A Tale of Shipwreck and Mutiny

This week on the Next Big Idea podcast, we bring you something a little bit different -- David Grann, author of the current #1 New York Times Bestseller, The Wager, shares his extraordinary historical tale of shipwreck, mutiny and murder.

Listen to his conversation with our producer Caleb Bissinger on Apple or Spotify, and join the conversation below!

Six years ago, David Grann was clicking through the digitized files of a British archive — as one does — when he landed on something that stopped him dead in his tracks. It was the journal of an 18th-century midshipman who’d been aboard a warship called the Wager when it wrecked off the coast of Patagonia. The survivors were marooned on a barren island; they faced starvation and privation; eventually, they descended into anarchy.

“It had these unbelievably arresting descriptions,” Grann told our producer, Caleb Bissinger, on this week’s episode of The Next Big Idea, “scurvy and cannibalism and shipwreck and tidal waves and typhoons.”

Grann, who is a long-time staff writer at The New Yorker and the author of the #1 New York Times bestsellers The Lost City of Z and Killers of the Flower Moon, thought the Wager might be an interesting subject for his next book. But he worried the story lacked depth. “It seemed like one of the more unusual and extraordinary sagas of survival and adventure it'd ever come across," he says, “but when you're looking for a story idea — especially a book idea — you need other dimensions.”

As he dug deeper, he found them. Much to his surprise, he discovered that several of the castaways had made it back to England, where they’d told very different stories about what happened on the island. While some of the survivors cast themselves as valiant heroes, others dismissed them as mutinous cannibals. When the Royal Navy convened a court-martial in an attempt to understand what really happened on the island, the men’s war of words became a matter of life and death. “If they don't tell a convincing tale,” David says, “they are going to get hanged."

It may all sound rather old-fashioned, even a little macabre. But as you’ll hear David Grann describe in today’s episode, it’s surprisingly relevant.

“I would leave the archives, come home, and flip on the TV,” he recalls, “and there would be stories about so-called alternative facts or fake news or disinformation. And then I would go back to the archives, and I'd see there was misinformation and there was disinformation — there were even allegations of fake journals, a kind of 18th-century allegation of fake news. I started to feel like the story was a parable for our times.”

Satisfied he’d found those “other dimensions,” Grann began work on a book that is out now. It’s called The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder, and it’s currently in its sixth week at the top of the New York Times bestseller list. Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio are already at work adapting it for the big screen. 

As a hack of a sailor, I was fascinated – and shocked – to hear his descriptions of what life was like aboard these “floating cities.” As a writer of sorts, I loved hearing David describe the lengths he goes to get his stories right.

Listen to his riveting conversation with our producer Caleb Bissenger on Apple or Spotify, and join the conversation below!