The writer David Grann had been reading about Wager Island for years when he finally decided to see it for himself. A boggy speck that abruptly rises out of the Pacific Ocean on the Chilean coast of Patagonia, it’s named for the British Royal Navy vessel that wrecked just offshore in 1741. One hundred forty-five men were stranded on the island, where strict military order rapidly gave way to mutiny, cannibalism, and murder. Grann had spent countless hours poring over the contradictory, self-serving accounts of the sailors, combing through archives in England and squinting at 18th-century handwriting, but he still felt like there would be something missing from his understanding until he went there. The remote island is just as desolate as it was nearly 300 years ago, but he found a Chilean captain willing to undertake the multi-day voyage in a simple boat heated by a wood stove. “It was not,” he told me, “one of the smarter things I’ve ever done.”
And he’s a smart guy, a longtime staff writer for the New Yorker (which, like GQ, is owned by Condé Nast) and a best-selling author. He specializes in gripping historical chronicles and crime stories, filled with fearless explorers and ruthless killers, with twists and double-crosses so rich in intrigue that they would strain credulity in fiction. But Grann’s stories are all true, and because they actually happened, because every detail is invariably backed up by some unearthed court testimony or a dusty file plucked from a long-neglected archive, he’s become one of our culture’s leading sources of holy shit page-turners.
His latest book,The Wager, which comes out this week, spins out the story of the shipwreck and mutiny by weaving together the rival accounts of the ship’s gentleman captain, a lower-class gunner, and a 16-year-old midshipman. The doomed ship left England as part of a squadron on a secret mission to intercept a Spanish treasure galleon loaded with silver, which meant weathering the dangerous storms below Cape Horn, at the southern tip of South America. It’s an adventure, guaranteed to please fans of the seafaring novels of Patrick O’Brian and the movie they inspired, Master and Commander—and, by extension, history-loving dads everywhere.
But where O’Brian’s books look back at the Age of Sail through an idealized haze, there’s not much to romanticize in The Wager: The expedition is crewed by old men and invalids, the boat disintegrates in the gales of the Southern Ocean, and the bodies of the scurvy-ridden sailors melt off of their bones. The expedition is revealed to be a boondoggle at best, and probably something far more sinister. Grann has managed to push the conventions of true crime and pop history into something more meaningful: The Wager is a story about a shipwreck, but it’s also about how the men who somehow made it off the island told their competing accounts, which became the sensational true-crime of their day, and watching Grann make sense of the tangle raises fascinating questions about how stories take on a life of their own.
The film rights to The Wager were sold to two of the biggest names in Hollywood long before the book was even printed—the plan is for it to be turned into a movie directed by Martin Scorsese and starring Leonardo DiCaprio. The pair have already adapted Grann’s previous book, Killers of the Flower Moon, which recounts a murderous conspiracy in 1920s Oklahoma targeting wealthy but vulnerable Osage Indians and the oil on their land. That movie, which stars Robert De Niro, Brendan Fraser, and Lily Gladstone alongside DiCaprio, will premiere at Cannes next month, before a wide release this fall. It isn’t the first story of Grann’s to be adapted. Most notably, 2006’s The Lost City of Z became a 2016 movie of the same name, and the Old Man and the Gun, Robert Redford’s final film role, was a modest hit. But none have yet been produced on close to this scale: Killers of the Flower Moon is already perhaps the most-anticipated film of the year, with awards-season buzz before anyone has even seen it. It’s the biggest kind of (non-comic book) movie that Hollywood still makes, and Grann is in some way on the precipice of becoming the culture’s foremost (non-comic book) storyteller.
Chris Cohen
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