In 1740, amid an imperial war with Spain, the Wager—a tricked-out merchant ship—set sail from England on a mission to capture a Spanish galleon laden with silver. The mission went awry. Two years later, a glorified raft washed up on Brazil’s shores, carrying only 30 of the original 250-odd crewmen. They told a heroic story of survival against all odds: illness, shipwreck, starvation on a desolate island. Six months later, three more survivors turned up on the coast of Chile, with an accusation of mutiny.
In The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder (Doubleday), David Grann untangles the dueling narratives, bringing a nearly 300-year-old drama to life. Drawing from ship logs, survivor accounts, and court records—with context and color from the works of Lord Byron, Charles Darwin, and Herman Melville—The Wager zeroes in on the experiences of a handful of central figures, from Captain David Cheap to a 16-year-old midshipman named John Byron (the poet’s grandfather). The result: a genre-defying literary naval-history thriller, part Master and Commander, part Lord of the Flies.
“One of my pet interests has always been mutiny,” Grann told VF. “I’m interested in military organizations that are designed by the state to enforce order. What is it that suddenly causes them to disorder? In literature and film, there’s always this question: Are they these extreme outlaws, or are they these romantic figures who are rebelling against something rotten at the core of the system?”
Questions like these have long animated Grann’s writing. Among his features for The New Yorker, where he’s been a staff writer since 2003, are a profile of the French serial imposter Frédéric Bourdin and the story of a Polish novelist charged with murder. And his books are cinematic, both narratively and actually, including The Lost City of Z, an account of a British explorer who went in search of El Dorado (Charlie Hunnam stars in the film version); the collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes (notching Robert Redford a best-actor Golden Globe nomination for the adaptation of Grann’s piece “The Old Man and the Gun”); and the best-selling Killers of the Flower Moon, about the 1920s murders of members of the Osage Nation (with a Martin Scorsese joint starring Leonardo DiCaprio coming to theaters soon). In the wake of finishing Killers, as phrases like “alternative facts” and “post-truth” proliferated, Grann began researching the Wager. He had been desperately hoping that his next book might feature living figures he could call up on the phone, but “this weird 18th-century story felt like a parable for our time.”
Vanity Fair: Your writing often includes some kind of grappling with how to tell the story you’re telling, or otherwise engages with the act of storytelling.
David Grann: I think early on I was telling stories more straight and traditionally. And then, over time, you start to become more sensitive to the way people are telling their stories, or shading their stories, and also of your own challenges in trying to render the truth.
I have a sense of my own inadequacy now. I started off as a young reporter—you watch All the President’s Men and you say, Well, this is how it’s going to be. And then you start to realize that getting to the truth is really murky and hard. I am a zealous believer in the truth, but accessing it and knowing it and documenting it…
Sometimes projects lead to other projects. With Killers of the Flower Moon, I was so interested in the fact that here was one of the worst racial injustices and sinister crimes in American history, and yet I had never heard of it. Most people outside the Osage Nation had not heard of it. And it’s like, why weren’t we taught this? Why did this not become part of history? That was something that haunted me. And so when I found the story of the Wager, it seemed like here you could really see the way people were shading their stories, but then also how nations and empires shade their stories and create their own narratives and their own mythic tales.
More and more, I’m acutely aware of parts of the story that have been scrubbed or whitewashed, and sometimes really tragically can’t be accessed anymore. Sometimes what haunts me when I do a story, it’s not the things I know, even when it’s a horrible crime, but actually the things I don’t know.
Keziah Weir
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