then the great enigma of the age of sale, which was scurvy. And nobody knew then that it was caused by a lack of vitamin C in their diet. And so hundreds and hundreds of the seamen perished – their bodies and ceremoniously thrown overboard. The poet Lord Byron, who drew on John Byron’s account, would later say, without a grave, unknown, and uncoffined. And the ships at that point were desperate to try to stay together because if they knew if something ever happened to them, there would be no one to rescue them if they were alone. And only way they can signal with each other is by firing blanks in their cannons. They had no other way to communicate back then. And so they’re firing their cannon blanks repeatedly. But eventually, the booming winds and the storm just drown out the sounds and all the ships scatter in the storm, and the Wager with its new commander, David Sheep, finds itself alone and left to its own destiny.
Erik
And they’re also worried about the Spanish Armada, correct? That they need to stay together in order to even stand a chance?
David Grann
Yes, the mission was supposed to be secret, and so they would have the element of surprise, but they had already learned and already at one point been chased by the Spanish, an armada which was larger and more powerful than this expedition. And so they knew that the secret had leaked out. So yes, they were terrified of or concerned about having to confront this armada. So they were trying to elude it and outrun it. But that was another danger they faced, especially if they were alone.
Erik
Yeah, the Spanish commander was extremely cunning. He actually crafted a ship that looked like one of theirs, right?
David Grann
Yeah, they would often try to dupe you back then. And one of the things they would do was they would get intelligence about what your signal flags look like or what the flags on your ship look like. And so one of the commanders of the Spanish Armada had designed a flag to look exactly like the Commodore, the head of this expedition’s flag on his ship. And so at one point, one of the British vessels sees this flag and believes it’s a ship from, you know, the Commodore, the ship from their own squadron. And they suddenly approach it when they realize, they get really close, and they realize that this is the enemy. And so suddenly they have to turn and flee in desperation as these Spanish ships chase it.
Erik
Yeah, very exciting. So where exactly does the Wager shipwreck? Can you tell us where it happened?
David Grann
Sure. So if the ship separated, Commodore Anson, who was the head of the squadron, had given instructions to try to rendezvous off the coast of Chile, along the Patagonia coast there. And so after they’re separated, Captain Cheap, who’s kind of determined to live up to this image of himself as a heroic captain and prove his worth, manages to guide the Wager around Cape Horn, which is at the very tip of South America. And it’s like that sea that flows the Drake Passage between Antarctica and the end of South America. And he steers the ship then up the coastline. But back then seamen were, they had to sail partially blind because they could tell their latitude by reading the stars, but they had no way of knowing their longitude because they didn’t have reliable clocks, which would have been necessary. They had not yet been invented yet. So they had to rely on what was known as dead reckoning, which amounted to informed guesswork and a leap of faith. There’s a reason why it’s called dead reckoning. So as the Wager is coming up the coast of Chile, along the Pacific, in South America, off the coast of South America, and off the coast of Patagonia, it suddenly realizes that its estimation of its longitude was not only wrong, it was wrong by hundreds of miles. And they are suddenly caught in the gulf that is now known as the Gulf of Sorrows, or as some prefer to call it, the Gulf of Pain.
Erik
Right, right. So the Wager, as you said, wrecks, and they are stranded on an island. I mean, initially they’re grateful to be on land, but that gratitude does not last indefinitely.
David Grann
Yeah, so in this bay, they smash into some rocks and the ship begins to rip apart and it’s just important to understand that these ships were you know, they were buoyant castles, they were their homes, and many seamen in those days couldn’t even swim. And so the ships is just breaking apart, all the planks are shattering and the decks are caving in and water is surging upward and rats are scurrying upward and those who’ve been suffering scurvy in their hammocks drown, but the survivors climb up on the remnants of the ship and when they look out in the distance they can see this desolate island shrouded in mist and they use one of the small transport boats like a row boat – you know – it can also fly a sail. And they begin to ferry people ashore and about 145 survivors make it. Originally, the Wager carried 250 men and boys, and so at that point they were down to about 145. And on that island is Captain David Cheap survives, the gunner John Bulkeley, and the young midshipman John Byron. And initially, as you say, they think, well, maybe this would be our salvation. Yet the island turns out to be desolate and windswept. The temperature hovers around freezing. It’s constantly raining or sleeting. And worst of all, they can find virtually no food. One British officer later described the island as a place where the soul of man dies in him.
Erik
Ugh, yeah. Captain Cheap, as the ship is going down, acts quite heroically, but he also suffers an accident, right?
David Grann
Yeah, shortly before the wreck, he had gone on deck to try to fix one of the sails and fell through a hatch in the storm, about six feet and broke a bone by his shoulder that was actually his armpit. It’s actually poking through the skin. The surgeon had to repair it. So he is using a cane and is wounded in one arm. He’d also suffered from scurvy during the voyage. So he is ailing yet he remains a commanding force and when he gets to the island he believes he should remain their commander because he had been their commander at sea. And he believes that the only way they will survive is to maintain the cohesion that existed on the ship and that they should be governed by the same rules and regulations that existed in the Navy. And he tries to build an imperial outpost.
Erik
Right, right. So the crew basically basically breaks into three groups. The captain and his small core group of supporters, mostly officers. Then you have a group of marauders who represent anarchy. But then there is this group in the middle, and it’s the bulk of the men who will ultimately be the mutineers, who are relatively reasonable in their arguments. They don’t want to disobey, right? For the sake of disobedience, they just want to get off the island. And they disagree with the captain on how to do it.
David Grann
Yeah, so as they are starving on the island, they can’t find food, they do descend into these warring factions and anarchy. And there are these marauders who are just kind of roaming about pillaging and trying to steal and killing, in fact. Then there are these two other forces, one the captain with his few loyal survivors, and John Bulkley, who though he could not be commander of a ship because he was not born into the aristocracy during the days of class structure, he begins to emerge as a commander in his own right. He was an instinctive leader on the island and many of the men gravitate to him. And he stirs them with phrases and populist phrases that would resonate with people, you know, years later. You know, he would use phrases like “life and liberty” and his determination is to try to get off the island any which way he can and to get back to England in safety and Captain Cheap still is hopeful for some chance of redemption, some chance that he could build a castaway boat and find Anson or maybe even overtake a Spanish trading ship to then use that and to continue with the mission. And so even while the groups are starving and they are fighting and they will (chuckle) send diplomats and back and forth between each camp to communicate and give messages and they’re signing political petitions of protest, they’re holding these philosophical debates about the nature of leadership and government and rules, what should be the rules in a state of nature, could, you know, should Cheap remain the captain because he’d been the captain before, could Bulkley be their captain now because he had demonstrated these certain abilities, and so, and then ultimately they have philosophical debates about the nature of mutiny, that taboo, and should they cross it and when should they cross it.
Erik
And everything that is motivated by food, right? Or the lack of food?
David Grann
Food is, you know, there have been studies on the nature of starvation and how it can affect you and create irritability, and sometimes lethargy, desperation can lead to conniving, and no one has spared those forces of that pressing need and so yes they are constantly under the pressing call of hunger. When you read their journals often they’ll just repeat it – they just have almost an obsessive obsession with food and a phraseology is just saying we look for food – we didn’t find any food – we felt the call of hunger – we still feel the call of hunger and so that is eating away at them well while they are working out all these matters. So yes, it is a real test of their wits. In many ways, the island became this laboratory testing the human condition under these extreme circumstances. Inevitably, it begins to reveal the hidden nature of each person, both the good and the bad. On the island, it’s worth pointing out that you do see these remarkable acts of gallantry and bravery and courage at times, but you also then just see acts of shocking brutality and murder.
Erik
Right, right. So one of the themes that runs through your book is this idea of civilization. What it means to be civilized. The British Empire had a harsh and prejudiced view during this time towards indigenous peoples. The word “savage” is used quite freely by figures in this story. But when things got really bad on Wager Island and all hope seemed lost, it was a local native tribe who embraced the castaways and even helped them survive.
David Grann
Yes. So, as the castaways are starving, almost miraculously, emerging through the mist are a couple of canoes with members of an indigenous Patagonian group known as the Kawésqar. And the Kawésqar had lived in that region along the Chilean coastline for hundreds of going back and they tended to travel in small familial groups and to live almost exclusively off marine resources. They traveled in their canoes, they were sometimes referred to as the nomads of the sea, and over the years they had adapted to these very harsh conditions and climate there and they always kept the fire going in their canoes, they knew where to find food and hidden shoals of fish. They had adapted so well that when NASA later was contemplating putting people into space, it went to do research on the Kawésqar to see how they could adapt it to their conditions. And so when they arrive and see these starving people, they offer a lifeline. And they go out in their canoes and they paddle away and they then bring back food for the castaways. But the castaways are blinded by their own imperialist attitudes and several of them mistreat the Kawésqar. And eventually the Kawésqar take one look at these (chuckle) kind of hairy white castaways and Europeans who are spiraling into violence and are threatening and they just disappear one morning. They just take their canoes and vanish, and after that the castaways only descended further into a state of depravity.
Erik
Yeah, yeah. There is so much drama, so much conflict on this island as their society slowly degrades. But one especially important moment is when the captain shoots a crew member, kills him, and this action has a really lasting effect on the rest of the story, right?
David Grann
Yes, so the captain who is desperate to cling to his command, you know, this is what he had always longed for. He had finally attained it before the wreckage and he’s determined to hold on to it. He’s increasingly insecure though as he’s watching his power wane. He fears mutiny, he’s becoming increasingly paranoid and at one point he thinks the seaman was misbehaving and he thought maybe he was mutinying and he bursts out of his tent and he rushes up to this man and without asking any questions, he takes a gun and he shoots him directly in the head. And he hoped, well I don’t know if he hoped, but after that, if there had been any hope to quell the unrest, in fact the opposite happened. It just ended up turning more people against him.
Erik
Right. And this becomes important later on. When some of the castaways get back to England, there are different perspectives on this killing. What was it murder? Was it justified?
David Grann
Right. Was it direct homicide? Were the circumstances justified after there was growing rebellion and disobedience among crew members? Cheap sees that is justified but the others see it as homicide, and that also then just further ignites the battle between the opposing camps
Erik
And there’s also this question, right? What authority does the Navy have on an island when the boats are gone? And the crew members are no longer being paid?
David Grann
Right, once the boat has gone, do they still have, you know, should naval rules and regulations still apply? Some of the castaways assert the notion that it doesn’t. Perhaps they see it as kind of an escape clause to do what they want. Cheap obviously believes it does and that it should still apply even on land.
Erik
Yeah. The bulk of your story is told from the perspective of three different people, the gunner, the captain, and this midshipman, John Byron. Did you have a favorite amongst the three? Was there a particular character that you especially enjoyed writing about or felt emotionally connected to?
David Grann
I would shift between the perspectives, trying to show how each one of them is shaping their story, to try to emerge as the hero of it, to kind of live with the things they had done or hadn’t done, and to just show how we all kind of shape our stories, leaving out certain facts, burnishing other facts. Captain Cheap would say, on the island I was forced to proceed to extremities, and John Byron would say, well he shot him right in the head. (Chuckle) And so you could just see in the way they, you know, will describe and depict the same scene reflecting their own interests and their own vantage point. So, you know, I always feel my role as a writer and an author is to understand each one of them. And this is an interesting story because it’s less about figures who are purely good or purely evil. It’s about people more like us who are deeply human, who are flawed and fallible. And in those circumstances, you see them again do – at one moment they might act heroically and another barbarously. And so I found there were elements of each of them that were admirable. And other times, you know, you kind of recoil at things they do. But it’s less that you try to say you identify with one most. You’re really trying so hard to understand each. So while you’re writing with each of their perspective, you’re kind of with them in those moments. I would say that John Byron, who’s only 16 when the voyage begins, he in some ways is closer to our eyes and ears on this bewildering world because he is only a child so he’s seeing it through fresh eyes and he is coming of age amid the horrors not only unleashed by the elements but by his own shipmates. So I think he is in some ways the most relatable. He’s less of a, for a long time he’s kind of a follower trying to make sense of all that’s happening. And so I think in some ways, he is closer to the reader, in the sense that his, you know, it’s almost like an introduction, and almost like innocent eyes onto this horrifying world.
Erik
Right, right. He’s very relatable, because he sees the story from both sides. he’s born into aristocracy, so he sympathizes with the officers, with the captain to an extent, but just like everyone else, he wants to get off the island. And he sees, like the majority, that the captain is getting in the way of them leaving, that they don’t like his plan of attempting to follow through with this secret rendezvous. They just want to hightail at home in the most direct way possible.
David Grann
Yes, he can recognize the flaws in the commander, the volatility, the tempestuousness, and he also admires certain elements of the captain’s bravery and fearlessness and courage. But the captain also represents that order that he belonged to – that system of hierarchy and command. And, um, you know, the notion of joining a mutiny would have been a real breach for someone like John Byron for his career, future career in the Navy. So he is, he is torn by his his own background. It’s shaping and influencing and rattling inside of him as he tries to make these decisions. But he is also drawn to Bulkley. And Bulkley, you asked, you know, about, you know, qualities, and Bulkley is this kind of remarkable figure in so many ways. You know, he’s almost like somebody from the West in the United States, kind of just shows up with no discernible past and is then kind of just a force of nature. And he, you know, does show this kind of remarkable ingenuity and cunning and this will to survive. And so he represents in many ways, their best chance if they are going to live.
Erik
So this community that they created is so interesting. They basically build this town, but they also stay in their own little cliques. These men hang with fellow crew members of similar status or occupation. And one of these groups that stuck together was the Marines. Would you mind talking a bit about this group of Marines and their function on the ship?
David Grann
So, there was still a kind of amorphousness in the command structure at that time in the British Navy. Marines were then essentially soldiers, and so they were brought on ships for any kind of assaults that might be conducted on land in particular. They would also, you know, have roles on the ship. They were, because they were not seamen, many of them were untrained as seamen. Their roles on a ship was limited. On a ship, they were technically under the command of the captain, but they also had their own officers and on land during assaults, they would follow their own officers. When they’re on the island, the leader of the Marines begins to assert his own authority and also starts to construct his own competing command structure, kind of builds this wooden chair-like throne in his hut and flies a flag from rags marking his own territory and his soldiers kind of sit around him. And they represent a potent force. Where will their allegiance fall? Will they stay with the captain or will they go with the mutineers?
Erik
Right. So these two opposing groups make their own attempts to get off the island and they suffer some pretty harrowing experiences. More starvation, more loss of life, but some of the members of these two competing groups are successful in making it back to England.
David Grann
Yes, I mean it’s unbelievable that after everything they have been through, you know, from, you know, even before the shipwreck, you know, with the typhoon and tidal waves and scurvy and then the shipwreck and then the violence on the island and starvation. Some of them do make it back to England. One castaway travels some 3,000 miles, completing one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded. And then back in England they are summoned as they had feared to face a military tribunal for their alleged crimes on the island and after everything they’ve been through they fear they may be hanged.
Erik
So the original mission of the squadron was the capture of this gold-laden Spanish galleon and while the Wager isn’t the one who ultimately confronts it, right? Another ship from the squadron does finally meet with this Spanish galleon face-to-face and an incredible battle ensues.
David Grann
Yes, and there are so many kind of unexpected… I always say that truth is stranger than fiction and this is one of those stories where you’re just like, oh, OK. After everything the squadron have been through, and they break apart, and the Wager wrecks, and two other ships turn back, and another ship has to be burned. I mean, it’s just one calamity after another. One of the ships does survive and does ultimately confront this Spanish galleon. You have this kind of climactic sea battle. So the story just kind of has these really kind of startling turns. I mean, to me, one of the startling turns too is just castaways from the the Wager will just periodically just show up in England, some of them six years later after they had set sail from England. Their families can no longer recognize them. So there are just these kind of constant twists and turns but what’s really important about that battle with the galleon is that during the trial, you know, as each side is kind of warring over their stories, trying to have their version prevail, you know, hoping to save their lives, the British Navy is also looking for another story, a kind of an alternative version of history because it doesn’t really like any of these stories that make the British Empire look bad. I mean it undercuts the central claim that the British Empire had used to justify its ruthless colonization and conquering and killing and enslavement of other peoples around the world, that their civilization was somehow superior to others. And on that island, you know, the vanguard of the Empire, the supposed apostles of Western civilization had behaved more like brutes than like gentlemen. And so that twist will also become part of the fight over history and which version of history will be told.
Erik
I’ve always been a big fan of Patrick O’Brien, his Aubrey-Maturin series of books. I have them all, although it’s been a while since I’ve read them. Master and Commander was turned into a film with Russell Crowe years ago. Were you a big fan of those books? Did they influence your writing at all?
David Grann
Yes, I mean, I have not read the whole series, but I had certainly read some of them and loved them and kind of swept away by them and the relationship between the two main protagonists. And I had also, I love tales of the sea and stories of the sea. From Melville to Lord Jim of Conrad and other books. So they were stories that I carry with me and you know when I was doing research for this book I read a great deal of these stories and I revisited them. An interesting thing about Patrick O’Brien is this story will then radiate out – the story of the Wager and the story of this expedition and the squadron and the calamities that took place and the sea battles and whatnot. And they would influence, you know, philosophers like Rousseau and Voltaire and Montesquieu. Charles Darwin carried one of these accounts with him on the Beagle during his voyage. And it also influenced, you know, two of the great novelists of the same, Melville and also Patrick O’Brien. Patrick O’Brien, before he created this Master and Commander series, this masterful series, two of his early earlier novels were drawn and inspired by this expedition, including the Wager disaster. There’s even a character, one called John Byron. They’re not as good as his later works, but they became the prototypes for them in many ways. And so you can see not only how this, you know, the people in the story are telling stories and shaping their stories, but you see how their stories radiate out and would have a profound influence on others over time.
Erik
With so much finger-pointing going on by these parties in conflict, this giant blame game that happens, did that make it difficult at all to sort through the facts? Different people coming from different perspectives with different motivations? How did this play into the construction of your book?
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Yeah, because there are even allegations of these fake journals and some journals will get repurposed and kind of serve the interests of the anonymous writer. And there is a great deal of disinformation that comes out of this. So but there is also a surprising trove of primary materials to draw on, you know, muster books and log books from the ships, diaries and journals that somehow survived this expedition. It’s kind of unbelievable. You can go to England, these archives and pull these documents out of boxes and the bindings are disintegrating and this kind of dust cloud invades you. But you can read them, you can read them with a magnifying glass and they’re very vivid and they can really enable you to reconstruct what happened on a day-to-day basis because many of them are day-to-day accounts, daily accounts of events and they really provided the bedrock of the book. What’s interesting in the accounts in sorting through the truth is that this is not a case where the figures are outright lying about what happened. They don’t completely lie about the facts or deny a fact that occurred. It’s more typical, I think, to the truth as possible is to show, which is why I show, which is why I structure the book from the three figures, is as you see their competing accounts, you see what one lays out and what the other one fills in or what the other one emphasizes, it’s through this kind of the conflicting compilation of these three accounts that the truth begins to emerge or you get closer and closer to the truth. And ultimately I try to leave it to the reader to provide, you know, history’s judgment. And so I’m really showing. But I do think through these competing accounts, you can get fairly close to truth. And a lot of the underlying materials that were happening contemporaneously, like logbooks, are, you know, fairly impartial sources of exactly what did happen.
Erik
Did you wonder, as you were putting this all together, if you had been a member of the crew of the Wager, who would you have followed?
David Grann
Yeah,who would you have been? Would you have been a murderous marauder? Would you have stayed with a captain based on a sense of duty and patriotism and loyalty? Or would you have joined the mutineers feeling, you know, justified in your rebellion, and claiming survival. And as John Bulkely wonders, is it a sin to want to live? And I think that is the ultimate question. And I think it’s why when you read the book, you know, even when certain people are doing disagreeable things or appalling things, you’re a little bit careful about completely casting a stone in judgment because you have to wonder yourself, what would I have done in their shoes? Or in their case, they didn’t have shoes because their shoes disintegrated on the island. But what would you have done? And I don’t know. I don’t know. And I think that is one of the things that makes the story powerful because it is a probing of our very nature, the nature of all of us. We didn’t go through it, but it’s illuminating – these questions- of how we behave and who we are and how should we conduct ourselves under these circumstances. Thankfully, most of us are put in those situations, but they do reveal something profound about society, about civilization, and about who we are as people.
Erik
Yeah, yeah, well said. Poor John Byron, (chuckles) his shoes disintegrate.
David Grann
(Laughs) Yes, yes, yeah.
Erik
And he’s able to make a pair of shoes.
David Grann
Yes, yes, they find a seal and they make, you know, out of the leather, the skin, he makes some shoes, but then when he’s starving, he ultimately has to eat his shoes.
Erik
So I want to ask you about your visit to Wager Island. Did the reality of the island match your understanding of it, you know, as you were researching it?
David Grann
I had, at that point, I had spent about two years, the whole book took about five years to research and write. And I had spent about two years in the archives. You know I had never planned on going to Wager Island. But after two years of combing through these materials, you begin to have that doubt that kind of gnaws at you and you kind of wonder, well, can I really understand what the castaways had gone through unless I went to the island myself. So that’s when I made the rather foolish decision to see if I could get there. I found a Chilean captain who had a boat who could take me there from Chiloé Island, which is about 350 miles north of Wager Island off the coast of Chile. He had initially sent a photograph of his boat, and I thought from the photograph it looked really pretty big and comfortable. When I got there, it took about four or five days to actually finally make it to the boat. I had to take multiple planes and cars and ferries. But when I finally got there, I took one look at the boat, and I was like, ooh, that doesn’t quite look like the boat in the photograph. It was relatively small and wood heated and, you know, (laughing) it just had a tiny little bunk for me to sleep in. And it was so rough and tempestuous at first that we couldn’t even leave because the Coast Guard had closed the port. So several days passed and we were just trapped on the boat and I started to wonder if we would ever get there. And then finally the Coast Guard lifted the blockade for the port and we slipped out one dawn and we went across that kind of rough bay and we were following the route that actually some of the castaways had taken in reverse when they had tried to escape from Wager Island. And initially we had stayed within the channels of Patagonia which are there – there all these little islets along the coast – all these little islands and if you weave between them for a while, you can just avoid the pounding sea. And it’s very chillingly beautiful. It’s very desolate. We didn’t see anybody, really another soul for several days. But eventually the captain said, well, you know, if we’re going to get to Wager Island now, we’re going to have to go out into the ocean. So we headed out from the channels at that point. And that was when I first got my first glimpse of these terrifying seas and the waves were really enormous and I think this boat was really designed for the channels not the seas. We were just getting pitched around. You had to essentially just sit on the deck. You could not stand. If you stood you really would break a limb and get thrown. So I just sat there and I was half drunk on Dramamine (both laughing) And I also, I had to pass the time. So I foolishly, I had listened, I had a recording of Moby Dick by Melville on my iPhone. So I listened to that, which in hindsight, it was not the most soothing thing to have done. (Erik laughs) And eventually though, you know, the captain was very skilled. He eventually leads us through what is known as the Gulf of Pain and gets us to Wager Island and it remains a place of wild desolation, barren and desolate. I was all bundled up in clothing and long johns and sweaters and a wool hat and gloves and boots and I was cold and so I realized you know it was a kind of one of those revelations. I was like, the castaways were always describing that they were constantly freezing. And it dawned on me that they were no doubt suffering from hypothermia, being so wet and cold. And like the castaways, we could find virtually no food on the island. We found some of the little stalks of celery, those sprouts of celery that they had found, which mysteriously to them cured some of their scurvy. But that was really about it. There was some seaweed, we saw some mussels. But there are no animals on the island. There are some birds that fly about it, but on the island there are no animals. And after that visit and trying to explore the island and getting a sense of what it is, I could finally grasp why that British officer had described the island as a place where the soul of man dies in him. And so I don’t describe my own journey in the book, but it really helped inform my descriptions of the island and breathe life into those descriptions, and really helped me understand the seas and what had happened on that island to those men.
Erik
Right. And you did see some small remnant of the original ship, right?
David Grann
Yeah, so at one point, by the encampment, somebody in our group said, look here, over here, and there’s an icy stream. And we were by where the castaways had built their encampment, and there was some wooden timber. There was some timber there. They were about five or eight yards long, I’m trying to remember now. They were bound together with wooden pegs for nails and they are the remnants of an 18th century warship believed to be His Majesty’s ship, the Wager. And we knew what they were because a British expedition and Chilean joint Chilean expedition/scientific mission had discovered them more than a decade earlier. And nothing else remains of that furious struggle that once took place there or of the ravaging dreams of empire. That’s it. Just those few fragments.
Erik
The tribe of indigenous people that assisted them, what is the status of that tribe now? Are they still in that area?
David Grann
They tragically were largely decimated from European contact over the years, both other explorers and from diseases, and so along that coastline where they had once roamed for so long, there really are there are no more Kawésqar. There are a few descendants apparently that still do live far away from that place, but a tiny, tiny number of people. And so there are no longer those nomads of the sea, patrolling those coastal waters.
Erik
Yeah. So, I’m so curious, when you showed up there, you had a pretty good idea of where the encampment was. When they’d first washed ashore, there was a native hut that the captain had moved into, and the town was kind of built off of this hut. Could you kind of see the town, envision it as you looked around, as you explored?
David Grann
So, we had some, you know, general sense of the area of where the encampment had been and where these fragments were. And not precise, not down to coordinates or anything like that, but just the general part of the island which they were at. And, you know, I had never been to Patagonia and so it was hard for me to fully imagine what these places were like. You know, in terms of the mountainous terrain, I guess that did conform and you could see these mountains looming over you. And their descriptions were quite vivid, so they did bring visual images to mind. But there were things, for example, that only being there really allowed me to understand. So, for example, the castaways would describe how they couldn’t really explore the island, that they went out on a few expeditions and they would just become so exhausted, and that it was so hard to walk on the island. And I just thought, that’s so strange. And it was just being there when I realized how mountainous the terrain was. So even in the flatlands, it’s so kind of boggy and then covered with this dense foliage, it really just kind of wraps itself around you, that it’s like kind of trying to push through a hedge or something. And so, you know, even a walk 25 yards on the island is just exhausting. And so, all of it just helped bring it to life. I would say what I saw conformed with their descriptions very well, but being there gave me a visceral understanding of what it was really like.
Erik
Yeah, that’s got to be really rare for a writer. You know, you’re researching events that happened 300 or so years ago. Normally, those places look drastically different, but not here.
David Grann
Yes, yes, yeah and even that part of the island has shifted somewhat over the centuries too, so there are some physical changes just even to the island to where the seas are and erosion, but I’ll just give you a real interesting example, which is when we were on the boat crossing over the Gulf of Pain to try to get to Wager Island, we passed several islands in the gulf. And the captain had his map in front of him and he pointed to them. He said, well, that’s Smith Island and Hobbs Island and Waller Island and another, I think, Hurtiford Island. And I thought, well, those are very English-curious-sounding names and they sounded vaguely familiar to me. And I brought with me copies of the journals from some of the castaways. And I went to look at one of them and sure enough those were the names of some of the castaways and they were actually four Marines who, when one of the castaway parties had been trying to flee Wager Island in two tiny little vessels, one of the vessels had sank. And so there wasn’t enough room for them in the other vessel. And so these four Marines were abandoned on these islands, on this little cluster of islands. And the last thing they said was, “God bless the King”. And this is their epitaph. And the captain didn’t know why they were named that. He just knew that those were the, you know, the names that, but he didn’t know the origins. But so there are these eerie echoes of the past still into the present. And I always say that the past shapes the present, even when we’re ignorant of why or how.
Erik
Absolutely. Yeah. Are you working already on a new book?
David Grann
You know I’m in the process of looking so if your listeners have any good ideas, please send them to me. It is always the hardest part to find some story that will consume me for years on end and hopefully have you know, a story that can hold you in the grip but also hopefully have these other deeper schemes. I always say you’re only as good as the story you’re chasing.
Erik
Yes, yes. So I will put a link to your website on the show notes, as well as a link to our previous conversation about Killers of the Flower Moon. But this has been so great. Thank you for taking time out of your day to talk about the Wager.
David Gran
That’s my pleasure. Thank you for having me back on the program.
Erik
Again I have been speaking to David Grann. He is author of The Wager, a Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.
