Sea Control - Sea Control 440 - The Wager with David Grann

Episode Date: June 29, 2023

Link:The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, by David Grann, Doubleday, April 18, 2023.

Hey folks, it's Jared. My guest today is number one New York Times bestselling author David Grand. We're going to discuss his latest, The Wager, A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder. Once again, looking for audio editors? If you're interested in learning how we put these podcasts together and think you're able to learn our basic editing skills, we'll teach you. Drop us a note at ccontrol at simsec.org. I'd like to pause here to highlight our local chapters, whether you're in South Korea, Egypt, Singapore, France, New York, India, or the Caribbean, chances are there's a SimSec local chapter near you. You can find a full listing of our chapters and contact information on the website, simsec.org, so if you're interested,

please reach out. Finally, I want to take the opportunity to recommend our partners in the SimSec Podcast Network, The Bilge Pumps. You can find Alex, Jamie, Drack, and a pile of iron brew bottles wherever you download your podcasts. And with that, Kimber's Men. Hello, off-shipmates, and welcome back aboard Sea Control. My guest today is number one New York Times bestselling author David Grand. So if you recognize the name, he's written The Lost City of Z, Killers of the Flower Moon. His latest is The Wager, A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder. David, welcome.

Normally, I would have the guests introduce themselves here, but I'm going to go slightly off script and say it. I initially reached out to you because I saw a book about maritime stuff, which is kind of what we talk about on the program here. And I didn't really connect the dots that I was not reaching out to David Grant author, but like David Grant, now like pop cultural phenomenon, because after I reached out to you, I started to get like see stuff come in through the other sort of feeds that I watch. And you showed up on a podcast that I listened to with Drew McGarry and David Roth. And then there was a profile about you in the ring. I was like, oh, oh, no. Normally the authors that I talk to, it's like are in a very niche sort of space and their works are not going to be widely read. Their works are excellent and like read in this very specific like maritime reviews like, oh, oh, right.

This guy's the number one New York Times bestselling author. So I'm going to jump sort of right into the questions here with the usual reminder to listeners. All opinions are not reflective of any institution with which we might be otherwise associated. But how did the wager and its crew come to your attention? So I had finished my book, Killers of the Flower Moon, and I was looking for a new idea for a book. And I didn't really know what it would be. As you kind of mentioned, I'm a generalist. So I kind of move from subject to subject rather than being, you know, a British naval historian, for example.

And I was looking into mutinies because it was a subject that had always interested me. um i always found them a very kind of particular kind of rebellion that takes place within the apparatus of the state um so what causes these instruments of order to suddenly disorder this was a subject that intrigued me and so i was just kind of generally reading about mutinies and somehow i found myself um in a you know archive and found a digital copy in england of an account written by um a midshipman john byron who had been 16 years old when the hms wager had set sail on this expedition and if the name is familiar i didn't know it then but john byron later became the grandfather of the poet lord byron whose poetry including don julian is greatly

influenced by this account i was now reading and initially when i was reading it you know was written in this old english the s's were printed as f's and it's kind of archaic and slightly tangled prose and and yet i kept pausing and being seized by these description of you know the perfect hurricane that's what john byron described the tempest around cape horn and the scurvy and the shipwreck and the mutiny and i soon realized that this you know old archaic account really held the clues to one of the more extraordinary tales of the sea and of survival and a mayhem I'd ever come across. So that was the first thing that got its hooks into me. What was the wager's mission, if you could describe that for the listeners?

Yeah, it was after an imperial war had broken out between Spain and Great Britain in 1739, uh the british authorities had um given orders uh for the wager to set sail with a squadron of other ships on a secret mission which was uh to sail around cape horn and then into the pacific and try to intercept a spanish galleon which was filled uh with plunder from the colonies and was filled with so much silver and jewels that the ship was known as the prize of all the ocean so believe it or not that was part of the military mission so now as you're reading this tale we'll talk about sort of that abject misery that everyone involved in endures at what point do you say to yourself i need to go on a boat and experience this myself it sounds horrendous

i need to go there and see it so yeah i spent about two years um just doing archival research and um you know being a generalist my learning curve is very high so you know i spent the first year just immersing myself in maritime literature and and developing a facility with the language of these ships in the 18th century, how they were built, how they were operated, the coded words used on the ship where everybody stood. And I was kind of telling the story or researching the story in a way that for anyone who knows me is most suited towards my kind of paltry physical attributes in archives

and museums. But after about two years, I began to have that gnawing doubt whether I could ever fully understand what these castaways had gone through unless I tried to go there myself and so that's when I made a kind of foolish decision which was all right I'm going to try to get to what is now known as wager island where the ship had wrecked and these castaways were and I found a Chilean captain who had a boat in Chilauea island which is about 350 miles north of what is now known as wager island off the coast of chile and the kind of patagonian side and uh you know the funny thing is they sent me a picture of the boat and the boat in the photograph when i was in new york look you know look pretty big

but when i finally got there it took many days to finally arrive on chile island and i got one look at the boat it was much smaller than it appeared in the photograph it was a wood heated boat um and it was fairly top heavy uh it really wasn't suited for the oceans it was kind of suited for the channels of Patagonia and at first you know we're supposed to set out right away but it was so stormy and so tempestuous that the Coast Guard had actually blockaded the port and we're not blockaded it literally but prevented any any ships from going out and so one day passed another day and another day I started wondering if I was ever going to even begin this journey and finally about the fourth or fifth day the Coast Guard let us slip

out we slipped out at dawn we went across a gulf that was fairly rough and then we entered into these channels which are kind of for the listeners who've been to patagonia you know that all these kind of islets they'll know kind of fractured coastline and you kind of weave between these islands and when you do so you're actually fairly shielded uh from the ocean so it's actually fairly calm it was very chillingly beautiful after after a day or so you know we didn't see another boat or another soul. And we would stop at these little islands and the captain and the crew would get off and they would cut down wood for our stove. It was wintertime. That's how we'd heat the boat and cook. And then they would also hook up a little hose up to the glacial streams.

That's how we got water for the boat. And we did this for about five days. And that's when the captain said to me, well, now, you know, if we're going to get the wager out and we have to go out into the ocean we're actually following in reverse a path that some of the castaways trying to escape from wager island taking and we hit out of the ocean that i got my first glimpse of these fairly terrifying seas and it wasn't even that stormy out compared to certainly what the men of wager had gone through uh but you know we were just being tossed about the waves you know it's like a mountain of water in front of us and behind us i just had to sit on the deck in the cabin because if he stood, you might break a limb.

I'd taken all these. I don't really get seasickness, but I had taken every seasick medicine known to man possible. And I listened to an audio recording of Moby Dick, which in retrospect was not the most soothing thing to have done. Beautiful book, but not the best thing to listen to in stormy seas. But eventually that captain was very capable. He led us through what is known as the Gulf of Sorrows,

or some prefer to call it the Gulf of Pain. and we get to wager island and the island remains this place of wild desolation no people kind of unrelentingly windy constantly raining or sleeting and as the castaways found we found virtually no food and making that journey was so important i don't describe my own trip to the island in terms of my own experience but it breathes so much life and understanding into my narrative. And I could, after doing that journey, finally understand why this British officer had described the island as this place where the soul of man dies in him. Now, you mentioned having reviewed maritime literature to prepare yourself to, as part of

your research process, what kind of stuff were you reading? Well, kind of a multiplicity of things. I mean some was um you know a lot of primary materials a lot you know there is a surprising amount of primary source documents that survived this expedition which is kind of unbelievable to think about you know some of these documents went around the world some survived shipwreck you know they survived typhoons and you know you can you can access them in archives in england you know they come out of these boxes and you know they're from the you know 1740s and uh you know the bindings are disintegrating and they're water stained and you kind of breathe in a cloud of dust and yet you can read them and you know the log books for example are kind of day-to-day

reconstruction of of what uh these men and boys went through uh on the executive vision so the you know so these books and the muster books and the letters they're really the kind of the bedrock and the foundation of the book but i read a lot of wonderful works of history um you know brian lavery uh who really you know i mentioned my name because he was so uh helpful to me in understanding how ships were built um uh and loaded at the time um i read all his works he taught me um daniel bow who uh another uh great naval historian who really knows probably wrote it's in a book about kind of that era of the British Admiralty. So I read his works. And of course, I tried to read a lot of accounts by other seamen, any seaman who had written any

firsthand accounts or had journals from the 18th century, and even later to just kind of understand what life was like on that ship from their point of view, what the food was like, what it was like to kind of sleep and live together in those close quarters? How did they operate the ships? But there are, and I list many of them in the kind of long bibliography of the book for listeners who are interested, but there's just so many wonderful source material

and people who are real experts. And so I always say that books are built on other books and I'm very grateful to those other works. And I'll also just add that literature also, I read a lot of literature, You know, even though I wasn't necessarily always using them as primary material, but, you know, Patrick O'Brien's novels and and, of course, Melville's work. And Melville was really one of the great kind of social anthropologists of life at sea. And so even though it's a slightly later period, so many of his books, not just Mopedeck, were extraordinarily helpful.

Yeah, the other thing I would say about Melville is that you mentioned that a lot of his experience comes later. But fundamentally, life at sea did not change for a period of a couple hundred years. There were not massive advances in technology until you start to see the introduction of steam and things like that. But what was your own relationship with the sea prior to beginning your research? You mentioned your experience with seasickness prior to this year, but did you grow up near the water? I did, actually. I grew up on the water and the sea for me has always kind of been a balm to some degree. I grew up by Long Island Sound, so it's not quite like the seas that they all went through. My dad was actually a sailor, so I had experience on boats.

But, you know, the boats that we sailed on were obviously very different than, you know, a warship or a man o' war from the 18th century. So I had experience, you know, of that. And I've always had a love of sea tales and a love of the sea. So I think that also was part of the thing that drew me to the story, even though it's very different than anything I had written about. And certainly, you know, despite that kinship with the sea, you know, very different than anything I've ever experienced at sea. You mentioned your dad was a sailor. What did he do? Was he a fisherman or? He was a sailor. We did some fishing, too, but, you know, he just loved he loved to sail. So we always had, you know, anywhere between a 20-foot to a 30-foot, you know, 35-foot sailboat.

You know, they got bigger as he got older and had a little more resources. And so we would sail, you know, across Long Island Sound. I spent a lot of time in my youth, you know, being his first mate, and it was often just the two of us. So now you've done all this archival research. but you understand sort of what you're headed for from a weather perspective, or at least what the most extreme version of the weather could be. What is the screening process like for this Chilean captain that you've never met? Are you just relying on an agent to find you his cousin?

Well, you know, I had found a reference from a scientific exploration society who put me in touch with somebody who helped me find the captain. And so I can't say my screening process was very rigorous, but it came through others. So I felt confident. And I will say the Chilean captain was really capable. He really was. I, you know, as unpleasant as it was at times, I always felt confident. You know, you know when, you know, if you've been at sea, you know when a captain is a true seaman and has confidence and control.

So the boat was not really designed for those seas, which is what made it so challenging. But he always instilled confidence. I always felt like he was in control and knew what he was doing. Okay. I did not mean to cast dispersions on the captain himself. I just. Yeah. Yeah.

No, but you should cast dispersions on my screening process because I tend to do these expeditions very haphazardly. So I feel somewhat fortunate that it all worked out so well. it's a credit to him but not a credit to my searching process possibilities the way i search for it now i've read lost city of z and killers of the flower moon and now this book but what is it about human misery that you find so fascinating or is it just coincidence that all three of these are like yeah these are absolutely terrible experiences or that is it just make for a good story i mean i think there's a certain professional interest that you know if you're just kind of

sitting on an island uh you know drinking a margarita on a caribbean coastline uh you know it's a it's a much less dramatic exciting adventure but i i think it's it's a little bit deeper than that i think each of these stories kind of reveals something larger about the human condition you know it's often on these it's often when humans find themselves in these extreme circumstances circumstances that are not easily conquerable circumstances that they sometimes put themselves in through their own folly or delusions or illusions or dreams or corrosive ambition that we kind of test the human condition and so many of these stories i thought are kind of you know they they are like they they they act as almost laboratories

of of of the human condition and kind of you get to see kind of slowly and inevitably um kind of peeling back i guess uh of human nature and and you get to see both the good and the bad and those you know you see the triumphant you see the great sacrifice you see the gallantry, and then you can often see just shocking acts of brutality and the breakdown of order and civilization and society. And so I think that is partly what draws me to these very different expeditions, adventures, or stories that are very different in nature, but I think all in some ways hold up a mirror to kind of who we are as people. so from my perspective a lot of the book was written from the ship's gunner's perspective

the ship's gunner is named bulkley and he's kind of the for lack of a better term i would call him the lead mutineer here for classifying this as a mutiny and cheap and byron are very prominent too byron you mentioned already here i can't remember exactly what cheap's role was um it's been a couple weeks since i actually finished the book here but was that just a function of available source material because you mentioned very early on as you're describing sort of bulkley's account bulkley was uh what do you call someone who writes in a journal it's like certainly not a journalist but he's like he's a he's a diarist he's a diarist he was a compulsive diarist yes yeah he was he writes down everything that happens to him sort of as it's happening or

everything that he's doing sort of as it's happening we would call that a c lawyer as well too because part of paper documentation here was that just a function of available source material or what was it that drew you to bulkley's perspective if you will yeah so i think um you know obviously there is a kind of practical element whenever you tell these stories that you know you need underlying materials for and the way i want to tell these stories in this kind of hopefully vivid way that gets close as possible to other people's lives and documenting them recording them um you know you need you need you need these kind of underlying materials so part of that being drawn in as a practical reason but um i had decided to structure this book in a

very unusual way um in a way i never really structured a book this way which was told from the perspective almost the warring perspectives three people on board the ship and um one was david sheep as you mentioned and he is the one who kind of because he becomes the captain of the wager and the interesting thing back at the cheap is he's somebody who's always kind of frustrated on shore and kind of plagued by debts um and yet he'd always found refuge in the wooden world of a ship and on this expedition he finally finally obtained what he had always longed for which is he becomes captain of his own ship um of course until the wreckage um so obviously writing about his perspective is key because he will become the captain who is trying to hold on to order

and his command on the island um then there's john bolkley and john bolkley is a remarkable figure because he was a compulsive diarist what's interesting was he didn't come from the aristocracy yet he was highly literate we don't know exactly what class he was from but probably a lower middle class he was a gunner on the ship he knew that uh kind of in that class structure at the time he was not going to become a commander or ship um yet suddenly on that island in that kind of democracy of suffering you know he has a chance to emerge as a leader in his own right and you have for lack of a better term they wouldn't use this phrase but there's a bit of a class struck a class uh struggle on the island between cheap and and bulkley as well and so having those

two competing accounts is so they are the two kind of pivotal figures so both the records are there and then of course the third perspective is john byron and john byron being just 16 at the time of the void set out um he has kind of a romantic view of the sea before he leaves uh and yet you know, then he encounters one horror after the other. He also writes a very vivid, detailed account, which you can draw on. And in many ways, he is kind of our eyes and ears onto this bewildering world, because he's just kind of a boy trying to navigate this. And so going back and forth between those three perspectives, you get to see how we often tell stories. And we often try to emerge as the hero of our own story. And each of them is trying to emerge as the hero of

their own story, to live with the things they have done or haven't done. And I think by doing that and by alternating these perspectives, we also get a better sense of what the truth actually is. You know, one of them may say on the island, I was forced to proceed to extremities. And then you suddenly cut to the next thing and say, oh yeah, I shot him right in the head. And by just opposing those, we get a better sense of each person and each character. Why did they leave out? What did they include? And through those perspectives, hopefully we get closer to the truth. So you're choosing three people that are all essential to the story. They are all key figures. And thankfully from historical, from historians' point of view, they also left behind

materials that lets us narrate their perspectives. I guess, where did you come down on who is the most reliable narrator? Because you said everyone wants to be the hero of their own story. That is certainly true for Cheap and for Bulkley. I did not come away having read Byron's account necessarily feeling that he was trying to be the hero of his own story. He mentions multiple points where he failed and sort of struggled with his failure in some of his decisions. So I guess I felt like Byron was probably the most reliable of the two, but he also had maybe a little less at stake as he's relating this here because he's not facing what Bulkley is necessarily facing. Yes. Yeah, I think he is, you know, in many ways, reliable, certainly relatable. And he describes his own kind of struggle, kind of which side is right, and kind of his own consciousness.

but they each come from a different place in society a different part of the ship and so they're they're all shaped by their own ambitions and dreams and certainly they influence Byron who hopes to still have a career in the navy hopes to rise to become an officer and so clearly those those forces are kind of at work in his narrative and a work upon him as well and his own kind of romantic view you know of himself uh more childlike but um and more innocent in a way um and what's striking about him to me uh is that you know he's somebody who has to come of age he's i mean he's coming of age it's like a coming of age story amid somebody you know not only among the horror of the natural elements but also the horrors of of of humanity

at times as his own shipmates turn on each other now if there's a quote-unquote celebrity that emerges out of this it's actually none of the characters that we've mentioned so even Byron you know it's his grandson who kind of becomes a celebrated Lord Byron here I would say it's Commodore Anson who the wager is part of a larger squadron of ships that set sail here it's like can you explain what eventually happens here with Commodore Anson what he does is his ship makes it through sort of on its own and uh what what becomes of him yeah so the squadron um you know is coming around cape horn and you know just battered by storms suffering one of the worst scurvy outbreaks ever recorded maritime history hundreds and hundreds of the men have perished

their bodies thrown overboard the ships are all struggling to stay together and yet eventually they all kind of scatter in this storm and the wager ends up wrecking and a couple ships turn back and um but really astonishing and remarkably and a tribute um to commodore anson's abilities as a commander um he really has these kind of shackletonian qualities for people familiar with shackleton he manages uh with his ship the flagship the centurion to continue on and ultimately after a while it's the only really ship left on the mission and you know it's depleted of men but it forges on and it manages remarkably to hunt down the spanish galleon off the coast of the philippines and after a naval battle manages to seize it and capture this prize

worth about more than 80 million dollars in today's money and so he returns to england in what had really been a disastrous war and, in many ways, just a disastrous expedition in terms of cost and life. But England at that time, you know, the authorities were kind of desperate for some news of a victory and success seized upon this story,

and he is celebrated in ballads and songs and tales and also kind of authorized as an account, which becomes really one of the biggest selling works of travel literature of the 18th century and really influences many other writers and philosophers um so he kind of emerges in a way as the hero of the story in the sense that he's the hero in particular that the great britain wants for the story because it gives them something to celebrate and i think they're at least in some ways commodore anson faced the most difficult lead i don't know his most difficult leadership decision i'm trying to think about a frame this

but after years literal years of this expedition which he's lost hundreds of people he's got barely enough sailors left to sort of handle this vessel that he still has and then he turns him and says nope we're going for the treasure ship it's like i know you all thought that we were going home but we are going to turn and go for the treasure ship i thought that was actually one of the more interesting leadership decision in the boat i can't fathom getting up in front of people who have suffered that much and tell them it's like i know you thought we were all going home yes we're going to continue on to this yeah well and and and to me you know this the you know when you you tell a story because it's it's obviously a you know gripping and it it seizes you but

you really want it to be about all these kind of other rich themes and um and you know one of the rich themes in this book it's a study of leadership and what is the nature of leadership and you have a study of captain sheep and you know both his his flaws kind of makes him a flawed leader on the island and you have bulkley who has these kind of instinctive leadership abilities um and but also his flaws and then you also see obviously someone like uh anson and kind of what makes him successful and there's kind of a really interesting moment where for a for a a period of time um many of the ants and many of the men from the ship had gone on to an island in the pacific and their flagship gets blown out to sea and they think it has been uh uh lost and sank and so they

are marooned on this island and you get to witness how anson kind of handles that situation how he commands the men and holds them together now it's a much less period of time than the men have been on the wager but nonetheless you see that he is somebody who has those marks of leadership that are very distinctive um and that make a good leader you know the stereotype you know which i had which is you know dispelled when you when you read this the literature this period was the kind of captain who ruled by the lash in the 18th century and certainly there were some of those i mean they were notorious but they were less common than the stereotype would suggest because they weren't very successful commanders and nobody wanted to go to sea with them

and the most successful commanders were those who kind of you know cajoled and sympathized and inspired and led by example and you you see that by anson in those moments and he kind of even ignores the kind of you know some of the stifling hierarchical elements were working side by side with the men in that moment when they're on the island and so you see some of those marks of a leader right final question for you it's a pretty simple one it won't take very long just like did you actually find and eat any of the wild celery on wager island that eventually stopped the scurvy outbreak that was one note that i actually made in the book as i was going through i was like i wonder if you actually ate some of this i certainly did yes i got to the

island i i visited the area of the encampment and uh uh and yes found these sprouts of some very little things to eat on the island and and this and the castaways you know they didn't understand what caused scurvy back then um but they ate some celery which they noted mysteriously it kind of cured their their scurvy and of course it has some vitamin c in it um near that encampment um uh at one point um one of the people in our group pointed to an icy stream and in that icy stream i could see these timbers that were about five yards long they were bound together with these kind of wooden nails these wooden pegs holding them together um and they are the remnants of an 18th century ship believed to be from his majesty ship uh the wager and we knew what they

were uh because the scientific exploration society um had led an expedition about a decade earlier it was a joint Chilean a joint British Chilean expedition um and that's all that remains of that kind of furious struggle that once took place there all those ravaging dreams of empire um and so that was something else I saw and I just couldn't help but just stare at them in astonishment and after you know all these years of kind of documenting the sound and the fury the only sound i i really heard when i stood there was that eternal hush of the sea that's incredible david uh thank you so much for coming on today i understand this has also been picked up to uh be turned into a feature film so i look forward to seeing it hopefully it doesn't suffer all the

sort of notorious issues that come from shooting on the water as we go back through history and look at all the difficulties, whether it's Waterworld, JAWS, or whatever, but hopefully it'll have a smoother transition to the big screen. I know where we can find you online. You're very easy to find there, but what are you working on next? What's going to be your next project? I'm looking for a new book idea. So to me, that's always the hardest thing, finding something that will get its hooks into me and take me on usually a half-decade journey. So if any listeners have a good idea, please let me know. Absolutely. Well, thank you again for joining us. To listeners, thanks for tuning in. We'll see you next time. Thank you.

A porter of, and a porter of gin, oh, where can I put it in the alley? A porter of wine, of white and red, oh, put it on the shimbo now. So help me, oh, I'm putting it in the alley. Where can I put it in the alley? Help me, oh, I'm putting it in the alley. Put it on the shimbo now.