Poured Over: David Grann on The Wager

By Jenna Seery / April 27, 2023 at 6:00 am

“We all shape our stories in some way, we all try to emerge as the hero of them…”

Author of Killers of the Flower Moon, David Grann, takes on mutiny and shipwreck in the shocking true story of The Wager. Grann joined us on the show to talk about wading through archival research, his adventure to the sites from the book, seeing his works become films and more live at Barnes & Noble Union Square with Poured Over host, Miwa Messer.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.

Featured Books (Episode):
The Wager by David Grann
Killers of the Flower Moon by David Grann
The Lost City of Z by David Grann
Moby Dick by Herman Melville
The Unknown Shore by Patrick O’Brian
Robinson Crusoe by Daniel Defoe

Full Episode Transcript

Miwa Messer
Hello New York and just a reminder we are taping live for the Poured Over Podcast. I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over, David Grann obviously is the best-selling author of among other books, The Lost City of Z and Killers of the Flower Moon, which we all know Scorsese has turned into a three hour and 26 minute movie that apparently is coming to Cannes next month. So, we’ll see what happens. But more importantly, we’re here to talk about The Wager, which shipwrecks, mutiny very bad things. And I want to give us a little bit of context before we start talking about this book. So Robinson Crusoe, pubs in 1719, Moby Dick pubs in 1851, Lord Byron, you really are wondering why I’m bringing up Lord Byron, but there’s a reason I’m bringing up Lord Byron, Lord Byron, publishes the first two cantos of Don Juan, which was his, you know, scandalous, scandalous poem in 1812. Lord Byron is born in 1788, Lord Byron’s grandfather, is one of the main characters in The Wager and I was not expecting that. If you read David, you know that he finds these stories, right, tucked away in the corners of history, right? This is the fun thing about following David, whether it’s in the New Yorker or in the books, he always finds the unexpected, and then he turns it into something you cannot put now. So I am going to ask you how The Wager started?

David Grann
Yeah. So The Wager started when I was looking to one of my pet obsessions, which is mutiny. You know, I think just from a kid reading about mutinies and watching films, I’ve always been intrigued by them. You know, what is it about a military organization that is supposed to be an instrument of order? What causes some of the people to suddenly disorder? Are they these extreme outlaws? Or is there something rotten at the core of the system that justifies the rebellion. So in any case, I was poking around in mutiny, maybe there could be a book idea somewhere in there. And I eventually came across an 18th century journal, written by John Byron, who had been the 16 year old Midshipman on The Wager, when the voyage set sail and of course, he would later go on to become the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, this account that Byron himself had written influenced his grandson, who referred to it in Don Juan as my granddad’s narrative, and this old journal, at first seem kind of stilted and was written this archaic Old English. But as I read more, I kept pausing over these arresting phrases that were words like the perfect hurricane, John Byron used. There were words like scurvy, teeth falling out, there were words like shipwreck, violence on the island, this kind of real life Lord of the Flies and shipwreck and mutiny and murder. And so I realized that this little strange little book, I thought had at least the seed at that point, it was just a seed of what I thought could be an interesting book.

Okay, so I’m gonna add to that for a second Britain’s going to war with Spain, able bodied Seaman are being kidnapped off the streets of London and other cities in Britain, because the Navy doesn’t have enough people. They’re being taken out of care homes on stretchers and put onto boats. This does not seem like a great idea. And you open the book with the possibly one of the best lines ever. “The only impartial witness was the sun.”

Yeah, well, the seeds of this expedition for its destruction can be traced back to its very origins in England when this squadron which is being sent on this secret mission, and The Wager ship is part of it, to try to capture the Spanish galleon and fill with treasure, which was known as the prize of all the ocean. But as you say, they were woefully short of men. They sent out these press gangs just to round people up and just basically drag them onto the ships and sent unwillingly on a voyage that may last as long as three years and they were so short, a man as you said that they actually went to a retirement home and they took these soldiers who were in their 60s and 70s, many of them were missing an assortment of limbs, and some were so sick they had to be lifted onto their stretcher, and everybody knew they were sailing to their deaths. So the idea of building a band of brothers on one of these ships based on all these recalcitrant semen was going to be an enormous challenge. As for the opening line, this is a story not just, and what really drew me to the story was not just but it is this gripping saga of survival, this kind of crazy sea yarn, but that it is also really a war over the truth. And I’m sure we will get into that. Yes. And so that’s why that opening line about the only impartial witness was the sun.

Okay, so you spent two years in an archive, like you’ve always been very clear that everything starts for you with the paperwork. Essentially, you like to be a detective with paperwork.

I like to be in a place that suits me, which is basically in the safe confines of an archive.

Okay, but the safe confines of an archive and the way you operate sounds like codebreaking to me.

Well, a lot of these old texts do involve an element of detection, especially when you are a generalist like me, I think if you’re a naval historian who has spent, you know, 40 years and did their PhD reading these documents, it’s, you know, a familiar language. But for somebody like me, it isn’t. I’ll just give you one example. So there is this surprising trove of primary materials that survived and God knows how they survive these typhoons and tidal waves swamping the ships, and some of them survive shipwreck, but you can go to England, you can pull them out of the archives in these boxes, they come out, they are from the 1740s, they are water stained, they are crumbling, dust just rises out of them when you open these boxes, one of the documents that is there are the muster books, the muster books from these various ships. And when I first started reading a muster book, it just looked like gibberish to me, it basically was just the name of a seaman, or an officer, when they enter the ship. It listed the rank and the date they entered, but it had one other columns with these abbreviations. One letter was R and I was like, what is the R mean and I saw R next a lot of other names. After a while and studying these documents and consulting with experts. oh, that means they ran, they tried to desert and then another abbreviation was even more striking in these muster books, it was the letters DD, I was like what is DD and when you started to look down the pages from the muster books of all the different ships in the expedition, you just kept seeing dd, dd, dd, skip a few dd, dd. DD, it turns out means discharge dead. And so you could actually study these documents and start to create tallies, and they give you a sense of the horrific toll of this voyage. And I realized only after a while that these documents can really speak volumes, but it really does take a little while to figure out what the hell is going on.

Okay, so in typical David Grann fashion, which this many books and I can say that there’s many pieces in for The New Yorker, I can say that, but here you are, you found the details that you’re looking for. You have done the research slash journalism slash, you’ve got the history in place. There’s a little bit of true crime, obviously, we’re dealing with mutiny and other assorted terrible things. Right. So there’s a little bit of true crime happening. So we’ve got all of the hallmarks of a piece by David Grann. But how do you structure this in a way that keeps the average reader— not everyone grew up on a sailboat pal. Like, you know, we understand the ocean a little more, and maybe then some, but you have got to keep the momentum going in the story. You have to figure out who’s worth using as a lynchpin for the story, you’ve got three characters that you’re basically focused on. Obviously, we’re spoiler free in this conversation, because the books on sale today, so I’m not going to deny you the pleasure of reading this book. But how do you structure how do you take all of that data, all of that research, all of those words, all of those notes from people who have been dead for hundreds of decades? How do you turn that into a story?

Yeah. So well, in this case, the challenge was, in part because when several the castaways do miraculously make it back to England and they are summoned to face a court martial. And many people here would know the line from Joan Didion that we all tell ourselves stories in order to live. But in their case, it’s quite literally true. If they don’t tell a convincing tale, they’re gonna get hanged and they could die. So several of them begin to offer other stories and testimony and this generates this kind of competing war over the truth. So it’s almost impossible to be an omniscient narrator in this case, we’re never omniscient narrators anyways, when we’re looking back at time. So I decided to structure around the three figures on The Wager all of whom are very different. There is the Captain David Cheap, who was somebody who back in Scotland was like, chased by debtors and always kind of embittered and frustrated, and yet on a ship usually found refuge and, on this expedition, he finally obtains what he had always longed for, which was the chance to Captain his own warship. And then the other perspective is told from John Bulkeley, who was the gunner on The Wager who was in many ways the most skilled Seaman onboard the ship, and who was also an instinctive leader. Yet, because he didn’t come from the aristocracy, he really didn’t have any chance that he could ever become captain of a warship at that time in that class structure. And then the third perspective is from John Byron. So partly you choose them because they left behind materials that you can draw from, you can really represent their perspective and the structure by alternating between each one, even though their points of view are warring, you get closer to the truth. And I think you’ll also learn something essential, which is one of the themes of the book, which is that we all shape our stories in some way. We all try to emerge as the hero of them. In their case, the stakes could be even higher, but they are all shaping their story. And so you get closer to the truth only by alternating these narratives and the way you build suspense is actually pretty easy— you just tell the story, the way it unfolded, from their perspective, because when they set off, they have no idea what’s going to happen even the next day, or the next hour, they set off with grand expectations and illusions and hopes and delusions. And then they begin to encounter these horrors and often each day, they don’t know if they’re going to live or die, whether they’re on the island if they’re ever going to get off the island. So their lives are fraught with tension. They are fraught with suspense. And so if you just let the story unfold the way it really happens, which to me is the way you get closer to the truth. To not tell history with always the arrogant hindsight, of a historian or detective already knows all the answers, you tell a story from the perspective that people have no idea what the outcome is going to be. And therefore, there is an inherent mystery as to all our lives. And so that’s the way you kind of do it. I’ll just give you one example, the competing narratives that just gives you some sense of this without giving too much away on the eye, then they descend into this Lord of the Flies. And one of the counts, somebody says, I was forced to proceed to extremities, are forced to proceed to extremities, what would that mean? And then you read the other account saying, Oh, he shot him right in the head. And it’s only by seeing this kind of interplay between the tacks that you get to see you get insights into each person, what they’re leaving out why they’re leaving out, and then slowly, you’re getting unspooled. But I do ultimately leave it to you all, to provide history’s judgment.

There’s also, you know, you talk about this being Lord of the Flies on Wager Island. And there are a couple of moments in the book to where you’re talking about how they essentially create a little village, right? They’re all these little different huts and everyone’s, but they’re trying to preserve the sense of order. And this sense of class and structure. I mean, one of the ways you describe it is that on the ship, you are dependent on other people doing their jobs properly. And so these guys are really reluctant to let go of the systems that they have been raised in because it’s the only thing they know. And yet here they are on this island going, okay, there are no animals. There’s really no food except for celery. And I’m also expecting, and this may be because I read alive at too young an age but I was expecting a little more cannibalism. I was a little surprised there wasn’t more cannibalism.

And there may have been more. Yes, they may not have wanted to go into it. They did not dwell on it. It was a taboo.

I’m guessing they didn’t because there was a lot of superstition to at one point, there’s a group that sort of kind of gets off the island briefly. And they’re having such a rough go of it on the water that they decide because they have not buried a dead colleague, they have to go back and buried this body because they’re like, Well, this is why we’re having a terrible time. So this combination of sort of structure and superstition and everything else, it’s just, it’s wild.

Yeah. Well, you know, I spent a fair amount of time in the opening two chapters, unfolding these floating civilizations, and what the wooden world of a ship was like, how these ships were built, how they were very regimented, how each person has a very designated spot, they were very hierarchical, and how they kind of function as this organization with their own lingo. One of the things you know, I don’t know what insights you will gain from the book, but you will gain at least what you’ll gain to you will learn that certain words that you use actually derived from the age of sale. You will learn for example, that a scuttlebutt was a barrel on the ship where they would fill it with water and the seamen would gather around to get their water rations, and they would gossip. Piping hot was the boatswain’s whistle for a hot meal. Pipe down was his whistle to get quiet at night. My favorite phrase, which came a little bit later was to turn a blind eye which was from when Horatio Nelson wanted to ignore his superior signal flag to retreat, he put his telescope up to his blind eye. So that’s why we use the phrase to turn a blind eye. The only other thing you’ll leave, and I won’t explain fully, why is that if ever you go to sea bring limes.

We are gonna go there for a second. I’m sorry, life on board ship was gross. Yeah, like that is the nicest way I can describe it.

Those conditions. It was tough. It was tough in those conditions, life on land can be pretty darn hard in that age, too, for a lot of these people. In fact, some of the poor actually found meals more plentiful on the ship. The one thing that Hamilton knew was that if you didn’t feed the men that you kind of would provoke them in their most tenderness point. So they were February well, but yes, conditions were very tough. And on this expedition, they were extraordinarily tough because of the nature of the expedition, the ships were packed with more men than the ships were designed for The Wager out about 250 men and boys, some as young as six, some in their 80s, all packed together, the seamen would sleep on hammocks, with only about a foot separating them of space. And if the ship rock, they would have to jostle each other. And then of course, they end up suffering from every disaster that could possibly happen even before the shipwreck.

I’m sorry, the amount of pus alone. Really, you will make it through those pages, I promise you will make it through those pages, it is worth it, the payoff is there but wow. And yet, the structure and the hierarchies and the behaviors kept them all sort of sane under the circumstances, they clung to this this. This is how they got through the worst things ever.

Yeah. So, the first part of the book is building that civilization, this floating civilization and explaining how it worked. And then at a certain point, it is how does that what happens when that floating civilization disintegrates literally as the ship cracks on the rocks, but also even in a more profound sense of customs and mores and order, they find themselves as the gunner, John Bulkeley says, in a state of nature.

You know, we’ve had a couple of questions from folks both when they were registering on Eventbrite and here tonight, just Patrick O’Brian, in ‘59, he wrote a book which hold on, I have the title here, The Unknown Shore, which is essentially based on part of the story of The Wager, which you have here. But were you reading Patrick O’Brian, as you were prepping for this? I know you’ve read a crazy amount.

Yes. I, you know, whenever I work on a work history, I tend to read fiction more for pleasure anyways, and when I work on a book, I end up having to do so much research, so many documents. And so I always seek out fiction that might help just kind of bring the life to abort. Partly it’s an escape, but also just to make me kind of live with it in that world. So I read a lot of Patrick O’Brien I read, you know, Melville, who, you know, I had read Melville when I was young, and you know, they really shouldn’t make you read it. When you got Moby Dick. I was just awestruck by Moby Dick. It is the strangest, most bewildering, most brilliant novel I think I’ve ever read.

Certainly, Moby Dick is actually trippy and best reserved, yes, like, I read it young. And then I went back as an adult, and it’s much better later. It’s just and it’s really trippy. So if you haven’t ever made it through Moby Dick, it’s totally worth it. Also, in the heart of the sea, in the heart of the sea. I’m very fond of that bonus. And actually, I have to say, you’re John Byron made me think of Thomas Nickerson, who was roughly the same age, you know, I don’t know how many of you have read it. But you know, he’s on the Essex as it goes out from Nantucket. And of course, this is the book that inspires Moby Dick. But like Byron, he had written sort of his take on it and Melville used that to create Moby Dick.

What’s interesting in the book, too, is it’s really, you know, it’s this yarn, but it’s also it’s meditation on truth, but it’s also a real exploration of storytelling and the way we tell stories and what’s so interesting, Not only do these people end up telling their stories and shaping their stories, but they are also shaped by the stories they have heard and told either run the forecastle man, the seasoned seaman onboard a ship, but also by the sea tales they went. Byron in particular John Byron, 16. You know, he loved adventure tales, he even brought some in his sea chest with him on this voyage. He had read Robinson Crusoe, he thought he was going to live a romance of the sea, that was his illusion when he went, he thought he was going to live his own kind of adventure, of course, didn’t quite go that way. And what’s amazing is when they’re coming around Cape Horn, you see this interplay between how stories radiate out and take different forms. So, Robinson Crusoe, the novel is inspired by an actual real incident of a British castaway who was left on this island, and then he was rescued I can’t remember now how long, after about a year or so after he had lived on this island, and his account was recorded by the captain who rescued him in his logbook. And so that ends up inspiring Defoe, but what’s so interesting is when they’re coming around Cape Horn, and they’re suffering from scurvy, and they’re battling this perfect hurricane, what are they dreaming of? What are they thinking about? They want to get to the island of Robinson Crusoe. They think if they can just get to that island of Robinson Crusoe, which was a real place, they’ll be okay, they can survive the way they did in the tale. Of course, what they will discover when they become wrecked on the island, there was one essential difference between the fictional account of Robinson Crusoe, which is he was alone. Unlike these castaways of The Wager, they have to deal with the most unpredictable creature in all of nature, which is desperate humans, they were not alone.

They have to deal with their own ship, and they never let go of this idea. You know, sailors, especially in the British Navy, always, you know, there’s all this talk of being gentleman, and the honor of being a sailor and all that. Oh, yeah. They don’t live up to those standards. And obviously, they’re trying to stay alive. I’m really not entirely making fun of how they presented themselves to the world. Because I mean, they just wouldn’t let go and you tell some wild, wild stories, including the fact that some of these guys couldn’t swim.

You know, it’s funny in that day, I mean, again, it surprised me, most seamen could not swim. And so you can imagine, the sense of desperation, both when they’re fortress, these boats were both these lethal machines, but they were also their homes. And so you could only imagine what it was like, and they didn’t carry lots of lifeboats. I mean, they carried a couple of small transport boats, most of which would get shattered in the wreck. And so they have to, you know, some of them use one of them the ferry ashore, but they can’t swim, the water’s also very cold. And even when they’re on one of the castaway voyages, you know, they often can’t really even get to the land or the islands because they can’t swim. They’re too afraid to anchor by the rock so they can’t get provisions. So here they are starving, and they face this challenge.

They’re still keeping their logbooks, and in Bulkeley’s case he’s keeping a more detailed logbook than most. And again, this goes back to the point you were making earlier, where he’s trying to control his narrative. He’s trying to make sure that he gets heard. And it’s partially because he thinks he’s doing the right thing. And certainly, the captain thinks he’s doing the right thing and even our little buddy, John Byron thinks he’s doing the right thing. All of these guys are very well intentioned.

Yes, yes, these are not reductive heroes or villains, they are all really deeply human, they are much more like ourselves, I hope. We are flawed, and these people are all fallible. And one moment, you know, you’ll just admire these extraordinary acts of heroism and sacrifice and gallantry. And then a little bit later, you will just recoil at some shocking act of brutality. And as John Bulkeley ponders, is it a sin to want to live? It’s hard to judge because I think when you read this book, you understand each of them. And you end up asking your question, I asked myself the question, at least, you know, who would I have been on that island? What would I have done? In those circumstances? Who would I have followed? You like to think you would have been one way, but would you and I think that is a deep question about our very nature.

As a reader, that’s something I look for whether I’m reading history, or just a really great novel, I want the thing that connects to where I am in the world. It doesn’t have to be of this. I mean, we’re talking about guys in the 1740s. I mean, this story wraps up in 1746. So America is still a British colony. You know, the French Indian wars have started like, yeah, Lord Jim wasn’t even published yet. Darwin’s On the Origin of Species wasn’t published yet. The Jungle Book hadn’t been published. All of these things. I mean, this is really early. Yeah, it’s really early world history. And yet, it feels like this all could be happening right now.

Well, the costumes change, the way people might speak and their accents may change, but human nature is human nature. And I don’t think that really changes that much. And that island really becomes a laboratory that will test the human condition under very extreme circumstances, and inevitably, slowly begins to peel it back. And you will like some of the things you see, and you will not like some of the things you see. And so somebody like John Byron who set sail when he’s 16, with all this sense of romance, he has to come of age amid not only the horrors of these elements are the natural elements, but also the horrors unleashed by his shipmates, and his and his friends.

Chaos could kill you and I have lots of notes throughout my galley, I destroy galleys. Chaos could be deadly for these guys, if they couldn’t figure out how to feed themselves. If they couldn’t make their supplies last, they had managed to pull supplies off of the Wager. But how do you keep things from going bad? How do you keep food from spoiling, all of these things where if there’s chaos, you are going to die.

Yeah. And it leads to these really interesting debates. So the captain Cheap, you know, finally got his crown, he finally gets appointed captain of his warship, he gets the island and he says, I am still your captain? Why wouldn’t I not be your commander? I was appointed by the Commodore, I am rightfully your leader. Others start to have these philosophical debates saying, well, we’re on land, he wants to govern by the same kind of regimented rules and hierarchy that had existed on the ship. Others are wondering, well, do those rules still apply here? Do we need new rules to survive? What makes a leader? Is it because of a title? Or is it something you should you earn in these conditions and so even while they are starving on the island, we have these philosophical debates about leadership duty, loyalty, and patriotism. And ultimately, the great taboo: mutiny.

So, there’s an indigenous community Kawésqar. Am I saying that correct?

I’m always bad. The accent is on the middle, but the middle, I know where the accent is, but I still have trouble saying it right. Kawésqar.

Okay, sorry, so their native population. They’ve been in Tierra del Fuego and Patagonia for 1000s of years. They do show up at a very opportune moment and help keep our guys on Wager island alive. And one of the things you just sort of drop in, in your David Grann way is NASA years later went back to study this population, because they were like, how did they survive in this extreme cold? And I just love that, that you drop that in there. But I want to get back to them for a second because this community really did keep our guys alive. I really, they would not have survived without them.

Yeah, so the Kawésqar were really they were native Patagonian group they had, like other native Patagonians had lived along Patagonia for, you know, hundreds and hundreds of years. And over that time, they had really adapted to these very harsh geographical circumstances, they learned to keep warm, by always keeping a fire going, even in their canoes, I was struck, they even in these little, even in their canoes, and the wind and the storms, they always kept the fire going. And most important that they knew how to find food. They realized that trying to trek across this land was so difficult is hard to find animals along the long coach length of Patagonia. So they lived mostly in their canoes, and they just traveled hundreds of miles along the coastline. And they knew where to find marine resources. They knew where to find fish, where to find sea urchins. And so they knew how to survive. And so when they show up at the island, they suddenly offer the castaways a lifeline. They go out and they bring them food. But this is also a story about imperialism and the systematic prejudices that are embedded in that system. And so some of the castaways, who in their accounts will refer to these indigenous people as savages, mistreat them. And at a certain point, the Kawésqar are looking at these castaways, watching the violence spiral out of control and a certain point they’re just like, you know what, and they just disappear. I just, you know, this is one of those instances where imperialism and those attitudes, not only you know, can lead to the destruction of indigenous people, but in this case, it also helped fuel the destruction of the castaways, the imperialists themselves because they lost a lifeline. And after that, they begin to descend much further into a state of depravity.

And you’ve been to Wager Island.

Yes. Not one of the smartest things I’ve done.

Okay, so we need to talk about this 52-foot boat that you took, because that’s not big enough to be on the open ocean.

Yeah, I will say in my defense. I had a fixer from Colombia who was helping me, how can I arrange an expedition on my own to try to get to Wager Island? It’s not a place where you can find a cruise ship to go. We got sent this photograph of the boat and it looked really good. I was like it looks big and looks, you know, roomy and comfortable. And then after, it took me about four days to get to the island where we were going to depart from, which was Chiloway Island, which is off the coast of Chile, Patagonia, which is about 350 miles north of where Wager Island is located in a Gulf or a bay that is known as the Gulf of Sorrows are some prefer to call it the Gulf of Pain, which should have told me right then stay the hell away, but when I got them I saw the boat, I was like, God that’s not really very big. It was this it was it was really meant to go on the channels of Patagonia. And it was very top heavy, and it was heated by a wood stove, we would stop along the channels to chop wood to stay warm, it was winter. So it was about 30 degrees out it, was raining or sleeting. And we would also get our water from the glacial streams coming down and so we would pull up along these little islands and they would run a like a hose but a little bit wider up to these streams. And then they would run the water down to fill that fill our boat up with water so we would have liquid to drink. And so you know, in the beginning, it seemed pretty good though. I was like, we were in these channels that are very well sheltered from the islands. And so they’re really chillingly beautiful. They were desolate, we didn’t see another soul for days. It’s barren, the trees are all bent from the wind, they’re on 45-degree angles, they look as if they’re lying on top of each other, like hurtling sprinters, but it was beautiful. And I was like, I got this, no problem. Wager island here I come. And then there came a certain point where the captain said, you know, now we’re gonna have to go out into the actual ocean, open ocean if we’re gonna get the wager Island. And that’s when I first got my glimpse of the seas. And just let’s say it was like kind of like being in a ping pong ball, like if you were in the ball, and you were just getting bounced around. I just sat on the floor for about 8-10 hours a day. You couldn’t stand because if you stood you would get chucked. I don’t normally get seasick, but I was like a human laboratory for sea sick medicines. I was like, you know, the person who like a 4am is like, Oh, that looks like an interesting medicine. So I had, you know, like bands on the wrist and the things behind your ear and all this. I was drunk on Dramamine. But he was a very skilled captain, and he eventually led us through the Gulf of Pain and we did indeed get to wager Island.

Okay, so outside of the captain and the fixer, with the questionable boat, you in the past have talked about sort of your favorite kind of reporting is to just hang out and spend time with people. So when you’re working on a book like this, when everyone is dead, essentially. Yeah. Okay, you hang out with ghosts. But there are you’ve got your archivists who are showing you so let’s talk about the living people who helped you bring The Wager to life.

Naval historians were wonderfully helpful, just teaching me how to read this for like, it really took me about a year to feel fluent in this world that I kind of understood the lingo, could read the logbooks, understood the diaries and the language, what they were referring to. That it became more second nature, which you need to do if you’re going to write about it, because otherwise when I would write a sentence, my wife Kyra would say what are you talking about? Like, nobody’s gonna get that and nobody understands. So they were very helpful, and I traveled to a lot of archives to get the documents, but this one was fairly solitary. Because it was so long, though there were some descendants who had records or photographs or even some letters from people, but it was mostly libraries and archives, then, of course, this kind of wonderful, mad trip to Wager Island,

Which I’m glad you came back from. I want to drop in a couple of questions from the audience before we get too far afield because also, I’m watching the time and I knew this was going to happen. I knew we were going to bump up against time. Someone’s asking, please tell us about your process for deciding on what you’ll write about, what merits the undertaking, and you’ve talked about it a little bit in terms of The Wager, certainly, but let’s talk about the body of work that is David Grann.

Yeah, I think that is really the hardest thing. It’s a little bit easier when it’s a magazine story because it’s, you’re not going to be spending so many years with it. There is a kind of analytical rational process that goes along the you know, the analytical processes, you find a story that is something curious or interesting. Sometimes it can derive from just a strange combination of words. You know, once I was reading a little brief, briefs are great for looking at stories. They don’t exist anymore, because the newspapers, unfortunately are dying, but, I used to read all the Metropolitan papers and around different states and you’d read the briefs. I remember reading a brief once that it said several members of prison gang, the Aryan Brotherhood, were arrested while in prison, and they were rounded up I think it said one had been in solitary confinement. I was like arrested while in prison. And one is in solitary confinement, I just thought that combination of words just was like, that’s really weird and interesting. Like, and then I you just start asking yourself questions like, how do you even run a gang in a prison? And if you’re in solitary confinement, how do you even communicate? What is your you know, if you’re if it’s about power and riches, what are your riches and power in a prison system? What is your commerce, so that led me down the road to write a story about the most murderous prison gang, sometimes it can be, you know, even just a missing photograph I when I for Killers of the Flower Moon when I had heard a little bit about the serial killings of members of the Osage Nation, for their oil money during the early 20th century, and one of the really, more monstrous crimes from racial injustices, but it was something I didn’t know anything about before someone mentioned me and I was ignorant of, and I remember going out to the Osage Nation, and I visited their museum and there was this photograph on the wall. And at that point, I was like, am I gonna write I don’t really know. And I, there’s this great photograph on the wall that was taken from 1924. And it showed members of the Osage Nation along with white settlers, and it looked completely innocent, but I had noticed that there was this portion of the photograph that was missing and I asked the museum director who has since become a really good friend of mine, Katherine Redcorn. Why is that panel missing, and I’ve told the story before but she she said they had removed that photograph because it contained a figure who was so evil. And then she pointed to the missing panel, and she said, The Devil was standing right there and that really became the beginning of the origins of setting me on my way to write Killers of the Flower Moon. But I think the analytical part is you need a story in a subject that is fascinating, that that grips you in some ways. But also, I think it’s really important that reveals something larger and tells a larger story. You know, there are a lot of crime stories, for example, that are, I love to read, they’re kind of Gothic tales, and tabloids, but the only ones I want to tell are going to be the ones that hopefully illuminate something larger about the human condition or systematic injustices. Those are the ones you want to find that other layer that other dimension to the story, I think, if you’re going to tell it, so you kind of go through these analytical processes, you also have very practical questions: Is there enough material to tell the story? I come across great stories, and then like, all those documents are classified, then you do a FOIA, and the government comes back and says no, say like, all right. That’s why I can’t do that unless I live another 50 years and so sometimes there’s practical concerns. But I will say that among all those analytical questions, there is also something that is just instinctive, there is something when something just gets in you, you kind of see a good story, and it just kind of grabbed you. And when you can’t let it go, when you’re still thinking about it, that you’re almost trying to let it go, and it will let you go.

Yeah, you just described bookselling: you just know it when you see it. You’re a phenomenal writer and historian— do you have any advice for young artists and authors?

You know, I think the greatest advice is really just to do it. I mean, I think that there are really no grand secrets. I always joke that the difference between a writer and a non-writer is that the writer is just willing to spend eight hours staring at their computer, while the non-writer is like why would I do that? That’s nuts, can you write that for me? And then you go sit and spend eight hours. So that’s really the difference. But it is, you know, there are these kinds of unbelievably gifted writers and it’s just, you know, they have to work and hone their craft, but you’re just like, you were born with some gift. You’re a prodigy, but for most of us, it is a craft. And it is something that you, it is experiential, you learn the techniques of reporting and research, you learn how to analyze documents, to cross analyze documents, and you learn to write and structure by doing and so I think the real secret is if you— it’s not an easy life in so many ways, and it’s become, in so many ways, so much more fraught now, in terms of the industry and the media industry, and the kind of the old paths that used to exist are kind of crumbling. But there are still ways to do it. And so I would say if it’s something you really want to do, if you’re really passionate about it, just do it. But do it means actually doing it and not just talking about it. If you’re just telling the same story at a cocktail party, you’re not doing it you got to actually sit down and write it.

The team that is optioning The Wager is the same team that did Killers of the Flower Moon, which is obviously coming next month. Have you seen the film yet? Patrick Crane, I’m asking your question. Okay. Whether or not he answers it…

No comment. No, let me say that— I won’t be so quick. I did see an early cut of the movie and I was very impressed by what they have accomplished and achieved, and because I know nothing about the movie business, people always ask me like, do you know about movies, and I was like, I don’t know anything. You know, I always joke that like, you know, a movie production. I probably shouldn’t tell this joke, but I’ll tell it anyways, on a movie production, you know, there is like the captain, the director has a lot of authority, it’s like on a ship, then there are the petty officers. Then there are the Able Seaman, then there are the ordinary seaman and then all the way at the bottom are the little pitiful land lovers who have to work doing manual labor in the middle of the ship. So they’re called the waste because they’re in the waste of the ship, and they work alongside the defecating animals, that’s kind of where the author is in a movie production hierarchy. So I have been unbelievably blessed. I’ve been so fortunate. So my goal is with these things, is just get this thing into the hands of people know what they’re doing. I’m not going to tell them, excuse me, Mr. Scorsese, I really don’t think that tracking shot works right now. So you try to get into the hands of people who know what they’re doing. And what was so great about watching them work on Killers of the Flower Moon was that they share the same fierce commitment to the story that I had, you know, as a movie will not be an exact replica of a book and it shouldn’t be, it’s a completely different medium. When you’re a historian or you’re writing a story, you have to kind of tell it from the outside, because you can’t enter people’s consciousness. So you’re an external observer, as close as you get even with diaries. And yet, if you’re making a movie, there are people fully occupying these roles, so you tell the story from the inside. And that’s what makes film powerful. It’s just a different, but it’s a different medium, but they share that same fierce commitment to getting the story right. And they worked from everything I could tell just so closely with members of Osage Nation to get the story, right. And so much of the development of the process happened because of that was shot on location or Osage actors, those age who are involved in every level of their production. So for me that, you know, just gives me such a level of comfort because any author who tells you not to not afraid of what the outcome might be, when they adopted they’re lying to you always have some fear. But I had such comfort working with these folks. And so when they of course, said they wanted to, you know, maybe develop and option The Wager and try to develop it. I was like, can’t get better than that.

Okay, Lost City of Z, your first book was also made into a movie. Yeah. And Percy Fawcett, who was the subject of that book, he was a pop culture phenom in Victorian era. I mean, even Arthur Conan Doyle sort of used him as a model for a novel that he wrote in 1912. And the sailors and the captain and all of the men who wrote their varying books and tales when they got back from the Gulf, and all of their misadventures. They all wrote books, they became best sellers, off the chart best sellers. And of course, I had never heard of any of them or any of their books until you wrote The Wager. So that tells you about the legacy of some bestsellers. But there’s one book I’m going to ask you, and Aaron, I swear I’m keeping an eye on the time. This is the subtitle of one of the best-selling books.

So what’s important to understand is that this period, and one of the reasons these stories became so famous in the day was they corresponded with this transformation in the publishing industry, there was greater literacy in Europe, printing was cheaper. And so suddenly, these accounts could really be printed and spread and could be read and sea tales and sea yarns were such a fascination, this period of empires, they kind of became the seeds of early literature of British and European literature in many ways, which is why Defoe, you know, Robinson Crusoe. So in this account, but they had all these accounts have these, you know, this was their version, I guess, of Twitter or social media, I don’t know. So they would smack on these incredibly long subtitles to try to tantalize readers. And so this is a not a typical subtitle, a faithful narrative. That’s the other thing I love every one faithful. It’s kind of like when a politician tells you frankly, “a faithful Narrative of the Loss of his Majesty’s ship the Wager on a desolate Island in the Latitude 47 South, Longitude 81:40 West, With the Proceedings and Conduct of the Officers and Crew and the Hardships they endured in the Said Island for the Space of five Months; Their bold Attempt for Liberty, in Coasting the Southern Part of the vast Region of Patagonia; setting out with upwards of Eighty Souls in their Boats; the Loss of the Cutter; their Passage through the Streights of Magellan an Account of the incredible Hardships they frequently underwent for Want of Food of any Kind” it actually goes on thought that at a certain point you got to end it. I actually wanted I actually experimented with doing that for this. And I had done some I did some that I was like, that’s never gonna work.

David was going to break the internet. He was going to break the internet and instead we get a really excellent excellent book, The Wager with a bearable subtitle. Okay, we’re not gonna break the internet with that subtitle. David Grann, thank you so much for joining us.

Thank you always.