![]() And I could find no record of what happened to him. Duck survives the scurvy outbreak, the shipwreck, and the mad castaway voyage, yet he was kidnapped and sold into slavery. This is a story about stories, and there are some that can’t be told because of systemic racism and horrendous systems. John Duck, the free Black seaman on board. That said, you understand that these circumstances are so extreme and challenging so what you really ask yourself and try to judge is “What would I have done? How would I have measured up?”Īnd you don’t know so that’s what haunts you. You say, “What the hell are you doing” and you recoil at the foolhardiness and folly and the all-consuming ambition and the violence. I’m asking about you as a person, not a writer. Do you personally step back and judge them?Ĭheap was driven by ambition and by ideas of honor and sacrifice and that his story would be sung throughout history. But it’s only together as a kaleidoscope that you understand what the hell happened and get closer to the truth. He often served as our eyes into this world as he’s trying to make sense of it. He’s coming of age amid all these horrors. Rather than the pretentious prose you get from the officers, you get verbs doing action in strong, short, clear active prose.īyron is caught in the middle, and because he was a boy he was more innocent as he was watching this. But we know more of his thoughts than anybody because he was such a compulsive diarist and a very modern writer. And because he wasn’t an aristocrat he couldn’t afford to have a portrait done so he’s this figure who bursts into history but we don’t even know what he looks like. Cheap lacked the ability to cajole, sympathize, keep people together and inspire.īulkeley was not from the aristocracy, more likely he was lower-middle class, and he could never rise to captain of a ship because of the class system. But he lacked the instinctive abilities of leadership in these situations. Had fate dealt him a different hand and put him on another voyage he could have been fine. ![]() So when I was with David Cheap, with all his churning ambitions and insecurities and rigidness.īack on land, his life was filled with frustrations and disappointment and this was his chance to prove himself to the world that he was worthy and a great leader. When you’re writing from someone’s perspective, even when they do something shockingly bad, you hear them justifying and explaining their actions and you feel for them on some level. I’m not trying to absolve anyone, just to understand them. I structured it from the perspective of these three main figures – the captain David Cheap, the gunner, John Bulkeley, and the midshipman, John Byron – to show how each is shading the story to try and emerge as the hero. Could you relate to each of the main players? This interview has been edited for length and clarity. (For example, sick seamen don’t serve on deck, but are sent below to get out of the elements and rest so they are literally “under the weather.”) He recounts and analyzes the politics on land and onboard the ships as well as the dangers of the journey and how the vocabulary of sailing has permeated the language. Grann, who recently spoke by video surrounded by his voluminous notes and a model of The Wager, dives deep into the maritime world of that era. Related: Sign up for our free newsletter about books, authors, reading and moreĪs David Grann recounts in his gripping new book, “The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder,” neither group expected to see the other alive – and their competing stories created a new round of complications. Then, astonishingly, another three men turned up alive, including the captain and a young man whose grandson, the poet Lord Byron, would write about these exploits in “Don Juan.” It got worse from there: scurvy, typhoons, a shipwreck, murder and cannibalism and mutiny.Įventually, 81 men set out from where the crew had been stranded on a makeshift ship for a 3,000-mile journey that killed nearly two-thirds of them their survival was hailed as a miracle. Things went awry before they even left as the ships had trouble finding willing and able men. In 1740, a warship called The Wager left England as part of a fleet looking to make war with Spain in South America and capture a galleon holding millions in treasure.
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