In his new book, David Grann tells a classic sea yarn in a new way, overthrowing an old colonial story. Along the way, he charts a course for other tellers of modern adventure tales.
From a distance, The Wager looks like an old-fashioned thing. And in some hands the story might have heaved along like the ship itself: a relic of the 18th century, worn and worm-eaten, wearing only a new coat of paint. But Grann is one of America’s most meticulous narrative nonfiction writers, whether describing a septuagenerian bank robber for the New Yorker, or a French serial impostor, or a man trudging alone across Antarctica.
In The Lost City of Z, he told the story of Capt Percy Fawcett, who in the 1920s disappeared into the Amazon searching for a hidden civilization. In Killers of the Flower Moon, he wrote of Oklahoma’s Osage tribe, whose members were murdered for their oil money. Across a span of work writers tend to reveal patterns, purposefully or not, and Grann seems drawn to people too obsessed for their own good, grinding themselves away, so focused on each step they never look up to see the horizon. That pattern holds true in The Wager.
Here’s what Grann gives away, right at the beginning of his tale. We meet the cast of sailors and their officers in the mid-18th century, during the absurd-sounding War of Jenkins’ Ear, so named because it arose from the allegation a Spanish sailor cut off a British sailor’s ear. Really it was a clash of empires, as the British and Spanish grabbed as much of the New World as they could, then snatched it from each other. In 1740, His Majesty’s Ship The Wager set sail across the Atlantic. Its covert mission was to intercept a Spanish treasure ship off the Chilean coast.
The sailors endured hardships as they rounded Cape Horn, where the strongest currents in the world pounded the ship so hard even veterans reeled. That was also where scurvy set in, and typhus. At this early point in the story Grann begins to deviate from the romance of old sea-faring literature. He relates the physical and psychological toll of the voyage.
“As the scourge invaded the sailors’ faces, some of them began to resemble the monsters of their imaginations. Their bloodshot eyes bulged. Their teeth fell out, as did their hair.” Their breath stank. Their bones rattled, in a literal sense. “The cartilage that glued together their bodies seemed to be loosening.”
Grann begins weaving into the story references to older forms of sea poetry and narrative, for reasons that don’t become fully clear until later. As the sailors round the Horn, they see a great albatross and Grann relates the tale of another doomed voyage in the same spot. An officer on that ship shot an albatross, cursing the crew and inspiring Samuel Taylor Coleridge to write The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:
And I had done a hellish thing,
And it would work ’em woe:
For all averred, I had killed the bird
That made the breeze to blow.
Herman Melville, too, begins to appear in the story. Melville made his own hellish journey around Cape Horn and in 1850 described it in White-Jacket: “Impracticable Cape! You may approach it from this direction or that – in any way you please – from the east or from the west; with the wind astern, or abeam, or on the quarter; and still Cape Horn is Cape Horn … Heaven help the sailors, their wives and their little ones.”
The Wager aimed for Robinson Crusoe Island, in the Pacific, but shipwrecked instead on a remote island off Patagonia. And there – without giving anything away – the real struggle for survival begins. The two most central figures are Capt David Cheap and the ship’s gunner, John Bulkeley. One an aristocratic officer, the other an intuitive leader. They clash in a deadly contest to win the loyalty of the 145 survivors.
Eventually – again, Grann gives this away early – some of the survivors do return to England. They’re court-martialed, called to present their accounts of what happened aboard The Wager and on the island. Was it really a harrowing but simple tale of survival? Or something more insidious and menacing: mutiny?
That’s when the beauty of The Wager unfurls like a great sail. Grann’s book is not about romance but truth and he has prepared the reader. It’s a story about the stories we tell ourselves – that empires and nations tell themselves – and how they shape us. His literary references suddenly come into focus and lift the book to become something greater than an adventure tale.
Here’s what I mean: earlier in the 18th century another British officer, Alexander Selkirk, found himself marooned off Patagonia. His story inspired Daniel Defoe to write Robinson Crusoe. The men aboard the The Wager placed all their hope on Robinson Crusoe Island, because they knew the novel. Their voyage inspired Melville, who wove elements into his work. During Grann’s research, as he rode in a small boat to Wager Island, he listened to Melville’s Moby-Dick.
We make our stories, until they make us. So many of Grann’s predecessors wrote of colonial adventures in a way that glorified violence, exploitation and enslavement. But recognizing the power of story, Grann seeks to burnish nothing, instead presenting the truth. He fixes his spyglass on the ravages of empire, of racism, of bureaucratic indifference and raw greed. In doing so, he frees himself to acknowledge the valor, the curiosity and the sheer adventure of the age.
There’s an expectation, in reviewing a book like The Wager, to balance its strengths with some discussion of its flaws. But The Wager is one of the finest nonfiction books I’ve ever read. I can only offer the highest praise a writer can give: endless envy, as deep and salty as the sea.
The Wager is published in the US by Doubleday and in the UK by Simon & Schuster
