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Alison Stewart: This is All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. The wild and true story of a shipwreck and mutiny on the high seas is the subject of New Yorker staff writer David Grann's new book. The Wager sets sail from Portsmouth, England in 1740 on a mission as part of an ongoing conflict with Spain. After a relatively easy start to the journey, the ship eventually made it to the notoriously difficult sea around Cape Horn, where the ship encountered churning currents, enormous waves, and punishing wind.

Add the misery of disgusting conditions and widespread disease, aboard the ship, The Wager shipwreck on the southern coast of Chile. The crew settled on a desolate island, and amidst famine and desperation, factions emerged. There were threats of mutiny and all hope seemed to be lost. Eventually, the crew split off into groups, and the question is, would they make it off Wager Island alive? The Wager: A Tale Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder is out today. David Grann will be hosting a book event tonight at Barnes and Noble Union Square at 7:00 PM but he joins me now on publication day of the book. Happy pub day, David.

David Grann: Thank you. It's been a long journey, not quite as long and arduous as The Wager men went through, but it's been a long one.

Alison Stewart: Would you begin by reading from the prologue of your book?

David Grann: The only impartial witness was the sun. For days, it watched as a 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. It 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. About 50 feet long and 10 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 seep through the hull, and a stench emanated from within. The bystanders edging closer heard unnerving sounds. 30 men were crammed on board. Their bodies almost wasted 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 laugh 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 250 officers and crew had embarked from Portsmouth in a squadron on a secret mission to capture the 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 283 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 81 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 traveled through menacing gales and tidal waves through ice storms and earthquakes. More than 50 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 3000 miles, one of the longest castaway voyages ever recorded.

They were healed 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."

Alison Stewart: Tan, tan, tan, and there's more to come, which we will discuss. That was David Grann reading from The Wager. David, before you started this book, did you know starboard from earth, bow from stern, mast, jibs, battens?

David Grann: I had such a cursory understanding. I'd been on boats. I did know a bow and a stern, but that was about it. I had to learn an entirely new nautical language, and little did I know that so many of the idioms we have today derive from this age of sail. For example, the term scuttlebutt, which is on these warships, was just basically a barrel filled with water where seamen would gather around to get their water rations, but they would gossip, and piping hot was the boatswain's whistle for a hot meal.

On and on it went. I had to learn a whole new language, but not only did I have to learn a whole new language, I discovered how much of our language has been shaped by that language.

Alison Stewart: You also had to discover does the victor write history because there were histories of the shipwreck, but they differ greatly. Tell us a little bit about your first encounter with the history of The Wager. Then how some of the other encounters entered the picture and colored your view and how you would write the story.

David Grann: The most significant event that happened is that after that prologue I read that several months later, another little boat lost ashore. This time on the other side of South America, off of Chile. It's an even smaller, more battered craft and on board were only three men, one of whom was so delirious, he couldn't even recollect his name. After they recovered, they leveled the shocking allegation. They told a very different story that those other people who had gone to Brazil, were not actually heroes, they were mutineers.

It soon became clear that while on the island, they had descended into this real life, Lord of the Flies, with waring factions of murder, mutiny, and even cannibalism. Then when several of these people from boat groups come back to England after waging this war against the elements, they begin to wage a war over the truth because they are summoned to face the court marshal. If they don't tell a convincing tale, they could be hanged. My first discovery of this story was just one account from a midshipman who had been 16 years old on The Wager, whose name was John Byron.

Who would later go on to become the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron. Then I discovered these other accounts and as I began to read through these accounts and go to the archives, then I would come home and I would turn on the news and read the newspaper. I'd hear about alternative facts and allegations of fake news. Then I would go back to the archives, I'd be combing through these 18th-century documents and there would be disinformation and misinformation and even allegations of fake news.

Then I would come back home and there'd be a war over history here in the United States. What books could be taught? I'd go back to the archives, there'd be a war over this history. This weird story felt like a parable for our times. It was after digging into all these accounts that I said, "Well, this is a story that isn't only gripping, but I think tells us something."

Alison Stewart: It's interesting when you think about the men who were on the boat, 250 of them, but they were a motley crew to say. The least they were a great age difference. You write the individuals in The Wager, nearly all of them strangers to one another had been thrown together as if they were subjects in a whimsical experiment to test the limits of human sociability. What kind of men were joining these long-distance naval missions, these British naval missions?

David Grann: These ships were floating civilizations. All these strangers from all walks of life would be thrown together as young as possibly six and as old on The Wager that the cook was in his '80s. There would be aristocrats and dandy and city poppers and free black seamen. Somehow they need to be molded into a band of brothers. For this squad and the circumstances were especially challenging because many of the men were not volunteers. They were pressed into duty.

The squadron was sure to men and the British Admiralty send out these press gangs to essentially just round up men and boys who had the telltale signs of Mariners. Put them on these little vessels that were floating jails, bring them out to the ship for a perilous voyage that might last three years. They were so short of men, they took the extraordinary step of rounding up soldiers from a retirement home, some of whom were in their 60s and 70s. Many of them were missing an assortment of limbs and were so sick they needed to be lifted onto these ships on stretchers.

Alison Stewart: You also go into great detail the process of building a ship and getting it ready to sail during this time period, down to the details of the wood that was used. Why is this important context for the reader to understand the story?

David Grann: This is a civilization that is going to gradually break apart both physically the ship itself and the life on board the ship once the wreck occurs and also metaphorically. It was really important to show the world this floating world, the wooden world as they referred to it was like. These ships were in many ways the engineering marvels of their time. They were very sophisticated, remastered. Propelled by sale. They were lethal instruments and they were also the homes of sailors who had lived together in close quarters for years at a time.

Yet they were also very, very vulnerable because they were made mostly of perishable materials, which was wood, which was susceptible to storm, and sea, and worms, and rats, and termites. You name it.

Alison Stewart: David Grann is my guest. We're talking about his new book out today, The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. We'll have more with David. We'll talk about what was so difficult about navigating Cape Horn, what it was like when he actually traveled to Wager Island, and that real Lord of the Flies scene on the ground. This is All Of It.

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You're listening to All Of It on WNYC. I'm Alison Stewart. My guest this hour is David Grann. He is an author and New Yorker staff writer. His new book out today is called The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. David has a book event tonight at Barnes & Noble in Union Square at 7:00 PM. The Wager's journey, David, was to navigate Cape Horn or the tip of South America. It's notoriously a difficult sea to sail. First of all, what made it so difficult for sailors and why did The Wager have to go this route?

David Grann: The Wager was on a secret mission with this squadron to try to capture a Spanish galleon filled with so much treasure. It was known as "the prize of all the oceans." They needed to come around Cape Horn, which is at the very tip of the Americas, of South America. They were hoping to enter into the Pacific to eventually try to intercept this galleon, but the seas around Cape Horn are among, if not, the most notorious seas on earth. One of the reasons is that it's the only place where the seas travel uninterrupted around the entire globe without ever being impeded by land.

The waves and the forces of the sea accumulate power over 13,000 miles. A wave can dwarf a 90-foot mast. There are the strongest currents on earth there. Then, of course, there are the winds, which frequently blow at hurricane force and can accelerate 200 miles an hour. Herman Melville, who later rounded the Horn, compared it to a descent into hell in Dante's Inferno. When this squadron and The Wager begin to come around the horn, they are just battered by what one of them refers to as the perfect hurricane.

Alison Stewart: Makes you think Mother Nature doesn't want humans there, maybe. [laughs]

David Grann: Stay away. "Heaven helped those sailors whoever tried to go around," as Melville wrote.

Alison Stewart: You, being a good journalist, went to Wager Island for a three-week journey. When you got there, what were you looking for as a writer? Why did you want to be there? What did you want to see? What did you want to feel?

David Grann: I had spent about two years researching this book in archives and looking at documents, and there's a surprising trove of primary materials of diaries, journals, log books, and master books, which somehow survived this expedition to read through. I just began to be nulled by that doubt of, can I really understand what it was like on that island? Can I understand why they descended in that Lord of the Flies, unless I went there for myself? I found a Chilean captain to take me. I'd seen a photograph of the boat, which looked pretty big.

I was somewhat startled when I arrived off Chile Island, where the boat was got to depart on this 350-mile journey south to Wager Island, which is located in what is known as the Gulf of Pain. The boat was very small, but off we headed. Let me just tell you, immediately or pretty soon, I got a taste and a glimpse of these terrifying seas. The boat was just tossed about and I just had to basically sit down. If I stood, I would've been chucked and break a limb, so I just sat there with all my seasickness medicine and listened to Moby Dick on an audible, which I don't recommend.

It wasn't the most soothing thing to have done. Eventually, we did get to Wager Island. We go through the Gulf of Pain, we get to the island, and right away, I got a sense of just how cold, desolate, and wild the place it is. It was unrelentingly windy. It was barren. It was rainy. I was all bundled up in multiple layers, and yet I was still cold. Again, you have these insights when you make these journeys as foolish as they might seem, you guys suddenly realize, "Oh, my God, they must have all been suffering from hypothermia."

They just had scraps of clothing and here I was all bundled up. They had all described being able to find virtually no food, and I could find no food. There were no animals. There were a few mussels on the shore. We found some of the celery they ate, but that was about it. I began to understand why a British captain had described the island as a place where the soul of man dies in him. My soul would've died if I had to stay. [laughs]

Alison Stewart: From being there, do you think it was, this is a little bit of an essay question, the land, and the circumstances and the conditions that had people become feral and turn one another, or is that something innate in this group of people and the conditions just let it loose, ignited it?

David Grann: Yes, I think the situation is what accelerates it, in some ways, but it's not the sole factor. What is interesting about that island is it became this perfect laboratory to test the human condition under these very extreme circumstances. Slowly, almost inevitably, it begins to peel back the hidden nature of each person, and you begin to reveal something about them, both the good and the bad. There was something in this group, their frailties that made it a combustible mix when they were placed in those circumstances.

Alison Stewart: David Grann is the author of The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. You just mentioned, and you write about in the notes section, how much primary source material is still available amazingly. What does this say about these men, what they knew about this moment? That it needed to be documented? Was it a sense of some people journal for emotional regulation? From reading the documents, why were they writing all of this down?

David Grann: When they are on the island and they are holding these great, philosophical debates about what is the nature of leadership and duty, some of them begin to consider the prospect of mutiny, some of them begin to marauder and commit crimes. There are murders. Some succumb to cannibalism. They are even far, far away from the British Empire and the Admiralty, aware that if they ever get off this island, they may be judged. Even then, they are conscious of telling and shaping their story to write a story that can withstand the public attrition of a court marshal and a public scrutiny.

I thought that was remarkable. Some of them had got quills and paper off the ship before it sank on the island, and so they are keeping contemporaneous documents. They are signing petitions. You have people invoking such terms that would resonate with our own history with people saying life or liberty.

Alison Stewart: There are a few instances where the castaways come in contact with indigenous people of Patagonia. How did the tribes assist the castaways?

David Grann: This gets to your very question, was it something about the men or was it just the circumstances? A group of Patagonians known as Qawasqar arrived in canoes. These are native Patagonians who had lived in the region for centuries, had adapted to the region. They traveled mostly in small familial groups in canoes. They knew how to keep warm by always keeping fires going. More than that, they knew where to find marine resources to stay alive. When they show up, they offer the castaways the first lifeline

They begin to bring them back food and go out, but the spiraling violence, the racism among some of the castaways who look upon these people, and I'm using this in quotes, but this is what they would write in their accounts as savages, causes them to mistreat these people. Eventually, the Qawasqar look at the spiralling violence and chaos, and they're just like, "We're out of here." Who could blame them? They leave. After that, the castaways descend into a further obscene state of depravity.

Alison Stewart: Did you see the movie Triangle of Sadness?

David Grann: I have not yet seen it.

Alison Stewart: You understand why I'm asking? There's a scene where these very rich people, oligarchs and the like, the boat goes down and they end up stranded. Someone's money doesn't matter on the island. The person who can make a fire and catch fish matters. The way that the world changes based on what is necessary. I thought about it when I first started reading your book.

David Grann: What's interesting too, is there's a class struggle on the island, even among the castaways because the captain of the ship gets on the island and he believes he should still be the commander. He was the commander of the ship. In those days, you could really only be the commander of a warship for the most part, unless you came from the upper classes or the aristocracy. Yet in that democracy of suffering, could this other figure, a man named John Bulkeley, who was the gunner who did not come from the aristocracy, who could never have been a commander of a warship, could he suddenly emerge as commander in his own right?

He was an instinctive leader. You see this class struggle playing out far, far away.

Alison Stewart: In the movie, the chambermaid who grew up on an island becomes the captain on land. It's quite interesting. In our last moments, what was the public reaction when these two different stories, these two different tales of The Wager, arrived back in England?

David Grann: Yes, so there's this great war over the truth, and there is this disinformation, there is this misinformation, there are these fake journals that are circulated. As these two stories are fighting to see who prevail, those in power are listening to the stories, the Admiralty and the empire thinking, "Do we really like any of these stories? They make us look like brutes, not like gentlemen." Here it undercut the central claim for the British Empire why claim they could ruthlessly conquer other peoples, which is that its civilization was somehow superior.

This was a case study, obviously, just proving that. During this war over stories, you have not only the individuals fighting for which story will prevail, you also have the nation trying to manufacture its own mythic tale. One of the central themes of the book is that not only do people and individuals shape stories to serve their interests, but so do nations.

Alison Stewart: I also want to point out the book has already been optioned by Martin Scorsese. It's very exciting.

David Grann: It's very exciting. He and his team developed Killers of the Flower Moon, and could not have done a better job. I'm incredibly honored that they have expressed interest in developing The Wager.

Alison Stewart: The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder is out today. David Grann at the book event tonight at Barnes and Noble in Union Square at 7:00 PM. Thank you so much for spending part of your pub day with us.

David Grann: Thank you so much. It's my pleasure.

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