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The Meticulously Crafted Adventures of David Grann

How a bookish reporter became one of the most sought-after writers in hollywood..

David Grann is the first to say he isn’t a natural-born explorer. Thanks to a degenerative eye condition, the longtime New Yorker writer sees the world as though looking through a windshield during a rainstorm. He doesn’t hike or camp, and he has a tendency to take the wrong train when he rides the subway. While researching The Lost City of Z , his 2009 book about a Victorian-era adventurer who went missing in the Amazon and never returned, he briefly got lost in the Amazon himself. So it wasn’t all that surprising when, on a sunny morning in April, Grann showed up at the wrong location for our interview. When I found him on the sidewalk near the South Street Seaport Museum, where we were supposed to meet, he was grinning from ear to ear. “It’s just like me to get lost,” he said, laughing.

Grann, 56, may not have the strapping physical attributes of his subjects, but his meticulously researched stories, with their spare, simmering setups that almost always deliver stunning payoffs, have made him one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers working today. “We often think that reporters have to be super-capable in every way in order to get the best material, but sometimes if you have something like weak sight, you compensate in such a brilliant way that it’s better than if you have the best vision,” said Daniel Zalewski, Grann’s longtime editor at The New Yorker . In just over a decade, Grann has published The Lost City of Z ; Killers of the Flower Moon , about the targeted assassinations of members of the Osage Nation; The White Darkness , about a polar explorer obsessed with crossing Antarctica alone; and two collections’ worth of magazine stories about murderers, master manipulators, and scientists on the hunt for the elusive giant squid.

His latest book, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder , traces the journey of the H.M.S. Wager , a British warship that ran aground on a Pacific island in 1742 while on a secret mission. Stranded, the crew members mutinied and spent months fighting for survival, testing not only their physical limits but those of military law and the social order. Multiple groups of survivors miraculously made it back to England only to offer different, sometimes conflicting, accounts of the ordeal. More than the adventure story, the Rashomon -like atmosphere is what gives The Wager the intellectual heft of a David Grann endeavor. “After all they had been through — scurvy, shipwrecks, typhoons, violence — these castaway voyagers are summoned to face court-martial, and they could be hanged. So hoping to save their lives, they released testimony or written accounts, which became quite a sensation, but they also sparked this furious war over the truth,” Grann said.

After spending two years poring over journals, court records, and logbooks, he still felt he could never fully understand the experience of the Wager ’s crew unless he visited the island. That’s how this reluctant explorer found himself sitting in a small boat as it motored across a stretch of Pacific Ocean often referred to as the Gulf of Pain, while waves tossed the 50-foot vessel around like a soda can. “That journey was probably stupid, probably foolish, but in the end was really essential,” Grann said. As he walked around the island, the brutal conditions the sailors described — the windchill, the lack of food, the dense foliage that suffocated their movement — felt real. “I understood why this British officer had called Wager Island the kind of place where the soul of man dies. I’m like, Okay, my soul would have died here .”

Grann grew up in Westport, Connecticut, the middle child of the late Victor Grann, a cancer specialist and recreational sailor who occasionally exhibited some of the madman qualities his son would later explore in his subjects (“If a hurricane was coming he would not sail away from it,” Grann said), and Phyllis Grann , a powerhouse book editor and publisher who shared one piece of wisdom above all: Don’t become a writer.

Like any good child, he ignored his mother’s advice. After graduating from Connecticut College, he wrote a coming-of-age novel that he never published and briefly taught fiction while getting a master’s degree in creative writing at Boston University. Eventually, he gave up on fiction and committed himself to journalism, where he has mastered a streamlined, propulsive type of narrative that readers devour for its hide-and-seek reveals. The success of that form is indisputable — Killers of the Flower Moon has sold over a million copies — but it’s not without detractors. “If you taught the artificial brains of supercomputers at IBM Research to write nonfiction prose, and if they got very good at it, they might compose a book like David Grann’s Killers of the Flower Moon ,” Dwight Garner wrote in his New York Times review. Grann, however, is diligent about removing stylistic flourishes from his writing. “You’re really only as good as the material you’re working with,” he said. “You might be able to improve it some, or you may not make it as good as it could have been, but at some level, if the material isn’t good, you’re kind of sunk.”

“David spends weeks and weeks and months and months sifting through possible stories,” said David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker . “I’d wander by his office and he’d be reading these archives and old letters and all kind of material, holding the paper close to his face like an ancient Talmudic scholar.”

Nowhere are the twists and turns of Grann’s stories more hotly anticipated than in Hollywood. According to one film scout, producers sometimes hear about Grann’s ideas before he has committed to pursuing them. Four of his stories have been adapted into movies, and at least four others are in development as either films or series. The bidding war for Killers of the Flower Moon was heated, with the winners paying a reported $5 million for the rights. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio ultimately signed on to make the film, which is scheduled to premiere at the Cannes Film Festival in May. Scorsese and DiCaprio acquired the rights for The Wager last July, nearly a year before its publication.

Inside the Seaport Museum — where Grann revels in the knowledge that its tall ship, the Wavertree , was once battered rounding Cape Horn, just like the Wager — he tells me he doesn’t think about his projects as movies. His interest in the Wager was stoked by an 18th-century account written in stilted English, hardly cinematic gold. This account was given by John Byron (who would one day be the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron), who was 16 when he left Portsmouth aboard the Wager . As Byron’s story was one of a handful given by survivors, “I tried to gather all the facts to determine what really happened,” Grann writes in an author’s note at the beginning of the book.

Where other writers might take liberties, Grann is obsessive about accuracy. “David’s stuff reads like literature, but every detail, every quote, every seemingly implausible glimpse into a subject’s mind is accounted for,” said David Kortava, who fact-checked both The White Darkness and The Wager . Grann verifies his own work before sending it to a fact-checker, and his devotion to the fact-checking process can seem comical. The first time he asked Kortava if he had checked the spellings of his kids’ names on The Wager ’s dedication page, Kortava thought Grann was joking. The second time he asked, Kortava checked the spellings. “He doesn’t have an OCD diagnosis, as far as I know, but I do, and I definitely consider him one of the tribe,” Kortava said.

Grann didn’t always have the freedom to pursue his idiosyncratic interests. He was once a general-assignment magazine writer delivering stories about Barry Bonds, John McCain, and Newt Gingrich. A 2000 profile of the now-deceased Ohio congressman Jim Traficant that Grann wrote for The New Republic helped him discover the types of stories he wanted to tell and how to go about telling them. In an Ohio courthouse, Grann unearthed a 1980 recording of Traficant, then a candidate for sheriff, talking to two mobsters. “I hear Traficant dropping the F-bomb every other word, and I hear him talking about taking bribes, and then I hear about people coming up swimming in the Mahoning River. And it was a voice that was so different from the voice I heard on C-SPAN,” Grann said. “It was kind of the beginning where I was thinking, Oh! These are the voices of the stories I want to tell . It also showed me the power of archives for the first time. You can find things that are just kind of sitting there if you look, and they can peel back façades and get you closer to the hidden truth.”

I ask Grann if he misses reporting on contemporary figures. He holds up his hand and makes a zero with his fingers while letting out a sigh of relief. “The kind of reporting I really like to do is so immersive, and usually figures like that do not want you to be with them,” he said. Their ghosts, he has learned, have no choice.

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Awards & Accolades

Our Verdict

Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2023

New York Times Bestseller

A TALE OF SHIPWRECK, MUTINY AND MURDER

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2023

A brisk, absorbing history and a no-brainer for fans of the author’s suspenseful historical thrillers.

The author of Killers of the Flower Moon and The Lost City of Z returns with a rousing story of a maritime scandal.

In 1741, the British vessel the Wager , pressed into service during England’s war with Spain, was shipwrecked in a storm off the coast of Patagonia while chasing a silver-laden Spanish galleon. Though initially part of a fleet, by the time of the shipwreck, the Wager stood alone, and many of its 250 crew members already had succumbed to injury, illness, starvation, or drowning. More than half survived the wreckage only to find themselves stranded on a desolate island. Drawing on a trove of firsthand accounts—logbooks, correspondence, diaries, court-martial testimony, and Admiralty and government records—Grann mounts a chilling, vibrant narrative of a grim maritime tragedy and its dramatic aftermath. Central to his populous cast of seamen are David Cheap, who, through a twist of fate, became captain of the Wager ; Commodore George Anson, who had made Cheap his protégé; formidable gunner John Bulkeley; and midshipman John Byron, grandfather of the poet. Life onboard an 18th-century ship was perilous, as Grann amply shows. Threats included wild weather, enemy fire, scurvy and typhus, insurrection, and even mutiny. On the island, Cheap struggled to maintain authority as factions developed and violence erupted, until a group of survivors left—without Cheap—in rude makeshift boats. Of that group, 29 castaways later washed up on the coast of Brazil, where they spent more than two years in Spanish captivity; and three castaways, including Cheap, landed on the shores of Chile, where they, too, were held for years by the Spanish. Each group of survivors eventually returned to England, where they offered vastly different versions of what had occurred; most disturbingly, each accused the other of mutiny, a crime punishable by hanging. Recounting the tumultuous events in tense detail, Grann sets the Wager episode in the context of European imperialism as much as the wrath of the sea.

Pub Date: April 18, 2023

ISBN: 9780385534260

Page Count: 352

Publisher: Doubleday

Review Posted Online: Feb. 10, 2023

Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2023

BIOGRAPHY & MEMOIR | HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | HISTORICAL & MILITARY | SURVIVORS & ADVENTURERS | EXPEDITIONS | WORLD

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Kirkus Reviews' Best Books Of 2017

IndieBound Bestseller

National Book Award Finalist

KILLERS OF THE FLOWER MOON

The osage murders and the birth of the fbi.

by David Grann ‧ RELEASE DATE: April 18, 2017

Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.

Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.

During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorker staff writer Grann ( The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession , 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.

Pub Date: April 18, 2017

ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6

Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017

GENERAL HISTORY | TRUE CRIME | UNITED STATES | FIRST/NATIVE NATIONS | HISTORY

BOOK TO SCREEN

IN COLD BLOOD

by Truman Capote ‧ RELEASE DATE: Jan. 7, 1965

"There's got to be something wrong with somebody who'd do a thing like that." This is Perry Edward Smith, talking about himself. "Deal me out, baby...I'm a normal." This is Richard Eugene Hickock, talking about himself. They're as sick a pair as Leopold and Loeb and together they killed a mother, a father, a pretty 17-year-old and her brother, none of whom they'd seen before, in cold blood. A couple of days before they had bought a 100 foot rope to garrote them—enough for ten people if necessary. This small pogrom took place in Holcomb, Kansas, a lonesome town on a flat, limitless landscape: a depot, a store, a cafe, two filling stations, 270 inhabitants. The natives refer to it as "out there." It occurred in 1959 and Capote has spent five years, almost all of the time which has since elapsed, in following up this crime which made no sense, had no motive, left few clues—just a footprint and a remembered conversation. Capote's alternating dossier Shifts from the victims, the Clutter family, to the boy who had loved Nancy Clutter, and her best friend, to the neighbors, and to the recently paroled perpetrators: Perry, with a stunted child's legs and a changeling's face, and Dick, who had one squinting eye but a "smile that works." They had been cellmates at the Kansas State Penitentiary where another prisoner had told them about the Clutters—he'd hired out once on Mr. Clutter's farm and thought that Mr. Clutter was perhaps rich. And this is the lead which finally broke the case after Perry and Dick had drifted down to Mexico, back to the midwest, been seen in Kansas City, and were finally picked up in Las Vegas. The last, even more terrible chapters, deal with their confessions, the law man who wanted to see them hanged, back to back, the trial begun in 1960, the post-ponements of the execution, and finally the walk to "The Corner" and Perry's soft-spoken words—"It would be meaningless to apologize for what I did. Even inappropriate. But I do. I apologize." It's a magnificent job—this American tragedy—with the incomparable Capote touches throughout. There may never have been a perfect crime, but if there ever has been a perfect reconstruction of one, surely this must be it.

Pub Date: Jan. 7, 1965

ISBN: 0375507906

Page Count: 343

Publisher: Random House

Review Posted Online: Oct. 10, 2011

Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 1, 1965

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by Truman Capote

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The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

David grann.

331 pages, Hardcover

First published April 18, 2023

About the author

He is also the author of The White Darkness and the collection The Devil and Sherlock Holmes . Grann's storytelling has garnered several honors, including a George Polk Award. He lives with his wife and children in New York.

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Review: 'The Wager,' by David Grann

NONFICTION: "The Wager" is a soaring literary accomplishment and seductive adventure tale.

By Hamilton Cain

The War of Jenkin's Ear (1739-1748) has long slipped beyond the horizon of popular imagination and into the study carrels of aspiring historians, but at the time it was a flex for the Spanish and British empires as they expanded influence and filled coffers. In his enthralling, seamlessly crafted "The Wager," David Grann re-creates an all-but-forgotten episode from that conflict: the calamitous voyage and shipwreck of HMS Wager off the coast of Chile, and the survivors' fraught treks home. This is the stuff that sea shanties and sailor yarns are made of.

As the two countries mustered arms, the Crown dispatched Commodore George Anson and a small armada on a side mission: to vanquish a Spanish galleon laden with treasure. A lesser vessel, the Wager was captained by the egomaniacal David Cheap, Anson's protégé, determined to prove his mettle. Among the hundreds of men onboard were John Bulkeley, a robust, charismatic gunner; and teenaged John Byron, an aristocratic midshipman and grandfather of the future poet. (Grann draws heavily from their journals.)

Social hierarchies didn't stop at water's edge, but rather applied to the "wooden world" as the ships tacked across the Atlantic.

Anson's armada floundered while rounding Cape Horn, battered by punishing gales and towering waves. Scurvy and other plagues whittled their ranks. The Wager fell behind, buffeted by an onslaught of poor weather until it sank near a desolate Patagonian island.

Grann evokes the moment in a flurry of kinetic clauses: "The bowsprit cleaved, windows burst, treenails popped, planks shattered, cabins collapsed, decks caved in. Water flooded the lower portions of the ship, snaking from chamber to chamber, filling nooks and crannies."

The crew scrambled to shore. For months they scavenged for food, grappled with madness and theft, quarreled incessantly, buried their dead. The taboo of cannibalism crept closer. Anger mounted, as did whispers of the word "mutiny." Cheap and Bulkeley sparred as Lt. Bligh and Fletcher Christian would 50 years later.

After a sudden murder, Bulkeley and most of the men departed on a longboat, headed back to the Straits of Magellan and then on to Brazil, abandoning Cheap, Byron and a few loyalists. Grann's admiration for the gunner's bravery and smarts shines throughout "The Wager," as he observes of Bulkeley's logbook: "The account was something striking in English letters ... packed with more narrative and personal detail than a traditional logbook, and the story was told in a bracing new voice — that of a hard-nosed seaman. In contrast to the often flowery and convoluted prose of the time, it was written in a crisp style that reflected Bulkeley's personality, and was, in many ways, distinctly modern."

After horrific setbacks and losses, the castaways reached Brazil, where they recuperated, eventually journeying back to England.

Cheap and Byron took a more circuitous route to London, joining Bulkeley and others in a court martial, a clash of tales ginned up by a tabloid press, the hangman's noose a distinct possibility. The outcome was shocking. It's a testament to Grann's formidable skills that the denouement contains the book's weightiest revelations about the motivations of empires, the needless sacrifice of men's lives, and the atrocities of colonialism and racism.

He delicately teases out class censures, gentlemen arrayed against commoners conscripted ("pressed") into service, "another ignoble chapter in the long, grim history of nations sending their troops off on ill-conceived, poorly funded, bungled military adventures."

"The Wager," then, is an accomplishment as vividly realized and ingeniously constructed as Grann's previous work, on par with Jon Krakauer's "Into Thin Air" and Sebastian Junger's "The Perfect Storm." Welcome a classic.

Hamilton Cain reviews for the Star Tribune, New York Times Book Review, Washington Post and Boston Globe. He lives in Brooklyn.

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

By: David Grann.

Publisher: Doubleday, 352 pages, $30.

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Reviews of The Wager by David Grann

Summary | Excerpt | Reviews | Beyond the book | Read-Alikes | Genres & Themes | Author Bio

A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

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• First Published:
• Apr 18, 2023, 352 pages

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Book summary.

Winner: BookBrowse Nonfiction Award 2023 From the #1 New York Times bestselling author of Killers of the Flower Moon , a page-turning story of shipwreck, survival, and savagery, culminating in a court martial that reveals a shocking truth. The powerful narrative reveals the deeper meaning of the events on The Wager , showing that it was not only the captain and crew who ended up on trial, but the very idea of empire.

On January 28, 1742, a ramshackle vessel of patched-together wood and cloth washed up on the coast of Brazil. Inside were thirty emaciated men, barely alive, and they had an extraordinary tale to tell. They were survivors of His Majesty's Ship the Wager, a British vessel that had left England in 1740 on a secret mission during an imperial war with Spain. While the Wager had been chasing a Spanish treasure-filled galleon known as "the prize of all the oceans," it had wrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. The men, after being marooned for months and facing starvation, built the flimsy craft and sailed for more than a hundred days, traversing nearly 3,000 miles of storm-wracked seas. They were greeted as heroes. But then ... six months later, another, even more decrepit craft landed on the coast of Chile. This boat contained just three castaways, and they told a very different story. The thirty sailors who landed in Brazil were not heroes – they were mutineers. The first group responded with countercharges of their own, of a tyrannical and murderous senior officer and his henchmen. It became clear that while stranded on the island the crew had fallen into anarchy, with warring factions fighting for dominion over the barren wilderness. As accusations of treachery and murder flew, the Admiralty convened a court martial to determine who was telling the truth. The stakes were life-and-death—for whomever the court found guilty could hang. The Wager is a grand tale of human behavior at the extremes told by one of our greatest nonfiction writers. Grann's recreation of the hidden world on a British warship rivals the work of Patrick O'Brian, his portrayal of the castaways' desperate straits stands up to the classics of survival writing such as The Endurance , and his account of the court martial has the savvy of a Scott Turow thriller. As always with Grann's work, the incredible twists of the narrative hold the reader spellbound.

The First Lieutenant Each man in the squadron carried, along with a sea chest, his own burdensome story. Perhaps it was of a scorned love, or a secret prison conviction, or a pregnant wife left on shore weeping. Perhaps it was a hunger for fame and fortune, or a dread of death. David Cheap, the first lieutenant of the Centurion, the squadron's flagship, was no different. A burly Scotsman in his early forties with a protracted nose and intense eyes, he was in flight—from squabbles with his brother over their inheritance, from creditors chasing him, from debts that made it impossible for him to find a suitable bride. Onshore, Cheap seemed doomed, unable to navigate past life's unexpected shoals. Yet as he perched on the quarterdeck of a British man-of-war, cruising the vast oceans with a cocked hat and spyglass, he brimmed with confidence—even, some would say, a touch of haughtiness. The wooden world of a ship—a world bound by the Navy's rigid regulations and ...

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Winner: BookBrowse Nonfiction Award 2023 I found this book to be well-researched, well-written and extremely easy to read. It was actually quite a thrilling read to be honest. It felt more like I was reading an adventure book than a nonfiction book (Tara T). Although the subject matter was not of great interest to me when I started reading the book, my opinion quickly changed when more of the narrative was developed. The author takes a maritime scandal and engulfs the reader in a suspenseful historical thriller! (Dan W). It's a riveting, page-turning adventure, complete with shipwreck, mutiny and murder (Lois K)... continued

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A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder

Typhoons. Scurvy. Shipwreck. Mutiny. Cannibalism. A war over the truth and who gets to write history. All of these elements converge in David Grann’s upcoming book, “ The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder .” It tells the extraordinary saga of the officers and crew of the Wager, a British naval warship that wrecked off the Chilean coast of Patagonia, in 1741. The men, marooned on a desolate island, descended into murderous anarchy. Years later, several survivors made it back to England, where, facing a court-martial and desperate to save their own lives, they gave wildly conflicting versions of what had happened. They each attempted to shade a scandalous truth—to erase history. As did the British Empire.

In 2016, Grann, a staff writer at the magazine and the author of “ Killers of the Flower Moon ” and “ The Lost City of Z ,” stumbled across an eyewitness account of the voyage by John Byron, who had been a sixteen-year-old midshipman on the Wager when the journey began. (Byron was the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, who drew, in “ Don Juan ,” on what he referred to as “my grand-dad’s ‘Narrative.’ ”) Grann set out to reconstruct what really took place, and spent more than half a decade combing through the archival debris: the washed-out logbooks, the moldering correspondence, the partly truthful journals, the surviving records from the court-martial. To better understand what the castaways had endured on the island, which is situated in the Gulf of Sorrows—or, as some prefer to call it, the Gulf of Pain—he travelled there in a small, wood-heated boat.

In this excerpt, of the book’s prologue and first chapter, Grann introduces David Cheap, a burly, tempestuous British naval lieutenant. During the chaotic voyage, he was promoted to captain of the Wager and, at long last, fulfilled his dream of becoming a lord of the sea—that is, until the wreck.

The only impartial witness was the sun. For days, it watched as the strange object heaved up and down in the ocean, tossed mercilessly by the wind and the waves. Once or twice, the vessel nearly smashed into a reef, which might have ended our story. Yet somehow—whether through destiny, as some would later proclaim, or dumb luck—it drifted into an inlet, off the southeastern coast of Brazil, where several inhabitants laid eyes upon it.

More than fifty feet long and ten feet wide, it was a boat of some sort—though it looked as if it had been patched together from scraps of wood and cloth and then battered into oblivion. Its sails were shredded, its boom shattered. Seawater seeped through the hull, and a stench emanated from within. The bystanders, edging closer, heard unnerving sounds: thirty men were crammed on board, their bodies wasted almost to the bone. Their clothes had largely disintegrated. Their faces were enveloped in hair, tangled and salted like seaweed.

Some were so weak they could not even stand. One soon gave out his last breath and died. But a figure who appeared to be in charge rose with an extraordinary exertion of will and announced that they were castaways from His Majesty’s Ship the Wager, a British man-of-war.

When the news reached England, it was greeted with disbelief. In September, 1740, during an imperial conflict with Spain, the Wager, carrying some two hundred and fifty officers and crew, had embarked from Portsmouth in a squadron on a secret mission: to capture a treasure-filled Spanish galleon known as “the prize of all the oceans.” Near Cape Horn, at the tip of South America, the squadron had been engulfed by a hurricane, and the Wager was believed to have sunk with all its souls. But, two hundred and eighty-three days after the ship had last been reported seen, these men miraculously emerged in Brazil.

They had been shipwrecked on a desolate island off the coast of Patagonia. Most of the officers and crew had perished, but eighty-one survivors had set out in a makeshift boat lashed together partly from the wreckage of the Wager. Packed so tightly on board that they could barely move, they travelled through menacing gales and tidal waves, through ice storms and earthquakes. More than fifty men died during the arduous journey, and, by the time the few remnants reached Brazil three and a half months later, they had traversed nearly three thousand miles—one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded. They were hailed for their ingenuity and bravery. As the leader of the party noted, it was hard to believe that “human nature could possibly support the miseries that we have endured.”

Six months later, another boat washed ashore, this one landing in a blizzard off the southwestern coast of Chile. It was even smaller—a wooden dugout propelled by a sail stitched from the rags of blankets. On board were three additional survivors, and their condition was even more frightful. They were half naked and emaciated; insects swarmed over their bodies, nibbling on what remained of their flesh. One man was so delirious that he had “quite lost himself,” as a companion put it, “not recollecting our names . . . or even his own.”

After these men recovered and returned to England, they levelled a shocking allegation against their companions who had surfaced in Brazil. They were not heroes—they were mutineers. In the controversy that followed, with charges and countercharges from both sides, it became clear that while stranded on the island the Wager’s officers and crew had struggled to persevere in the most extreme circumstances. Faced with starvation and freezing temperatures, they built an outpost and tried to re-create naval order. But, as their situation deteriorated, the Wager’s officers and crew—those supposed apostles of the Enlightenment—descended into a Hobbesian state of depravity. There were warring factions and marauders and abandonments and murders. A few of the men succumbed to cannibalism.

Back in England, the principal figures from each group, along with their allies, were now summoned by the Admiralty to face a court-martial. The trial threatened to expose the secret nature not only of those charged but also of an empire whose self-professed mission was spreading civilization.

Several of the accused published sensational—and wildly conflicting—accounts of what one of them called the “dark and intricate” affair. The philosophers Rousseau, Voltaire, and Montesquieu were influenced by reports of the expedition, and so, later, were Charles Darwin and two of the great novelists of the sea, Herman Melville and Patrick O’Brian. The suspects’ main aim was to sway the Admiralty and the public. A survivor from one party composed what he described as a “faithful narrative,” insisting, “I have been scrupulously careful not to insert one word of untruth: for falsities of any kind would be highly absurd in a work designed to rescue the author’s character.” The leader of the other side claimed, in his own chronicle, that his enemies had furnished an “imperfect narrative” and “blackened us with the greatest calumnies.” He vowed, “We stand or fall by the truth; if truth will not support us, nothing can.”

We all impose some coherence—some meaning—on the chaotic events of our existence. We rummage through the raw images of our memories, selecting, burnishing, erasing. We emerge as the heroes of our stories, which allows us to live with what we have done—or haven’t done.

But these men believed that their very lives depended on the stories they told. If they failed to provide a convincing tale, they could be secured to a ship’s yardarm and hanged.

Chapter 1: The First Lieutenant

Each man in the squadron carried, along with a sea chest, his own burdensome story. Perhaps it was of a scorned love, or a secret prison conviction, or a pregnant wife left onshore weeping. Perhaps it was a hunger for fame and fortune, or a dread of death. David Cheap, the first lieutenant of the Centurion, the squadron’s flagship, was no different. A burly Scotsman in his early forties, with a protracted nose and intense eyes, he was in flight—from squabbles with his brother over their inheritance, from creditors chasing him, from debts that made it impossible for him to find a suitable bride. Onshore, Cheap seemed doomed, unable to navigate past life’s unexpected shoals. Yet, as he perched on the quarterdeck of a British man-of-war, cruising the vast oceans with a cocked hat and spyglass, he brimmed with confidence—even, some would say, a touch of haughtiness. The wooden world of a ship—a world bound by the Navy’s rigid regulations and the laws of the sea and, most of all, by the hardened fellowship of men—had provided him a refuge. Suddenly, he felt a crystalline order, a clarity of purpose. And Cheap’s newest posting, despite the innumerable risks that it carried, from plagues and drowning to enemy cannon fire, offered what he longed for: a chance to finally claim a wealthy prize and rise to captain his own ship.

The problem was that he could not get away from the damned land. He was trapped—cursed, really—at the dockyard in Portsmouth, along the English Channel, struggling with feverish futility to get the Centurion fitted out and ready to sail. Its massive wooden hull, a hundred and forty-four feet long and forty feet wide, was moored at a slip. Carpenters, caulkers, riggers, and joiners combed over its decks like rats (which were also plentiful). A cacophony of hammers and saws. The cobblestone streets past the shipyard were congested with rattling wheelbarrows and horse-drawn wagons, with porters, peddlers, pickpockets, sailors, and prostitutes. Periodically, a boatswain blew a chilling whistle, and crewmen stumbled from ale shops, parting from old or new sweethearts, hurrying to their departing ships in order to avoid their officers’ lashes.

It was January, 1740, and the British Empire was racing to mobilize for war against its imperial rival Spain. And, in a move that had suddenly raised Cheap’s prospects, the captain under whom he served on the Centurion, George Anson, had been plucked by the Admiralty to be a commodore and lead the squadron of five warships against the Spanish. The promotion was unexpected. As the son of an obscure country squire, Anson did not wield the level of patronage, the grease—or “interest,” as it was more politely called—that propelled many officers up the pole, along with their men. Anson, then forty-two, had joined the Navy at the age of fourteen, and served for nearly three decades without leading a major military campaign or snaring a lucrative prize.

Tall, with a long face and a high forehead, he had a remoteness about him. His blue eyes were inscrutable, and outside the company of a few trusted friends he rarely opened his mouth. One statesman, after meeting with him, noted, “Anson, as usual, said little.” Anson corresponded even more sparingly, as if he doubted the ability of words to convey what he saw or felt. “He loved reading little, and writing, or dictating his own letters less, and that seeming negligence . . . drew upon him the ill will of many,” a relative wrote. A diplomat later quipped that Anson was so unknowing about the world that he’d been “round it, but never in it.”

Nevertheless, the Admiralty had recognized in Anson what Cheap had also seen in him in the two years since he’d joined the Centurion’s crew: a formidable seaman. Anson had a mastery of the wooden world and, equally important, a mastery of himself—he remained cool and steady under duress. His relative noted, “He had high notions of sincerity and honor and practiced them without deviation.” In addition to Cheap, he had attracted a coterie of talented junior officers and protégés, all vying for his favor. One later informed Anson that he was more obliged to him than to his own father and would do anything to “act up to the good opinion you are pleased to have of me.” If Anson succeeded in his new role as the commodore of the squadron, he would be in a position to anoint any captain he wanted. And Cheap, who’d initially served as Anson’s second lieutenant, was now his right-hand man.

Like Anson, Cheap had spent much of his life at sea, a bruising existence that he’d at first hoped to escape. As Samuel Johnson once observed, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.” Cheap’s father had possessed a large estate in Fife, Scotland, and the sort of title—the second Laird of Rossie—that evoked nobility even if it did not quite confer it. His motto, emblazoned on the family’s crest, was Ditat virtus: “Virtue enriches.” He had seven children with his first wife, and, after she died, he had six more with his second, among them David.

In 1705, the year that David celebrated his eighth birthday, his father stepped out to fetch some goat’s milk and dropped dead. As was the custom, it was the oldest male heir—David’s half brother James—who inherited the bulk of the estate. And so David was buffeted by forces beyond his control, in a world divided between first sons and younger sons, between haves and have-nots. Compounding the upheaval, James, now ensconced as the third Laird of Rossie, frequently neglected to pay the allowance that had been bequeathed to his half brothers and half sister: some people’s blood was apparently thicker than others’. Driven to find work, David apprenticed to a merchant, but his debts mounted. So, in 1714, the year he turned seventeen, he ran off to sea, a decision that was evidently welcomed by his family—as his guardian wrote to his older brother, “The sooner he goes off it will be better for you and me.”

After these setbacks, Cheap seemed only more consumed by his festering dreams, more determined to bend what he called an “unhappy fate.” On his own, on an ocean distant from the world he knew, he might prove himself in elemental struggles—braving typhoons, outduelling enemy ships, rescuing his companions from calamities.

But, though Cheap had chased a few pirates—including the one-handed Irishman Henry Johnson, who fired his gun by resting the barrel on his stump—these earlier voyages had proved largely uneventful. He’d been sent to patrol the West Indies, generally considered the worst assignment in the Navy because of the spectre of disease. The Saffron Scourge. The Bloody Flux. The Breakbone Fever. The Blue Death.

But Cheap had endured. Wasn’t there something to be said for that? Moreover, he’d earned the trust of Anson and worked his way up to first lieutenant. No doubt it helped that they shared a disdain for reckless banter, or what Cheap deemed a “vaporing manner.” A Scottish minister who later became close to Cheap noted that Anson had employed him because he was “a man of sense and knowledge.” Cheap, the once forlorn debtor, was but one rung from his coveted captaincy. And, with the war with Spain having broken out, he was about to head into full-fledged battle for the first time.

The conflict was the result of the endless jockeying among the European powers to expand their empires. They each vied to conquer or control ever larger swaths of the earth, so that they could exploit and monopolize other peoples’ valuable natural resources and trade markets. In the process, they subjugated and destroyed innumerable Indigenous populations, justifying their ruthless self-interest—including a reliance on the ever-expanding Atlantic slave trade—by claiming that they were somehow spreading “civilization” to the benighted realms of the earth. Spain had long been the dominant empire in Latin America, but Great Britain, which already possessed colonies along the American Eastern Seaboard, was now in the ascendant—and determined to break its rival’s hold.

Then, in 1738, Robert Jenkins, a British merchant captain, was summoned to appear in Parliament, where he reportedly claimed that a Spanish officer had stormed his brig in the Caribbean and, accusing him of smuggling sugar from Spain’s colonies, cut off his left ear. Jenkins reputedly displayed his severed appendage, pickled in a jar, and pledged “my cause to my country.” The incident further ignited the passions of Parliament and pamphleteers, leading people to cry for blood—an ear for an ear—and a good deal of booty as well. The conflict became known as the War of Jenkins’s Ear.

British authorities soon devised a plan to launch an attack on a hub of Spain’s colonial wealth, Cartagena. A South American city on the Caribbean, it was where much of the silver extracted from Peruvian mines was loaded into armed convoys to be shipped to Spain. The British offensive—involving a fleet of a hundred and eighty-six ships, led by Admiral Edward Vernon—would be the largest amphibious assault in history. But there was also another, much smaller operation, the one assigned to Commodore Anson.

With five warships and a scouting sloop, he and some two thousand men would sail across the Atlantic and round Cape Horn, “taking, sinking, burning, or otherwise destroying” enemy ships and weakening Spanish holdings from the Pacific coast of South America to the Philippines. The British government, in concocting its scheme, wanted to avoid the impression that it was merely sponsoring piracy. Yet the heart of the plan called for an act of outright thievery: to snatch a Spanish galleon loaded with virgin silver and hundreds of thousands of silver coins. Twice a year, Spain sent such a galleon—it was not always the same ship—from Mexico to the Philippines to purchase silks and spices and other Asian commodities, which, in turn, were sold in Europe and the Americas. These exchanges provided crucial links in Spain’s global trading empire.

Cheap and the others ordered to carry out the mission were rarely privy to the agendas of those in power, but they were lured by a tantalizing prospect: a share of the treasure. The Centurion’s twenty-two-year-old chaplain, the Reverend Richard Walter, who later compiled an account of the voyage, described the galleon as “the most desirable prize that was to be met with in any part of the globe.”

If Anson and his men prevailed—“if it shall please God to bless our arms,” as the Admiralty put it—they would continue circling the earth before returning home. The Admiralty had given Anson a code and a cipher to use for his written communication, and an official warned that the mission must be carried out in the “most secret, expeditious manner.” Otherwise, Anson’s squadron might be intercepted and destroyed by a Spanish armada being assembled under the command of Don José Pizarro.

Cheap was facing his longest expedition—he might be gone for three years—and his most perilous. But he saw himself as a knight-errant of the sea in search of “the greatest prize of all the oceans.” And, along the way, he might become a captain yet.

But, if the squadron didn’t embark quickly, Cheap feared, the entire party would be annihilated by a force even more dangerous than the Spanish armada: the violent seas around Cape Horn. Only a few British sailors had successfully made this passage, where winds routinely blow at gale force, waves can climb to nearly a hundred feet, and icebergs lurk in the hollows. Seamen thought that the best chance to survive was during the austral summer, between December and February. The Reverend Walter cited this “essential maxim,” explaining that, during winter, there were not only fiercer seas and freezing temperatures but also fewer hours of daylight in which one could discern the uncharted coastline. All these reasons, he argued, would make navigating around this unknown shore the “most dismaying and terrible” endeavor.

But, since war had been declared, in October, 1739, the Centurion and the other men-of-war in the squadron—including the Gloucester, the Pearl, and the Severn—had been marooned in England, waiting to be repaired and fitted out for the next journey. Cheap watched helplessly as the days ticked by. January, 1740, came and went. Then February and March. It was nearly half a year since the war with Spain had been declared; still, the squadron was not ready to sail.

It should have been an imposing force. Men-of-war were among the most sophisticated machines yet conceived: buoyant wooden castles powered across oceans by wind and sail. Reflecting the dual nature of their creators, they were devised to be both murderous instruments and the homes in which hundreds of sailors lived together as a family. In a lethal, floating chess game, these pieces were deployed around the globe to achieve what Sir Walter Raleigh had envisioned: “Whosoever commands the seas commands the trade of the world; whosoever commands the trade of the world commands the riches of the world.”

Cheap knew what a cracking ship the Centurion was. Swift and stout, and weighing about a thousand tons, she had, like the other warships in Anson’s squadron, three towering masts with crisscrossing yards—wooden spars from which the sails unfurled. The Centurion could fly as many as eighteen sails at a time. Its hull gleamed with varnish, and painted around the stern in gold relief were Greek mythological figures, including Poseidon. On the bow rode a sixteen-foot wooden carving of a lion, painted bright red. To increase the chances of surviving a barrage of cannonballs, the hull had a double layer of planks, giving it a thickness of more than a foot in places. The ship had several decks, each stacked upon the next, and two of them had rows of cannons on both sides—their menacing black muzzles pointing out of square gunports. Augustus Keppel, a fifteen-year-old midshipman who was one of Anson’s protégés, boasted that other men-of-war had “no chance in the world” against the mighty Centurion.

Yet building, repairing, and fitting out these watercraft was a herculean endeavor even in the best of times, and in a period of war it was chaos. The royal dockyards, which were among the largest manufacturing sites in the world, were overwhelmed with ships—leaking ships, half-constructed ships, ships needing to be loaded and unloaded. Anson’s vessels were laid up on what was known as Rotten Row. As sophisticated as men-of-war were with their sail propulsion and lethal gunnery, they were largely made from simple, perishable materials: hemp, canvas, and, most of all, timber. Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.

Most of the wood was hard oak, but it was still susceptible to the pulverizing elements of storm and sea. Teredo navalis —a reddish shipworm, which can grow longer than a foot—ate through hulls. (Columbus lost two ships to these creatures during his fourth voyage to the West Indies.) Termites also bored through decks and masts and cabin doors, as did deathwatch beetles. A species of fungus further devoured a ship’s wooden core. In 1684, Samuel Pepys, a secretary to the Admiralty, was stunned to discover that many new warships under construction were already so rotten that they were “in danger of sinking at their very moorings.”

The average man-of-war was estimated by a leading shipwright to last only fourteen years. And, to survive that long, a ship had to be virtually remade after each extensive voyage, with new masts and sheathing and rigging. Otherwise, it risked disaster. In 1782, while the hundred-and-eighty-foot Royal George—for a time the largest warship in the world—was anchored near Portsmouth, with a full crew on board, water began flooding its hull. It sank. The cause has been disputed, but an investigation blamed the “general state of decay of her timbers.” An estimated nine hundred people drowned.

Cheap learned that an inspection of the Centurion had turned up the usual array of sea wounds. A shipwright reported that the wooden sheathing on its hull was “so much worm eaten” that it had to be taken off and replaced. The foremast, toward the bow, contained a rotten cavity a foot deep, and the sails were, as Anson noted in his log, “much rat eaten.” The squadron’s other four warships faced similar problems. Moreover, each vessel had to be loaded with tons of provisions, including some forty miles of rope, more than fifteen thousand square feet of sails, and a farm’s worth of livestock—chickens, pigs, goats, and cattle. (It could be fiercely difficult to get such animals on board: steers “do not like the water,” a British captain complained.)

Cheap pleaded with the naval administration to finish readying the Centurion. But it was that familiar story of wartime: though much of the country had clamored for battle, the people were unwilling to pay enough for it. And the Navy was strained to a breaking point. Cheap could be volatile, his moods shifting like the winds, and here he was, stuck as a landsman, a pen pusher! He badgered dockyard officials to replace the Centurion’s damaged mast, but they insisted that the cavity could simply be patched. Cheap wrote to the Admiralty decrying this “very strange way of reasoning,” and officials eventually relented. But more time was lost.

And where was that bastard of the fleet, the Wager? Unlike the other men-of-war, it was not born for battle but had been a merchant vessel—a so-called East Indiaman, because it traded in that region. Intended for heavy cargo, it was tubby and unwieldy, a hundred-and-twenty-three-foot eyesore. After the war began, the Navy, needing additional ships, had purchased it from the East India Company for nearly four thousand pounds. Since then, it had been sequestered eighty miles northeast of Portsmouth, at Deptford, a royal dockyard on the Thames, where it was undergoing a metamorphosis: cabins were torn apart, holes cut into the outer walls, and a stairwell obliterated.

The Wager’s captain, Dandy Kidd, surveyed the work being done. Fifty-six years old, and reportedly a descendant of the infamous buccaneer William Kidd, he was an experienced seaman, and a superstitious one—he saw portents lurking in the winds and the waves. Only recently had he obtained what Cheap dreamed of: the command of his own ship. At least from Cheap’s perspective, Kidd had earned his promotion, unlike the captain of the Gloucester, Richard Norris, whose father, Sir John Norris, was a celebrated admiral; Sir John had helped to secure his son a position in the squadron, noting that there would be “both action and good fortune to those who survived.” The Gloucester was the only vessel in the squadron being swiftly repaired, prompting another captain to complain, “I lay three weeks in the dock and not a nail drove, because Sir John Norris’s son must first be served.”

Captain Kidd bore his own story. He’d left behind, at a boarding school, a five-year-old son, also named Dandy, who had no mother to raise him. What would happen to him if his father didn’t survive the voyage? Already Captain Kidd feared the omens. In his log, he wrote that his new ship nearly “tumbled over,” and he warned the Admiralty that she might be a “crank”—a ship that heeled abnormally. To give the hull ballast so the ship wouldn’t capsize, more than four hundred tons of pig iron and gravel stones were lowered through the hatches into the dark, dank, cavernous hold.

The workers toiled through one of England’s coldest winters on record, and, just as the Wager was ready to sail, Cheap learned to his dismay, something extraordinary happened: the Thames froze, shimmering from bank to bank with thick, unbreakable waves of ice. An official at Deptford advised the Admiralty that the Wager was imprisoned until the river melted. Two months passed before she was liberated.

In May, the old East Indiaman finally emerged from the Deptford Dockyard as a man-of-war. The Navy classified warships by their number of cannons, and, with twenty-eight, she was a sixth-rate—the lowest rank. She was christened in honor of Sir Charles Wager, the seventy-four-year-old First Lord of the Admiralty. The ship’s name seemed fitting: weren’t they all gambling with their lives?

As the Wager was piloted down the Thames, drifting with the tides along that central highway of trade, she floated past West Indiamen loaded with sugar and rum from the Caribbean, past East Indiamen with silks and spices from Asia, past blubber hunters returning from the Arctic with whale oil for lanterns and soaps. While the Wager was navigating this traffic, her keel ran aground on a shoal. Imagine being shipwrecked here! But it soon dislodged, and in July the ship arrived at last outside Portsmouth harbor, where Cheap laid eyes upon her. Seamen were merciless oglers of passing ships, pointing out their elegant curves or their hideous flaws. And, though the Wager had assumed the proud look of a man-of-war, she could not completely conceal her former self, and Captain Kidd beseeched the Admiralty, even at this late date, to give the vessel a fresh coat of varnish and paint so that she could shine like the other ships.

By the middle of July, nine bloodless months had gone by for the squadron since the war began. If the ships left promptly, Cheap was confident that they could reach Cape Horn before the end of the austral summer. But the men-of-war were still missing the most important element of all: men.

Because of the length of the voyage and the planned amphibious invasions, each warship in Anson’s squadron was supposed to carry an even greater number of seamen and marines than it was designed for. The Centurion, which typically held four hundred people, was expected to sail with some five hundred, and the Wager would be packed with about two hundred and fifty—nearly double its usual complement.

Cheap had waited and waited for crewmen to arrive. But the Navy had exhausted its supply of volunteers, and Great Britain had no military conscription. Robert Walpole, the country’s first Prime Minister, warned that the dearth of crews had rendered a third of the Navy’s ships unusable. “Oh! seamen, seamen, seamen!” he cried at a meeting.

While Cheap was struggling with other officers to scrounge up sailors for the squadron, he received more unsettling news: those men who had been recruited were falling sick. Their heads throbbed, and their limbs were so sore that they felt as if they’d been pummelled. In severe cases, these symptoms were compounded by diarrhea, vomiting, bursting blood vessels, and fevers reaching as high as a hundred and six degrees. (This led to delirium—“catching at imaginary objects in the air,” as a medical treatise put it.)

Some men succumbed even before they had gone to sea. Cheap counted at least two hundred sick and more than twenty-five dead on the Centurion alone. He had brought his young nephew Henry to apprentice on the expedition . . . and what if he perished? Even Cheap, who was so indomitable, was suffering from what he called a “very indifferent state of health.”

It was a devastating epidemic of “ship’s fever,” now known as typhus. No one then understood that the disease was a bacterial infection, transmitted by lice and other vermin. As boats transported unwashed recruits crammed together in filth, the men became lethal vectors, deadlier than a cascade of cannonballs.

Anson instructed Cheap to have the sick rushed to a makeshift hospital in Gosport, near Portsmouth, in the hope that they would recover in time for the voyage. The squadron still desperately needed men. But, as the hospital became overcrowded, most of the sick had to be lodged in surrounding taverns, which offered more liquor than medicine, and where three patients sometimes had to squeeze into a single cot. An admiral noted, “In this miserable way, they die very fast.”

After peaceful efforts to man the fleets failed, the Navy resorted to what a secretary of the Admiralty called a “more violent” strategy. Armed gangs were dispatched to press seafaring men into service—in effect, kidnapping them. The gangs roamed cities and towns, grabbing anyone who betrayed the telltale signs of a mariner: the familiar checkered shirt and wide-kneed trousers and round hat; the fingers smeared with tar, which was used to make virtually everything on a ship more water-resistant and durable. (Seamen were known as tars.) Local authorities were ordered to “seize all straggling seamen, watermen, bargemen, fishermen and lightermen.”

A seaman later described walking in London and having a stranger tap him on the shoulder and demand, “What ship?” The seaman denied that he was a sailor, but his tar-stained fingertips betrayed him. The stranger blew his whistle; in an instant, a posse appeared. “I was in the hands of six or eight ruffians whom I soon found to be a press gang,” the seaman wrote. “They dragged me hurriedly through several streets, amid bitter execrations bestowed on them from passersby and expressions of sympathy directed towards me.”

Press-gangs headed out in boats as well, scouring the horizon for incoming merchant ships—the most fertile hunting ground. Often, men seized were returning from distant voyages and hadn’t seen their families for years; given the risks of a subsequent long voyage during war, they might never see them again.

Cheap became close to a young midshipman on the Centurion named John Campbell, who had been pressed while serving on a merchant ship. A gang had invaded his vessel, and when he saw them hauling away an older man in tears he stepped forward and offered himself up in his place. The head of the press-gang remarked, “I would rather have a lad of spirit than a blubbering man.”

Anson was said to have been so struck by Campbell’s gallantry that he’d made him a midshipman. Most sailors, though, went to extraordinary lengths to evade the “body snatchers”—hiding in cramped holds, listing themselves as dead in muster books, and abandoning merchant ships before reaching a major port. When a press-gang surrounded a church in London, in 1755, in pursuit of a seaman inside, he managed, according to a newspaper report, to slip away disguised in “an old gentlewoman’s long cloak, hood and bonnet.”

Sailors who got snatched up were transported in the holds of small ships known as tenders, which resembled floating jails, with gratings bolted over the hatchways and marines standing guard with muskets and bayonets. “In this place we spent the day and following night huddled together, for there was not room to sit or stand separate,” one seaman recalled. “Indeed, we were in a pitiable plight, for numbers of them were sea-sick, some retching, others were smoking, whilst many were so overcome by the stench, that they fainted for want of air.”

Family members, upon learning that a relative—a son, or a brother, or a husband, or a father—had been apprehended, would often rush to where the tenders were departing, hoping to glimpse their loved one. Samuel Pepys describes, in his diary, a scene of pressed sailors’ wives gathered on a wharf near the Tower of London : “In my life, I never did see such a natural expression of passion as I did here in some women’s bewailing themselves, and running to every parcel of men that were brought, one after another, to look for their husbands, and wept over every vessel that went off, thinking they might be there, and looking after the ship as far as ever they could by moonlight, that it grieved me to the heart to hear them.”

Anson’s squadron received scores of pressed men. Cheap processed at least sixty-five for the Centurion; however distasteful he might have found the press, he needed every sailor he could get. Yet the unwilling recruits deserted at the first opportunity, as did volunteers who were having misgivings. In a single day, thirty men vanished from the Severn. Of the sick men sent to Gosport, countless took advantage of lax security to flee—or, as one admiral put it, “go off as soon as they can crawl.” Altogether, more than two hundred and forty men absconded from the squadron, including the Gloucester’s chaplain. When Captain Kidd dispatched a press-gang to find new recruits for the Wager, six members of the gang itself deserted.

Anson ordered the squadron to moor far enough outside Portsmouth harbor that swimming to freedom was impossible—a frequent tactic that led one trapped seaman to write to his wife, “I would give all I had if it was a hundred guineas if I could get on shore. I only lays on the deck every night. There is no hopes of my getting to you . . . . do the best you can for the children and God prosper you and them till I come back.”

Cheap, who believed that a good sailor must possess “honour, courage . . . steadiness,” was undoubtedly appalled by the quality of the recruits who lingered. It was common for local authorities, knowing the unpopularity of the press, to dump their undesirables. But these conscripts were wretched, and the volunteers were little better. An admiral described one bunch of recruits as being “full of the pox, itch, lame, King’s evil, and all other distempers, from the hospitals at London, and will serve only to breed an infection in the ships; for the rest, most of them are thieves, house breakers, Newgate [Prison] birds, and the very filth of London.” He concluded, “In all the former wars I never saw a parcel of turned over men half so bad, in short they are so very bad, that I don’t know how to describe it.”

To at least partly address the shortage of men, the government sent to Anson’s squadron a hundred and forty-three marines, who in those days were a branch of the Army, with their own officers. The marines were supposed to help with land invasions and also lend a hand at sea. Yet they were such raw recruits that they had never set foot on a ship and didn’t even know how to fire a weapon. The Admiralty admitted that they were “useless.” In desperation, the Navy took the extreme step of rounding up for Anson’s squadron five hundred invalid soldiers from the Royal Hospital, in Chelsea, a pensioner’s home established in the seventeenth century for veterans who were “old, lame, or infirm in ye service of the Crowne.” Many were in their sixties and seventies, and they were rheumatic, hard of hearing, partly blind, suffering from convulsions, or missing an assortment of limbs. Given their ages and debilities, these soldiers had been deemed unfit for active service. The Reverend Walter described them as the “most decrepit and miserable objects that could be collected.”

As these invalids made their way to Portsmouth, nearly half slipped away, including one who hobbled off on a wooden leg. “All those who had limbs and strength to walk out of Portsmouth deserted,” the Reverend Walter noted. Anson pleaded with the Admiralty to replace what his chaplain called “this aged and diseased detachment.” No recruits were available, though, and after Anson dismissed some of the most infirm men his superiors ordered them back on board.

Cheap watched the incoming invalids, many of them so weak that they had to be lifted onto the ships on stretchers. Their panicked faces betrayed what everyone secretly knew: they were sailing to their deaths. As the Reverend Walter acknowledged, “They would in all probability uselessly perish by lingering and painful diseases; and this, too, after they had spent the activity and strength of their youth in their country’s service.”

On August 23, 1740, after nearly a year of delays, the battle before the battle was over, with “everything being in readiness to proceed on the voyage,” as an officer of the Centurion wrote in his journal. Anson ordered Cheap to fire one of the guns. It was the signal for the squadron to unmoor, and at the sound of the blast the entire force—the five men-of-war and an eighty-four-foot scouting sloop, the Trial, as well as two small cargo ships, the Anna and the Industry, which would accompany them partway—stirred to life. Officers emerged from quarters; boatswains piped their whistles and cried, “All hands! All hands!”; crewmen raced about, extinguishing candles, lashing hammocks, and loosening sails. Everything around Cheap—Anson’s eyes and ears—seemed to be in motion, and then the ships began to move, too. Farewell to the debt collectors, the invidious bureaucrats, the endless frustrations. Farewell to all of it.

As the convoy made its way down the English Channel toward the Atlantic, it was surrounded by other departing ships, jockeying for wind and space. Several vessels collided, terrifying the uninitiated landsmen on board. And then the wind, as fickle as the gods, abruptly shifted in front of them. Anson’s squadron, unable to bear that close to the wind, was forced to return to its starting point. Twice more it embarked, only to retreat. On September 5th, the London Daily Post reported that the fleet was still “waiting for a favourable wind.” After all the trials and tribulations—Cheap’s trials and tribulations—the squadron seemed condemned to remain in this place.

Yet, on September 18th, as the sun was going down, the seamen caught a propitious breeze. Even some of the recalcitrant recruits were relieved to be finally under way. At least they would have tasks to distract them, and now they could pursue that serpentine temptation, the galleon. “The men were elevated with hopes of growing immensely rich,” a seaman on the Wager wrote in his journal, “and in a few years of returning to Old England loaded with the wealth of their enemies.”

Cheap assumed his commanding perch on the quarterdeck—an elevated platform by the stern that served as the officers’ bridge and housed the steering wheel and a compass. He inhaled the salted air and listened to the splendid symphony around him: the rocking of the hull, the snapping of the halyards, the splashing of waves against the prow. The ships glided in elegant formation, with the Centurion leading the way, her sails spread like wings.

After a while, Anson ordered a red pendant, signifying his rank as commodore of the fleet, to be hoisted on the Centurion’s mainmast.

The other captains fired their guns thirteen times each in salute—a thunderous clapping, a trail of smoke fading in the sky. The ships emerged from the Channel, born into the world anew, and Cheap, ever vigilant, saw the shore receding until, at last, he was surrounded by the deep blue sea.

This is drawn from “ The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder . ”

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As Scorsese preps his ‘Flower Moon,’ David Grann’s new book takes to the high seas

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The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

By David Grann Doubleday: 352 pages, $30 If you buy books linked on our site, The Times may earn a commission from Bookshop.org , whose fees support independent bookstores.

What is it about sea stories? Great writers in the tradition of Herman Melville, Joseph Conrad and Patrick O’Brian have used the self-contained world of a ship and its crew to tell stories of fear, greed and rebellion. A shipboard drama, whether it’s a mutiny, a close-quarters battle or a desperate fight to survive the furious elements, shares in common with the locked-room mystery a cast of characters with warring motives and nowhere to go.

New Yorker writer David Grann knows a good story when he sees one; his most recent book, “Killers of the Flower Moon,” about a series of murders on the Osage Indian reservation in the early 1920s, went into multiple printings, and the movie version directed by Martin Scorsese is awaiting theatrical release. In “ The Wager : A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder,” he has found not just a good but a great story, fraught with duplicity, terror and occasional heroism.

With ‘Lost City of Z’ and ‘Killers of the Flower Moon,’ David Grann is a hot literary property

David Grann is what you might call a writer’s writer.

April 18, 2017

The story of “The Wager” begins in 1740. Britain was at war with Spain in a brutal struggle to claim uncharted territory. It was colonialism at its most naked and avaricious, and the battles were largely fought at sea. The Wager was one of eight ships in a squadron that launched from Portsmouth, England, and headed to South America, its goal to capture a Spanish galleon loaded with treasure — a prize that would enrich both the crew and the English government.

The Wager was a small ship, tasked with carrying trade goods, small weapons, gunpowder and the squadron’s supply of rum (the analogy of the “powder keg” unavoidably comes to mind). The crew was a combustible mix of regular sailors, marines and impressed crewmen — impressment being a kind of slavery wherein men were kidnapped and forced to serve for an indefinite period.

Five hundred invalids from the Royal Hospital in Chelsea, many in their 60s and 70s, were ordered to fill out the ranks. As old as 80 and as young as 6, the Wager crew “had been thrown together as if they were subjects in a whimsical experiment to test the limits of human sociability,” Grann writes.

That is putting it mildly. The venture seemed doomed from the start. The squadron immediately ran into trouble when typhus and then scurvy , a grotesque disease of vitamin C deficiency, struck down the majority of the crew. After another ship’s commander died, the Wager’s capable captain was transferred to replace him, and David Cheap, an untested officer who had never been in charge of a ship, was named captain of the Wager’s crew.

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As the squadron approached the tip of South America, the weather worsened; the other ships in the squadron began to turn back. But Cheap, who had just grasped the prize of command over the ship, wouldn’t consider it, and ordered the Wager’s crew to sail into some of the wildest seas and worst weather on Earth.

Many writers have tried to convey just how terrifying the waters around South America’s Cape Horn were in the days of wooden ships and uncertain navigation, as boats battled wild winds, freezing mists and 90-foot waves against a surreal backdrop. One writer was succinct about this Mordor-like terrain: “a proper nursery for desperation.” All this before the Wager passed into Cape Horn, where gales reached 200 miles per hour and subzero temperatures coated the ship with a carapace of ice.

One trick Grann pulls off — again and again — is not showing his hand, and this review honors that accomplishment by not revealing the details of what happens next. Suffice it to say that the Wager and what was left of its crew ran onto the rocks of an exceedingly bleak island off the south coast of Chile.

Given the documentation Grann works with, the reader can intuit that not everyone is going to die (though many do). But as Cheap loses control of his desperate men, starvation, mutiny and murder ensue. British bad behavior scares off a tribe of Indigenous rescuers. And the escape attempts of those who try to make it off the island are so brutal, hair-raising and implausible, the reader is left wondering just what makes some human beings so determined to survive.

Another Grann specialty is on full display — creating a cast of indelible characters from the dustiest of sources: 18th century ship’s logs, surgeons’ textbooks, court-martial proceedings. What a fascinating, conflicted lot they are. Cheap, whose driving desire to prove himself completely extinguishes his common sense. John Bulkeley, the Wager’s gunner, a weapons expert and “instinctive leader” whose Bible-inspired narrative gifts would impel him to write an indelible account of events. “Bulkeley relished recording what he saw,” Grann writes. “It gave him a voice, even if no one but him would ever hear it.”

Then there was Midshipman Jack Byron, 16 when the Wager set sail, whose own account would inspire verse by his renegade grandson Lord Byron on the subject. In his poem “Don Juan,” Byron would memorialize the low moment when starving crewmen killed and ate his grandfather’s dog: What could they do? And hunger’s rage grew wild:/So Juan’s spaniel, spite of his entreating, Was kill’d, and portion’d out for present eating.”

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Besides poems, the story of the Wager would eventually inspire books, a flood of press coverage, a court-martial and a continual retelling of the story, from survivors to naval historians to Patrick O’Brian’s early novel “ The Unknown Shore .” So why read this book, as opposed to the Wikipedia entry?

Besides Grann’s narrative gifts, there’s the age-old reason — to find out how human beings behave under extremes (without suffering them yourself). And Grann puts his story in context, showing what a raw, naked grab for power the age of colonial expansion was. The Wager’s crew was caught in the cogs of a brutal machine, and many had precious little of what we would call free will.

The other strength of the Wager’s story is that it just gets more and more improbable. How did anyone survive? How did English authorities deal with a massive case of bad publicity? How did the traumatized survivors move on? The story of the Wager is, like many of its antecedents — from Homer’s “ Odyssey ” to “ Mutiny on the Bounty ” — a testament to the depths of human depravity and the heights of human endurance, and you can’t ask for better than that from a story. Maybe you get seasick at the thought of a seafaring novel; make an exception in this case. The Wager will keep you in its grip to its head-scratching, improbable end.

Gwinn, a Pulitzer Prize-winning journalist who lives in Seattle, writes about books and authors.

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Things to do | book review: writer is at top of his game in ‘the wager’.

The Wager is the story of an ill-fated 18th Century ship named for Sir Charles Wager, a British officer. The ship is part of a squadron led by Commodore George Anson (who pilots The Centurion). Captain David Cheap presides over “The Wager” which, along with the other ships in the squadron, is deployed in 1740 to track a Spanish galleon said to be full of riches.

The ship is separated from the squadron off the southern coast of South America. The crew is then shipwrecked miles from the continent and is in irreparable condition. Stranded on a deserted island with virtually no food or water, the crew lingers for months.

In a desperate situation, much of the crew begins to harbor feelings of mutiny. They already blame Cheap for steering the ship too close to the rocks, sealing its fate of ruin. But the feelings of mutiny are elevated to acts of mutiny after Cheap shoots to death a drunken member of the crew.

The mutineers are led by John Bulkeley, the gunner of the ship. He leads repair efforts on the small boats which are left aboard what is left of “The Wager.” And his original plan is to attempt to return to England (with Cheap rendered to the status of a prisoner).

In the middle of the conflict is young John Byron, a midshipman only 16 years old.  He was also the grandfather of the great English poet (though the two never knew each other). Byron is torn between concern over the ineptitude of Cheap (as well as the homicide) and his duty as a crew member to respect the chain of command.

Cheap expresses to Bulkeley his preference to be left behind rather than transported as a prisoner.  Bulkeley accommodates Cheap, leaving him behind with the members of the crew who sided with the captain. Though Byron initially joins Bulkely’s group, he abandons the mutineers and makes his way back to the island and Cheap.

Bulkeley and what’s left of his crew make their way back to England after unspeakable trials and Bulkeley keeps a log of events to cite for the reasons of the mutiny (in the event they are prosecuted). A few years later, by way of miracles at sea, Cheap makes his way back to England with his comrades who are still alive and reports the mutiny to the Department of Admiralty.

A court martial is arranged, though it’s important not to reveal the outcome of the hearings in accordance with the spoiler alert. What can be noted is that whereas the log maintained by Buckeley is at first published as a triumphant story, upon Cheap’s return to England, the log is used as evidence against Buckeley.

An author tells a tale. A journalist relates the facts. Grann manages both and he is indeed both an author and journalist. “The Wager” maintains the literary excellence Grann delivered in “Killers of the Flower Moon.” It’s also bound to be made into a movie. But seldom is the movie as good as the book.  And that is sure to be the case with The Wager.

John O’Neill is an Allen Park free-lance writer.

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Discussion Guide and Book Club Questions for The Wager by David Grann

By: Author Luka

Posted on Last updated: August 14, 2024

Categories Reading Guides

Book club questions and reading guide for The Wager by David Grann: what is truly important? This novel explores everything from leadership, survival, colonialism, & the clash between romanticized ideals and harsh realities in the 18th-century British Navy.

For a complete list of David Grann’s books in order, click here!

The Wager by David Grann

I deeply enjoyed this book! It is a historical truth worth telling and reading, and as the book says, it’s mind-boggling how much suffering the human spirit and body can endure, as well as the physical and moral extremes humans will go to survive when starving.

About the Author | Book Club Questions | Additional Recommendations

Summary  | Chapter by Chapter |  Characters Explained

Discussion Guide

About the Story

The Wager is a true story that explores the 18th-century shipwreck of the British naval ship named the Wager during the War of Jenkins’ Ear.

The survivors, led by Captain David Cheap, find themselves stranded on an island near Patagonia, facing challenges like food shortages & internal conflicts. Tensions rise, leading to a mutiny orchestrated by John Bulkeley, a lower-ranking crew member.

The story unfolds with struggles for survival, clashes of authority, and encounters with Indigenous populations. It delves into themes of leadership, colonialism, and the impact of historical events on individuals.

About the Author

David Grann is an American journalist and author known for his investigative reporting and non-fiction writing. He was born on March 10, 1967. Grann has written for prominent publications such as The New Yorker and The New York Times Magazine, convering topics from crime, politics, as well as historical events.

He gained widespread recognition and acclaim for his books, particularly The Lost City of Z: A Tale of Deadly Obsession in the Amazon, published in 2009. This book tells the story of British explorer Percy Fawcett, who disappeared in the Amazon rainforest while searching for a mythical ancient city. The book was later adapted into a feature film in 2016.

Grann’s other notable work includes Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders & the Birth of the FBI, published in 2017. This book investigates a series of murders of wealthy Osage Native Americans in the 1920s, which led to the formation of the FBI. This book received widespread critical acclaim and has been adapted into a film directed by Martin Scorsese, starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

Grann is celebrated for his meticulous research, compelling storytelling, and ability to uncover forgotten or overlooked historical events. His works often blend elements of true crime, history, and adventure.

Book Club Questions for The Wager

• How does the 18th-century geopolitical landscape between Britain and Spain shape the events in “The Wager”?
• In what ways does the author, David Grann, bring the historical setting to life? How does he balance historical accuracy with storytelling?
• Dive deeper into the challenges the Wager faced, particularly in navigating Drake’s Passage. How did these challenges contribute to the shipwreck, and could better preparation have prevented it?
• What motivations drive Captain David Cheap to join the navy and rise through the ranks? Do you sympathize with his character, or do you find his actions questionable?
• Consider Cheap’s decision to attack Spanish colonies despite the hardships faced by the crew. Was this driven solely by duty, or were there personal motivations at play?
• What did you think about Bulkeley’s qualities as a leader? How does his leadership style differ from Captain Cheap’s, and why did the crew rally behind him during the mutiny?
• How do Cheap’s leadership style and decisions contribute to the escalating tensions and mutiny on Wager Island?
• Analyze John Bulkeley’s character evolution throughout the story. What qualities make him a natural leader, especially in contrast to Captain Cheap?
• Discuss the ethical dilemmas Bulkeley faces during the mutiny. Do you agree with his decisions, and how do they reflect the challenges of survival and loyalty?
• What motivated Bulkeley’s decision to build a shelter and lead the mutiny to return to Britain? Were these actions driven more by survival instincts or a sense of justice?
• Explore the theme of “The Romance of the British Navy.” How does Grann depict the contrast between the romanticized ideals of a sailor’s life and the harsh realities faced by the crew of the Wager?
• How do the sailors’ expectations, fueled by stories of explorers like Sir Francis Drake, clash with the grim experiences on Wager Island?
• Examine Captain Cheap’s motivations for maintaining strict order, even resorting to violence. How do his actions reflect the mindset of a British naval officer during the 18th century?
• In what ways does Grann highlight the flaws and consequences of British Imperialism and Colonialism? Discuss the impact on both the colonizers and the indigenous populations encountered by the Wager survivors.
• How does the encounter with the Kawésqar people serve as an example of the negative consequences of colonialism?
• Analyze the mutiny led by John Bulkeley. Do you think it was a justifiable response to Captain Cheap’s leadership, or were there better alternatives for resolving the conflicts?
• Consider the court martial that follows the survivors’ return to England. Why do you think no one was held responsible for the shipwreck or the events on Wager Island?
• How does the narrative emphasize the power of storytelling? Discuss instances where characters, particularly John Bulkeley, use storytelling to control the narrative.
• In what ways do narratives influence public opinion, as seen in the court of public opinion after the survivors’ return to England?
• Explore the moral choices faced by the characters in their struggle for survival. How do the harsh conditions on Wager Island force individuals to make morally challenging decisions?
• Discuss instances of cannibalism and its portrayal in the novel. How does it contribute to the broader themes of survival and desperation?
• Discuss the psychological toll on characters who made difficult choices for survival. How did these experiences shape their perspectives and actions?Consider parallels between the European colonial mindset portrayed in the book and present-day challenges in understanding and addressing historical injustices.
• Discuss the representation of Indigenous cultures in the narrative. How does Grann navigate the portrayal of the Kawésqar people, and what impact does their interaction with the British survivors have on the overall narrative?
• Consider the impact of historical forgetting in the narrative. Why do you think the story of the mutiny on Wager Island was suppressed? How does this reflect on the reputation of the British Navy?
• Discuss the role of storytelling in preserving or erasing historical events. How does this theme resonate with contemporary discussions on historical narratives?
• Evaluate David Grann’s writing style. How does he engage readers in a true historical account while maintaining a compelling narrative?
• Consider the use of multiple perspectives in the storytelling. How does it contribute to a nuanced understanding of the events and characters?
• Grann’s journalistic background influences the narrative of this novel. In what ways does his expertise in crime and historical exploration shape the storytelling?

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Based on actual historical events and real people A War Too Far is the true story of the elite OSS Deer Team and their daring operation in the mountains of North Vietnam near the end of World War II. A gut-wrenching tale of the unbreakable bond between brothers-in-arms, bravery beyond reason, and an astonishing betrayal that would alter the world forever.

A War Too Far  is the first book in the highly acclaimed Airmen Series – historical novels that read like a modern political thriller, full of exciting action, and larger-than-life characters. Each book reveals unforgettable events leading up to and during the war that changed America forever.

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Discussion Guide for The Wager by David Grann

Happy reading! ❤️

I love to read and I enjoy exploring a range of genres including contemporary and historical fiction, mysteries, thrillers, nonfiction, and memoirs. If you would like me to review your book, feel free to reach out to me!

David Grann

Critics call the wager “a tour de force,” “a masterclass in storytelling,” and perhaps “grann’s best book yet”.

THE WAGER has it all: shipwreck, survival, and a thrilling courtroom climax…. the most gripping true-life sea yarn in years. A tour de force of narrative nonfiction, Grann’s account shows how storytelling, whether to judges or readers, can shape individual and national fortunes – as well as our collective memory.

— The Wall Street Journal

“[Grann has] been your favorite writer’s favorite writer for decades. But with a thrilling new book and an unprecedented back-to-back collaboration with Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio, David Grann is poised to become the moment’s leading storyteller…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…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.

“A thrilling account…Those who love yarns involving cannon fire, sea-chests, plum duff and mainmasts will find THE WAGER riveting, as will those less intrigued by the age of sail. In the hands of David Grann, the story transcends its naval setting. The author . . . is a master of exciting tales in far-flung places. He has produced a volume so dramatic and engrossing that it may surpass his previous books.

— The Economist

“Remarkable…finely detailed…a ripping yarn. Grann, the author of thinking-person’s adventures, has a rare gift for applying the rigors of narrative nonfiction to the stuff of myth and legend. Through tireless research and storytelling guile, he places the reader amongst a tempestuous collection of 18th-century British seamen, at war with the elements and, more fatefully, each other. As you read you feel the sting of freezing saltwater against the face, and the desperate pangs of hunger. Grann guides us step by step, storm by storm, man by man, in prose that the writers he references, including Herman Melville and Joseph Conrad, would appreciate.

— The Boston Globe

“An engrossing survival story… THE WAGER is a knotty tale of moral compromises and betrayal and a metaphysical inquiry into the elusive nature of truth and the power of stories to shape history and our perceptions of reality. For Grann, telling the story of the shipwreck and its scandalous aftermath was a chance to excavate not just a rousing adventure, but to explore how history is constructed, who writes it and what gets distorted or left out. After six years of research—including his own harrowing journey to the inhospitable island where the castaways washed up—Grann has delivered what will likely endure as the definitive popular account.

— The New York Times

“A masterclass in storytelling…A series of twists and turns worthy of a well-plotted thriller≥Grann has produced this riveting book so soon after the radically different but equally impressive “Killers of the Flower Moon” — a No. 1 New York Times bestseller. Simply put, Grann is working to a three-part formula. One: unearth a tremendous story from within a forgotten haystack. Two: spend months and months and months researching it. Three: write the narrative with the artistry of a superb novelist…One, two, three. Grann makes it look easy, even while exploring how desperate people behave in life-and-death situations. Hint: not well. This book is a tour de force.

— Toronto Star

“David Grann knows a good story when he sees one…In THE WAGER: A TALE OF SHIPWRECK, MUTINY AND MURDER , he has found not just a good but a great story, fraught with duplicity, terror and occasional heroism. …One trick Grann pulls off—again and again—is not showing his hand, and this review honors that accomplishment by not revealing the details of what happens next…Another Grann specialty is on full display— creating a cast of indelible characters from the dustiest of sources: 18th century ship’s logs, surgeons’ textbooks, court-martial proceedings… The story of the Wager is, like many of its antecedents—from Homer’s “Odyssey” to “Mutiny on the Bounty”—a testament to the depths of human depravity and the heights of human endurance, and you can’t ask for better than that from a story. Maybe you get seasick at the thought of a seafaring novel; make an exception in this case. THE WAGER will keep you in its grip to its head-scratching, improbable end.

— Los Angeles Times

“There were multiple moments while reading David Grann’s new book, THE WAGER , about an 18th-century shipwreck, when it occurred to me that the kind of nonfiction narratives The New Yorker writer has become known for share something essential with a sturdy ship. A vessel freighted with historical controversy, tangled facts and monomaniacal characters needs to be structurally sound, containing and conveying its messy cargo. It should be resilient yet nimble enough to withstand the unpredictable waters of readers’ attentions and expectations. Only an impeccable design will keep everything moving…Grann is so skillful…the consummate narrative architect…It’s the kind of inspiring chronicle that would make for a rousing maritime adventure. But this is a David Grann book, and so he gives us something more.

“[Grann’s] meticulously researched stories, with their spare, simmering setups that almost always deliver stunning payoffs, have made him one of the preeminent adventure and true-crime writers…The  Rashomon -like atmosphere is what gives  THE WAGER the intellectual heft of a David Grann endeavor…He has mastered a streamlined, propulsive type of narrative that readers devour for its hide-and-seek reveals.

— New York Mag

“Grann tells the riveting tale of the British ship the Wager, which embarked from England on a secret mission against Spain in 1740. Two years later, 30 ragged men from the Wager landed ashore in Brazil. Six months after that, three more Wager sailors washed up in Chile. The two groups accused each other of mutiny, eventually going on trial in England.  THE WAGER  reads like a thriller, tackling a multilayered history—and imperialism—with gusto.

— Time Magazine

“From its first to its last page, THE WAGER never stops being jaw-dropping. Even a sidebar account – of how a ship in the squadron, the Centurion, made it to the Philippines and somehow sank a Spanish galleon – reads better than any thriller. It’s a book about the limits of human endurance but also about the power of Britain’s class system and naval codes, which held sway – almost – even on a deserted island thousands of miles away.

— The Globe and Mail

“One of the most masterful historical nonfiction writers working today, investigative reporter David Grann has turned his attention to a 1742 shipwreck off the coast of Brazil. [T]his centuries-old crime story feels as prescient and timely as today’s front page.

“Few writers of fact can spin a narrative as well as David Grann, whether it be the quest for a fabled place ( The Lost City of Z ) or unearthing gross injustices against oil-rich Native Americans in the 1920s ( Killers of the Flower Moon ). His gift for detail, drama, and insight is unmatched. THE WAGER , takes place in the 1700s and melds an adventure tale with a courtroom saga that is nothing less than riveting.

“Grann vividly narrates a nearly forgotten incident with an eye for each character’s personal stakes while also reminding readers of the imperialist context prompting the misadventure. A new account of the Wager Mutiny, in which a shipwrecked and starving British naval crew abandoned their captain on a desolate Patagonian island, emphasizes the extreme hardships routinely faced by eighteenth-century seafarers as well as the historical resonance of the dramatic 1741 event.

— BOOKLIST , starred review

“A rousing story of a maritime scandal…a brisk, absorbing history.In 1741, the British vessel the Wager, pressed into service during England’s war with Spain, was shipwrecked in a storm off the coast of Patagonia while chasing a silver-laden Spanish galleon. Though initially part of a fleet, by the time of the shipwreck, the Wager stood alone, and many of its 250 crew members already had succumbed to injury, illness, starvation, or drowning. More than half survived the wreckage only to find themselves stranded on a desolate island. Drawing on a trove of firsthand accounts—logbooks, correspondence, diaries, court-martial testimony, and Admiralty and government records—Grann mounts a chilling, vibrant narrative of a grim maritime tragedy and its dramatic aftermath.

— KIRKUS , starred review

“Bestseller Grann ( Killers of the Flower Moon ) delivers a concise and riveting account of the HMS  Wager . . . Grann packs the narrative with fascinating details about life at sea—from scurvy-induced delirium to the mechanics of loading and firing a cannon—and makes excellent use of primary sources, including a firsthand account by 16-year-old midshipman John Byron, grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. Armchair adventurers will be enthralled.

— Publishers Weekly

The Pilot Who Almost Crashed a Plane While on Mushrooms

“Lie to Fly” tells the tragic story of a pilot who nearly killed 83 passengers—and ruined his career—while tripping on mushrooms.

Nick Schager

Entertainment Critic

On October 22, 2023, Joe Emerson boarded a flight from Everett, Washington to San Francisco, California. As an off-duty Alaska Airlines pilot, he was able to ride in the cockpit's jump seat. Once in the air, he became agitated and uncomfortable, and without much warning—save for a few strange glances—he suddenly leapt up and attempted to grab the engine fire shut-off handles, which if pulled would have sent the craft into free fall.

In audio of this incident, Emerson states, “I’m not OK” and, after being asked if feels alright, begins cursing as he springs into dangerous action. Fortunately, the pilots’ quick reactions stopped Emerson from accomplishing his goal, and in the aftermath of this near catastrophe, he was charged with, among other federal crimes, 83 counts of attempted murder.

Scarier still? Emerson’s explanation for his outburst was that, two days prior, he’d taken psychedelic mushrooms, and on this flight home, he couldn’t tell what was real and what was a dream.

Lie to Fly (August 23), the latest installment of FX’s The New York Times Presents -branded docuseries, is an investigation into Emerson’s saga—and amazingly, his use of mind-altering substances is the least stunning thing about it. To be sure, the fact that an experienced pilot went haywire thanks to ingesting psilocybin was attention-grabbing at the time, and is the primary selling point of this hour-long venture. Yet as elucidated by producer/director Carmen Garcia Durazo, Emerson’s story is also the most shocking evidence to date of a burgeoning United States aviation industry problem that threatens the safety of pilots and passengers alike, and seems to require large-scale reforms lest it blossom into a full-blown crisis.

Emerson knew from an early age that he wanted to fly. As a lonely kid, being in the air gave him the sense of “freedom” and purpose he’d always craved. In a new interview that forms the basis of Lie to Fly , Emerson talks candidly about his fondness for his profession, as well as its difficulties, given that traveling for a living means constant time away from home and, in his case, his wife Sarah Stretch and their two sons in Pleasant Hill, California. To maintain bonds with loved ones (and to make up for the fact that he often missed big events and had to cancel plans at the last second), Emerson would send his clan regular videos from his many pit-stops, some of which are depicted here. Despite these difficulties, however, Emerson was certain that being in the cockpit was “where I needed to be.”

Dr. Brent Blue, MD.

If being a pilot put an inevitable strain on Emerson’s life, so too did the terrible news that his fellow pilot and close friend Scott Pinney (who’d been the best man at his wedding) had died of an out-of-the-blue cardiac event. This rocked Emerson, who in the ensuing weeks and months became very close with Pinney’s father Frank, who says that their relationship “literally changed my life.” They grieved over gin and tonics (a course of action that Emerson admits wasn’t shrewd), and in October 2023, Emerson and some of Pinney’s other friends took a vacation together on remote property owned by Frank. This spot included a yurt, and while the guys were all together, Emerson was cajoled into trying mushrooms, thus initiating mayhem two days later.

Lie to Fly has Emerson recount his under-the-influence ordeal, during which he became convinced that he was “trapped” and that nothing around him was real. This is harrowing in and of itself, and yet Durazo’s exposé is really about the larger issue at play here: Emerson’s prior hesitancy to seek out counseling and medical attention for his depression. The reason for that reluctance, it turns out, is a system that’s increasingly ill-equipped to grapple with modern realities. For pilots to receive medical certification, they must pass exams conducted by senior aviation medical examiners such as Dr. Brent Blue, whose reports are then sent to the Federal Aviation Admission (FAA) so a determination can be made about whether an individual is fit to fly. Any red flags can lead to deferrals, and because of staff shortages and bureaucratic obstacles, those can last for more than a year—a calamitous situation for pilots who love their jobs and for families that want to stay financially afloat.

Pilot medical certification.

Because medical deferrals can go on for extended stretches (there are no Congress-ratified rules governing timetables), and because common challenges such as depression and anxiety (and the SSRIs that counteract them) are viewed the same as serious conditions such as schizophrenia, many pilots simply don’t seek the care they need. What this means is that rather than being flown by men and women who are depressed and medicated, millions are potentially being flown by pilots who aren’t properly coping with their struggles.

Lie to Fly portrays Emerson as merely an extreme example of the consequences of this “culture of concealment,” and his tale is paired with that of John Hauser, a nineteen-year-old sophomore at the University of North Dakota—where he was studying to be a commercial pilot—who chose to take his life because he knew that, should he get help for his mental health issues, he’d jeopardize his chance to professionally fly.

Lie to Fly is bolstered by input from John’s parents, aviation lawyer Joseph LoRusso, University of North Dakota Assistant Professor of Aviation Dr. William Hoffman, and FAA U.S. Federal Air Surgeon Dr. Susan Northrup, all of whom speak to the intricacies of this important topic. Most heartrending of all, however, is Emerson, who discusses his plight with an anguish that’s colored by self-recrimination, fear, and frustration at a paradigm that makes pilots choose between their dreams and their health.

Such a dilemma can only, in the end, lead to bad choices. While Durazo’s documentary ends on a somewhat heartening note—with the FAA taking “baby steps” toward rectifying this state of affairs—it nonetheless paints an unnerving portrait of aviation industry shortcomings that put everyone at risk. It also, in the process, serves as a stark reminder that sometimes, there’s more to a story than just its sensationalistic headline.

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The Anxious Generation: How the Great Rewiring of Childhood Is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness Hardcover – March 26, 2024

• Print length 400 pages
• Language English
• Publisher Penguin Press
• Publication date March 26, 2024
• Dimensions 6.39 x 1.26 x 9.5 inches
• ISBN-10 0593655036
• ISBN-13 978-0593655030
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• Publisher ‏ : ‎ Penguin Press (March 26, 2024)
• Language ‏ : ‎ English
• Hardcover ‏ : ‎ 400 pages
• ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 0593655036
• ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-0593655030
• Item Weight ‏ : ‎ 1.2 pounds
• Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 6.39 x 1.26 x 9.5 inches
• #2 in Parenting Teenagers (Books)
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About the author

Jonathan haidt.

Jonathan Haidt is the Thomas Cooley Professor of Ethical Leadership at New York University's Stern School of Business. He received his Ph.D. in social psychology from the University of Pennsylvania in 1992 and then did post-doctoral research at the University of Chicago and in Orissa, India. He taught at the University of Virginia for 16 years before moving to NYU-Stern in 2011. He was named one of the "top global thinkers" by Foreign Policy magazine, and one of the "top world thinkers" by Prospect magazine.

His research focuses on morality - its emotional foundations, cultural variations, and developmental course. He began his career studying the negative moral emotions, such as disgust, shame, and vengeance, but then moved on to the understudied positive moral emotions, such as admiration, awe, and moral elevation. He is the co-developer of Moral Foundations theory, and of the research site YourMorals.org. He is a co-founder of HeterodoxAcademy.org, which advocates for viewpoint diversity in higher education. He uses his research to help people understand and respect the moral motives of their enemies (see CivilPolitics.org, and see his TED talks). He is the author of The Happiness Hypothesis: Finding Modern Truth in Ancient Wisdom; The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion; and (with Greg Lukianoff) The Coddling of the American Mind: How good intentions and bad ideas are setting a generation up for failure. For more information see www.JonathanHaidt.com.

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Who Is the American Jew?

Joshua Leifer’s “Tablets Shattered” is both a history of Judaism in America and a cri de coeur from a heartbroken member of the tribe.

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By Sam Kriss

Sam Kriss writes from London about politics and culture.

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TABLETS SHATTERED: The End of an American Jewish Century and the Future of Jewish Life , by Joshua Leifer

In 2022, I visited the Palestinian city of Hebron and the Jewish settlement that’s wedged like a splinter into its ancient core. According to the settlers I talked to, they’d joyfully revitalized one of the oldest and holiest Jewish cities.

It looked like a wasteland. Ruined streets, littered with broken glass and machine-gun nests, in which the settlers had erected sterile apartment buildings, growing like alien crystals.

Every few minutes, I’d be stopped by one of the thousands of soldiers who patrol the occupied zone. They’d thumb suspiciously through my foreign passport, and then ask my religion. This is not a question I’ve ever faced from an armed official anywhere else in the world. But when I said I was Jewish, suddenly they grinned. “Jewish, good! Jewish, we like!”

When we said “Jewish,” these soldiers and I, did we mean the same thing? In the West Bank, Judaism has become a martial creed: It means that these hilltops belong to me, and I am free to do violence to whoever already lives there.

I didn’t recognize anything of my own religion in it, but my version is made from flimsier stuff. Instead of mythic certainties, I’ve got a big pile of books, a good recipe for matzo ball soup, a pair of candlesticks I never use and an overbearing mother.

Surveying the state of 21st-century American Judaism, Joshua Leifer finds a similar, sad pile of cultural detritus. “What is left of American Jewish culture has lost its distinctiveness and its bite, devolved into mere kitsch and cliché: no more Saul Bellow novels, only Seth Rogen movies.” His “Tablets Shattered” argues that American Jewry is, if not quite extinct, on its way out. He quotes the novelist Herman Wouk: “There will be no death camps in the United States. The threat of Jewish oblivion is different. It is the threat of pleasantly vanishing down a broad highway at the wheel of a high-powered station wagon, with the golf clubs in the back.”

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'Hillbilly Elegy' is back in the spotlight. These Appalachians write a different tale

Clayton Kincade

A photograph of Hillbilly Elegy by JD Vance. Bill Tompkins/Getty Images/Michael Ochs Archives hide caption

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis , the 2016 memoir from Republican vice presidential nominee JD Vance, once again began flying off the shelves after former President Donald Trump named Vance as his running mate. Many have turned to the memoir to find out the story of Vance’s upbringing, a core part of why he’s on the Republican ticket to begin with. But the book also brings along a host of assumptions that many authors still find not to be true.

Pulitzer-winning author Barbara Kingsolver said she felt that it was her duty to tell a different story of Appalachian life than the one that Vance presented in the book.

“It used the same old victim-blaming trope. It was like a hero story: ‘I got out of here, I went to Yale,’” Kingsolver said of Vance. “‘But those lazy people, you know, just don't have ambitions. They don’t have brains. That’s why they’re stuck where they are.’ I disagree. And that’s my job, to tell a different story.”

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Vance’s has been mired in controversy since its 2016 publication, especially by authors who cover the region. Vance, who writes that Appalachian culture “encourages social decay instead of counteracting it,” says this upbringing is central to his political ideology and thinking.

Many Appalachian authors, like Kingsolver, have worked tirelessly to combat what they feel is a misleading and even harmful depiction of the region. Her novel Demon Copperhead , a fictional window into the same communities, was named one of the New York Times ’ best books of the century just days ahead of the Republican National Convention. Last year, it won a Pulitzer Prize.

As hundreds of thousands more read about the plights of the Appalachian region, these authors are fighting back against what they describe as Vance’s assumed norms.

Overcoming “Hillbilly Elegy”

Vance writes in Hillbilly Elegy that he grew up most of his life in Middletown, Ohio, but spent summers and his free time until the age of 12 in Jackson, Ky. Vance adds that Jackson “was the one place that belonged to me.”

Vance’s first stop after the RNC was to a rally in Middletown, where he declared, “I love every one of you, and I love this town, and I'm so grateful to have been formed by it, because I wouldn't be who I was without it.”

2024 Election

Trump team responds after 'republicans for harris' call trump 'unfit' to be president.

But Vance’s claim to the area has created a cultural rift between him and those from Appalachia.

Kingsolver said that when she saw Vance’s recently resurfaced interview calling several Democrats “childless cat ladies who are miserable at their own lives and the choices that they’ve made,” it reaffirmed her disappointments with Hillbilly Elegy .

“When I read JD Vance’s memoir, I resented it all the way through. There was just something about it that kept telling me, he’s not from here, he doesn’t get us,” Kingsolver told NPR. “I thought, OK, you are not from here because when I think about my childhood, many of the most important women in my life who saved me, who took care of me, were childless women. It’s not just blood that defines community here.”

Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sen. JD Vance (R-OH) speaks at a campaign rally at VFW Post 92 on August 15, 2024 in New Kensington, Pennsylvania. Jeff Swensen/Getty Images hide caption

It’s not just Kingsolver who has an alternate narrative.

Meredith McCarroll and Anthony Harkins co-edited Appalachian Reckoning: A Region Responds to Hillbilly Elegy, a blend of scholarly, poetic and narrative rebuttals to Vance’s tale published in 2019.

Harkins, a professor of history at Western Kentucky University, said that Hillbilly Elegy loses its footing by generalizing one person’s narrative into a definitive account of the entire region.

“It’s totally legitimate for anybody to tell their own story and how they see it,” Harkins told NPR. “But to then present it as the story of Appalachia, to speak of a memoir of a culture, is problematic particularly because that region has so often been stereotyped and misrepresented through recent history.”

McCarroll, director of writing and rhetoric at Bowdoin College and an Appalachian native of Waynesville, N.C., said that the duo’s goal with the book was to spotlight a chorus of Appalachian voices in response to Elegy’s immense popularity, both existing on their own and in opposition to the text.

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“My inclination was to gather a lot of different voices, both that are challenging him but not speaking to him at all,” McCarroll told NPR. “It’s this weaving together of a lot of different authentic perspectives that can give a sense of how layered and complex this 13 state region is.”

McCarroll added that beyond Hillbilly Elegy, she wanted Appalachian Reckoning to counter the idea of Appalachia as a monolithic place.

“The back half of the book moved beyond Hillbilly Elegy, and really is just a collection of narratives from the region that you can’t read and come away thinking you understand Appalachia,” McCarroll said. “No one should say, ‘I read one book, and so I understand this region.’”

Writing the full truth

For these writers, telling the honest story of Appalachia is tantamount–even if they start difficult conversations.

Elizabeth Catte, historian and author of What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, published in 2018, said that books about Appalachia fall short for her when authors lean on inauthentic stereotypes in pursuit of authenticity.

“Sometimes people try to make up for personal knowledge or experience or study of a region by laying a bunch of tropes on a book and calling it authentic,” Catte told NPR. “Sometimes you don’t get a sense that Appalachia has a history, that it’s just a place full of problems, but none of those problems have an origin, or the origin is uninteresting to the author.”

Vance’s story has resonated with conservatives and non-Appalachians alike. In the wake of the 2016 election, the book became an explanation of sorts for some liberals as to who Trump’s supporters were and how he managed to win the presidency. One op-ed described Bostonians as “ lapping up ” the tale.

JD Vance autographs a book after a rally on July 1, 2021, in Middletown, Ohio. Jeffrey Dean/AP hide caption

The book became a best-seller and later was adapted into a movie. But for those from the region, crucial pieces of the puzzle that Vance painted are missing.

Harkins said that when discussing Appalachian history, texts must keep economic context in mind, like Appalachia’s political and cultural history with coal , when thinking about how the past has turned into the present.

“You can’t speak about the experience of Appalachia in the last hundred years without thinking about the massive effects that economic change have brought to it, in a place that is often the product of extractive industry, whether it’s lumbering or coal or fracking,” Harkins said. “One of the concerns I have with seeing it through the prism of Hillbilly Elegy is often that most of that stuff is not part of the story.”

Vance’s politics might not land with all readers, but he focused much of his Republican National Convention speech, which he gave just two days after being named to the ticket, on his relationship with his mom and grandma. These relationships are where these authors have found a common ground. For Kingsolver’s fictional quest, it was similarly important to keep Demon’s humanity front and center, both for the reader and for herself.

“I was kind of scared to write this novel for several years because you can’t bludgeon people with sadness or with truths that are hard to bear,” Kingsolver said. “Unless you give it a really delicious package. You have to give people a reason to turn the page. You have to give people characters that they love and believe in, that they honestly start to care about as their friend.”

The power of representation

Kingsolver said that when Demon Copperhead won the Pulitzer Prize last year, Appalachia rejoiced like Appalachia does.

“It was like fireworks all up and down the mountain,” Kingsolver said. “So many people from here, even my mail carrier and the cashier at the grocery store, said, ‘This is amazing. We won.’”

The novel has appealed to more than Appalachians: It unanimously won the 2023’s Women Prize, and more recently, it ranked No. 1 on the New York Times ’ readers’ “Best Books of the Century” list–and No. 61 on the critics’ list.

McCarroll said that with novels coming out today like Demon Copperhead, it is hard to stay upset at the negative aspects of Hillbilly Elegy. 

“What’s so exciting is that there are so many really diverse, beautiful stories that are really offering complicated perspectives, and so it’s like I don’t feel like I have to stay mad at Hillbilly Elegy ,” McCarroll said. “There’s a long history of Appalachian literature, too.”

McCarroll added that a variety of stories is important because they add texture to a region too often boxed into one corner.

“What a Black Appalachian coal miner in Pennsylvania is experiencing might be very different from a Mexican migrant worker in Western North Carolina is experiencing, which might be really different than what a third- or fourth-generation farmer who is white in Kentucky is experiencing,” McCarroll said.

Kingsolver said that when writing Demon Copperhead, it was important to combat assumptions made by mainstream media outlets about Appalachia.

“I think they miss our diversity. They think we’re all white, and we’re not. It was important for me to reflect that in this novel,” Kingsolver said. “I wanted it to be the great Appalachian novel that kind of puts our whole region in a context. We didn’t choose to have poverty and [high] unemployment. We didn’t ask for that. This came to us.”

Kingsolver added that it has been especially gratifying hearing from people whose perspective on Appalachia changed after reading her novel.

“I have heard from lots and lots and lots of people in other parts of the country who said, ‘This book asked me to evaluate my prejudices, and I thank you for that,’ ” Kingsolver said. “It’s amazing.”

When Kingsolver received news that she was at the top of the Times’ readers’ list last month, she said she had to “lie down on the floor” and think about its weight. Kingsolver said that a less obvious reward, though, was readers celebrating a story of an imperfect, wholly Appalachian character.

“I can’t even tell you how many people have written to tell me I’m still worried about Demon, I wake up at night worrying about him,” Kingsolver said. “As if he’s become their kid. He’s the world’s kid. That’s how you navigate it, that’s how you have to.”

Though Hillbilly Elegy might loom large once again, Appalachian authors, whether through fictional tales like Demon Copperhead or nonfiction deep dives like What You Are Getting Wrong About Appalachia, are finding strength in their resistance and dissent.

Reacting to news of being on the New York Times' list, Kingsolver wrote in an Instagram post:

“With a certain other ‘hillbilly’ book suddenly ascendant, my duty. No elegies here. Thank you.”

Correction Aug. 18, 2024

A previous version of this story mistakenly identified Anthony Harkins as an assistant professor in history at Western Kentucky University. Harkins is a professor of history. Additionally, an earlier version of this story incorrectly identified Bowdoin College as Bowdoin University.

• Barbara Kingsolver