David Grann, staff writer for The New Yorker and author of Killers Of The Flower Moon, is back with another must-read work of historical narrative non-fiction. This time, he’s back in adventure-mode (as he was with The Lost City Of Z) with The Wager, which charts the mutiny and aftermath of the HMS Wager’s 1741 shipwreck on the coast of an inhospitable Chilean island. Mayhem and murder abound, followed by the struggle to tell warring versions of the truth. Grann’s work pieces together countless firsthand chronicles of the disaster, and what emerges is unlike any other story of savagery and survival on the printed page.
Let’s just say that I devoured the book, even while being in a phase that doesn’t allow for much energy to swallow most books whole. And this is not only a Grann volume that history buffs will want to read but, like Killers Of The Flower Moon, could appeal to true crime lovers, too. As well, Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio signed on almost one year ago to develop The Wager as a movie, which we should hear more about after the pair debuts their Killers Of The Flower Moon Apple Original film at the Cannes Film Festival.
Grann was gracious enough to discuss this “crazy yarn” (how he initially described the book), which arrives on April 18, with us.
David Grann: Hey, Kimberly, how are you? Are you in Tulsa?
Hi David. Yes, somehow? I don’t know how this is still happening.
You know, I like Tulsa. Oklahoma’s an interesting state, but Tulsa’s got a lot of stuff happening.
You did spend a lot of time here doing research years ago.
I did. It’s got good music, some restaurants, and a bit of an art scene. You’ve got that great bookstore.
Ahhh yes, Magic City Books. And the last time we did this, your Killers Of The Flower Moon book was about to come out while Lost City Of Z had just landed in theaters. This time, The Wager is about to come out, and Killers Of The Flower Moon will soon arrive in theaters.
It is a funny thing. It’s also a testament to how slow I am at working on my books!
Hey, a lot has happened over the past few years. Since this is the earliest interview I have ever done, I must know this: are you a morning person?
Yes, I definitely am. I tend to get up pretty early. That’s probably a factor of old age. I’ve never been a great sleeper, but the mornings are my most productive time, so I really try to make sure that I try and pack in my writing and research. I’ll write in the afternoon too, but I’m far more effective in the morning.
I recently talked about this topic with a coworker, too. We’re pretty sure that morning and nighttime people don’t trust each other.
I think when you age, you become more of a morning person. [Laughs] I just get more tired as the day wears on. I find that my brain synapses fire more slowly. I think it was forced upon me and less of a choice.
My daughter knows not to speak to me for an hour after I wake up, so the morning-person thing hasn’t hit me yet.
Hopefully, it won’t! Then you can choose whether you’re a morning person or not.
I hope so. And I don’t want to spoil much of the book, so let’s go here: you did something crazy to prep for The Wager by traveling to this island.
When I began researching, I started in the way that is most suited to my character, which is in the safe confines of archives. For about two years, I was pulling these 18th-century logbooks and records and diaries and that had survived shipwrecks and typhoons, kind of remarkably. But there came a certain point where I began to fear that there were certain gaps in my knowledge, so that I didn’t really fully understand what the castaways had gone through. That’s when I decided to do something foolish, which was to make my own journey to Wager Island, which is located in the Gulf of Sorrows, or as some prefer to call it, the Gulf of Pain.
For good reason, as readers will learn from you.
I found this Chilean captain who had a wood-heated boat to take me there. Now, in the photographs, the boat looked pretty big, but then when I got there, I was very surprised to see that it wasn’t very big. It was very top-heavy, and for about three days, we were trapped on Chiloé Island, which is where we were departing from for about a 350-mile journey south. The weather was so bad, the Coast Guard had closed some ports…eventually, we slipped out at dawn and went through a pretty tumultuous gulf, and then we slipped into these channels that are more sheltered, you’re kind of weaving in and out of these fractured islands and these chillingly beautiful channel ways, and I was like, “This doesn’t seem so bad.”
Some famous last words right there.
Then after about five days, the captain said, “Well, now we have to go out into the open ocean.” And that was when I got my first glimpse of those terrifying waters. The waves dwarfed the boat, which was being tossed about so violently that I had to just sit on the floor. If I stood, I might break a limb. I sat there for hours. To pass the time, I put on an Audible book of Moby Dick.
[Laughs] What were you thinking with that selection?
In retrospect, that was probably not the most soothing thing that I could do. But the captain was very skilled, and he managed to guide us through the Gulf of Pain and get us to Wager Island. We went ashore in a little Zodiac, and it was really helpful to me to get a sense of what the island was like and see how much it conformed to the descriptions of the castaways. It was so barren and windswept, and it was freezing cold, and it was constantly raining and sleeting. I had all these clothes on. I was bundled up in wool and longhorns and hats and boots, and I was still so cold. And you know, the castaways only had scraps of clothing, much of which disintegrated during their time on the island. They had also described severe starvation because there wasn’t any food, and sure enough, there were no animals other than birds who fly off in the distance. And being there really helped me understand why one British officer had called the island “a place where the soul of a man dies.”
Much of this book is about the warring versions of the truth on what these men went through.
They generally agree on the basic facts, but like all of us, they are kind of shading their stories to emerge as the heroes of them, and in their case, the stakes are even higher. Joan Didion famously said, “We Tell Ourselves Stories In Order To Live,” but if they didn’t tell a convincing tale, they could literally be hanged afterwards because they’d been summoned to face a court-martial for their alleged crimes on the island. So you can really see how they are shaping certain facts, burnishing other facts, to try and spare their own lives.
And somewhere in there lies the truth.
What I really tried to do was to focus on three of the main participants’ competing perspectives and let the reader decide. I think when you read the accounts, you can tell what each one of them is shading, and by showing them, you’re getting closer to what the truth really is … you can see the difference in emphasis and the way that they’re manipulating their tales. And when they get back to England, they’ve already waged this war against the elements, and now, they’re waging a war over the truth. And there’s disinformation and misinformation and even an 18th-century form of Fake News.
A timely subject during your research.
And then the British Empire looks at all these stories and isn’t sure that it likes any of them, and there are efforts by those in power to cover up the scandalous truth and manufacture their own mythic tale. Hopefully, by showing the complexity of the competing accounts, you get to see how each participant is manipulating the truth, and it helps you to get closer to what the genuine truth really is.
In 2023, do you think the truth is any easier to parse? Seems like the internet makes it both easier and harder to search for truth.
What’s so interesting is that I’d go through these 18th-century journals and archives and this war over the truth and disinformation and allegations of fake journals being written, and then I would come home and would follow the news. You’d turn on the TV and see people claiming alternative facts and fake news. You go on Twitter and see trolls and disinformation, and so when I was researching and when I really decided to tell this story, I felt like it was a parable for our own turbulent times, and that we could learn something about the fragility of truth and the dangers of manipulating the truth and what happens when nations try to cover up the truth and don’t reckon with the past.
Now, some of these log books you read got pretty graphic, I take it?
These log books really helped me really understand what was happening each day, a chronicle of events. You can see with the typhoons, the descriptions of the waves. And then you also see the descriptions of the scurvy outbreak. You see it beginning with a few deaths, and then you see more and more people being listed as “departed this life.” Even before the Wager wrecked, this expedition had nearly a thousand people, and hundreds of them had already died of scurvy and other incidents. So these log books were a really helpful record. They were kind of an early template for a lot of forms of travel literature. Many of the log books and journals that were published after this expedition would become wild bestsellers. The great bestsellers of their time.
You mentioned scurvy. After I finished The Wager, I’ve remembered to take vitamins every single day.
Yeah! Take your vitamins, and always suck on a lime.
That’s a good note, too.
I had no idea! The thing for me that’s the richness about being a reporter and a generalist is that often I go on these projects, and I know virtually nothing about the subject. It’s like getting a full education. My images of scurvy were just like, “Okay, don’t your gums turn black?” I had no idea how severe it can be. Your hair falls out, your teeth fall out. Even the tissue that connects your bones seems to come undone. There’s an account of one of the men who had fought in battle 50 years earlier and broken a bone, which had long since healed. Suddenly, it just fractured again in the very same spot, and I had no idea that it could affect your senses so much. Many of the witnesses to the scurvy outbreak on the ship described it as getting into the seamen’s brains and causing them to go raving mad.
You did a public service on scurvy. And I also love digging into the acknowledgements of books. You praised your New Yorker editor, and you said that you would feel “marooned” without him, which fits here.
Daniel Zalewski — he was my editor from really my earliest days at the New Yorker. He’s a good friend, and he’s just a brilliant editor, and he read the text. He always makes sure that I’m precise. If I’m overwrought, he cuts it back. And so one of his insights, too, was toward the end of the book, thinking about the unwitting complicity of so many members of this expedition in the British Empire. They’re so focused on their daily survival, their families, on glory and, obviously ultimately, on saving their own lives, that they don’t dwell too much upon imperialism. There’s that kind of almost unconscious, unthinking complicity in the system that allows empires to persevere. And that was an idea that he really helped me hone. And I have a wonderful book editor, Bill Thomas at Doubleday … He is really smart about structure and pacing in a story. He read the manuscript and told me where I needed to deepen certain parts and expand on the reporting or the research.
You’re very fortunate to have those relationships. I also happen to have a wonderful editor [coughs] who puts up with me.
Writing is very solitary, but I don’t think you can get across the finish line unless you have great readers who can see things clearly with a fresh eye and then point you in directions where you can improve manuscripts. I’m not one of these people who believes that writers would be better off without editors. You need to find the right editors and then you hold onto them and feel marooned without them. And early in my career, I didn’t always have great editors. I’ve been very lucky for the past 15 or 20 years, to work with one of the great magazine editors of all time and one of the great book editors, so yeah, I feel fortunate.
So, we can’t end this chat without you telling me about your Killers Of The Flower Moon set experience.
I was really struck by the level of care, both in developing the story and the level of research. The production team would often ask me questions about the research, but they did their own as well. They filmed on location, which was really important, and most important of all, they worked very closely with members of the Osage nation to tell the story in a faithful and sensitive way. Chief Standing Bear appointed several ambassadors of the nation to work with the movie people, and so many Osage were involved in the process. There were Osage actors in speaking roles. I saw a very powerful scene when I visited. Several Osage were playing the roles and were astonishingly good.
The excitement is high for this movie. Scorsese, for crying out loud!
Well, I wrote that book, the main reason, was to hopefully fill in my own ignorance and the ignorance of others outside the Osage nation. So many of us hadn’t learned that history, and we had largely excised it from our conscience. And what I think will be great about the film is that it can reach even more people and hopefully lead people to a better understanding of the history.
Yeah, I would say that between your book and Watchmen, Oklahoma is having a moment that it should not be proud of, but at least people are…
… learning the history, which is really important.
My daughter even read your book for school.
That’s great. How old is she?
Older than I can deal with, but she will eventually cure all diseases, even scurvy. And thank you so much for your time today, David.
[Laughs] It was good chatting with you, Kimberly. Thank you for doing this.
‘The Wager’ will be available in bookstores on April 18.