The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
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David Grann on The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder
In him own words: quotes and insights from the author.Why he wrote it
A digitized journal and a question that wouldn’t closeGrann came to the Wager not by design but by accident. He was pursuing a general fascination with mutinies when he found a digitized scan of a journal written by John Byron, a 16-year-old midshipman who sailed aboard HMS Wager in 1740. The archaic English, F’s printed as S’s, nearly made him move on.
I kept being held spellbound by these descriptions of typhoons and tidal waves and ships breaking apart, and then the shipwreck and starvation and the warring factions in this real-life Lord of the Flies on this island.
A gripping survival story alone was not enough to justify five years of work. What converted his interest into a commitment was the legal trap waiting for the survivors when they returned to England. Those who made it home were summoned to a court martial and had to release competing accounts of what had happened on the island. Joan Didion’s famous line about storytelling usually operates as metaphor. In the Wager court martial, it was literal.
Joan Didion famously said, ‘We all tell ourselves stories in order to live.’ Yet, in this case of the men of the Wager, they quite literally have to tell their stories in order to live. And if they don’t tell a good one, they’re going to get hanged.
Grann was finishing Killers of the Flower Moon when phrases like “alternative facts” were dominating the news cycle. He found himself switching between present-day headlines and 18th-century documents and noticing that the two eras were rehearsing the same argument.
I would come home and I’d flip on cable news or read the newspaper and there would be all these discussions about wars over the truth and disinformation and misinformation...And then I would go back to reading about the Wager. I’d be reading these documents about all these people shaping and manipulating their narratives. Then I discovered that there were even fake journals!
The story’s silences troubled him as much as what the documents contained. One seaman, John Duck (recorded in some sources as “John Dock”), survived the wreck, the scurvy, the island, and the open-ocean castaway voyage home, yet left no account in the historical record. Every other survivor who returned produced testimony, published memoirs, or shaped the official narrative. Duck could not, for a reason that had nothing to do with the shipwreck.
John Dock was this free Black seamen on the Wager who manages to survive the shipwreck, typhoons, and then this castaway voyage. All the other castaways come back and they all render their story. They give testimony, they write books, they all shape the narrative — and yet he can’t because he was kidnapped and sold into slavery, and we don’t even know what happened to him. It’s such a gap in the history.
That gap did not resolve as research deepened. It became one of the book’s organizing moral facts: the archive is not a neutral record of who survived, but a record of who was permitted to speak.
How he wrote it
Two years at a desk, then a boat running on timber and glacier waterBefore Grann wrote a sentence, he spent two years immersed in documents he describes as a foreign language. The 18th-century Royal Navy was a closed society with its own codes, and he believed fluency in that world was a prerequisite for prose. He typed everything into a searchable Word document, then built chapter-specific sub-files before drafting. One small discovery in the muster books captures how long that immersion took: he kept encountering the abbreviation “DD” without knowing what it meant.
These were floating civilizations with different mores and customs and their own coded language. You’re not going to be able to write with fluidity or recreate a world unless you understand it.
After two years working through British archives and brittle documents, Grann decided he had to sail to Wager Island, the remote stretch of the Chilean coast where the castaways had survived for months. He flew to Santiago, traveled further south, took a ferry to Chiloé Island, and boarded a small wood-heated vessel whose captain cut timber from the shoreline for fuel and pumped drinking water from glaciers.
Not one of my smarter moves. I spent the first couple years researching it, going to British archives, turning my office into a crazy archive. Just geeking out with these documents. But I felt like I could never fully understand what they had gone through unless I went. And if you’re spending years writing about people, you do feel a certain moral obligation to try to understand them as best as possible.
The island gave him nothing factual that the archives had missed. What it gave him was physical: no animals, relentless wind, seaweed, some wild celery, and a quality of desolation that a document could describe but not transmit. The phrase that unlocked it for him came from a British officer who had been there before him.
One British officer had described the island as the place where the soul of the man dies in him. And it was only after this visit that I could begin to understand that.
The structural problem was separate from the research problem. Grann had multiple survivors with genuinely competing accounts, each shaped to protect its author at the court martial. He chose three focal perspectives: Captain David Cheap, gunner John Bulkeley, and midshipman John Byron. Rather than rule between them, he let them sit in tension. His reading of how the accounts diverge is precise about where the distortion actually lives.
What’s interesting about the perspectives is they don’t actually tend to lie. It’s what they leave out, or what they emphasize, or how they project themselves. It’s not a pure Rashomon where you’re like, Well, what is? They all agree on the basic facts. Nobody denies that the captain shot somebody on the island. But how is it portrayed?
Grann had carried a single sentence in his head for nearly the entire writing of the book, a planned last line he considered close to perfect. When he reached the end, he judged it against the book it had to close and found it wanting.
The whole time I was writing this book, I had a last line in mind: ‘All that remained was the eternal hush of the sea.’ But when I got to the end, I felt that it was poetry over meaning. The line I ended with was a little less lovely but has more meaning. I had to sacrifice the gem that I had basically been chasing for five years.
On what the book is wrestling with
Who controls the record after everyone comes homeGrann’s frame for the book is not adventure but epistemology: who gets to decide what happened, and how that decision gets made. The court martial was the first arena where those competing claims collided. But behind the court martial stood the British Empire itself, with its own reasons to prefer one version over another.
Not only were each individual of the survivors trying to shape their stories and tell their stories to serve their own self-interest. What this story really shows is how nations also shape and manipulate and edit their stories to serve their own self-interest. And what happened on Wager Island makes the British Empire look scandalous.
Grann is equally insistent that the book resist the pull toward moral tidiness. The men of the Wager were not divided into heroes and villains by the shipwreck. They were divided into themselves under pressure. His description of what extreme circumstances expose in people is not a conclusion about these particular sailors but a general claim about what catastrophe does to character.
Often, these situations become laboratories that test the human condition under very extreme circumstances...Inevitably, they begin to reveal the hidden nature of each person, both the good and the bad.
The concept of excavation, rather than imagination, is central to how Grann understands the nonfiction writer’s job. He arrived at this not as theory but as practice: the more he worked in archives, the more he felt the story asserting its own shape against his attempts to impose one.
What I realized is, as I did this more, is that you are an excavator. You aren’t imagining the story. You are excavating the story.
What he wants us to sit with
The stories nations tell to outlast the ones they buriedGrann returns to the question of archival silence across multiple interviews, and each time he frames it not as a historical problem but as a personal and ethical one for the writer. The things he cannot recover trouble him more than the crimes he can document, because the absence itself is a kind of evidence.
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...I increasingly want, if I can, to be transparent in my own gaps of knowledge.
The adventure framework of The Wager, with its typhoons and starvation and open-boat voyages, can make the book feel like an escape from present concerns. Grann’s consistent position is that it is the opposite. The Wager survivors’ war over the historical record began the moment they made landfall and has never really ended.
Not only were each individual of the survivors trying to shape their stories and tell their stories to serve their own self-interest. What this story really shows is how nations also shape and manipulate and edit their stories to serve their own self-interest.