The truth that the shipwreck of the 'Wager' still hides

BarcelonaAbout thirty emaciated men, some of whom can barely stand, arrive on a rickety boat to the southwestern coast of Brazil. The crew claim to be the only survivors of the Wager, a British warship that had left Portsmouth almost two years earlier with more than 250 officers and sailors. In 1742, almost a year after the ship went missing south of Chile, the reappearance of part of the expedition is considered a miracle.

Six months after this feat, another vessel, smaller and in an even more deplorable state than the first, arrives southwest of Chile. Three men are traveling, half-knotted and emaciated, and a cloud of insects is nibbling at the little flesh they have left. When they have recovered and are back in England, they accuse their companions from the ship that had previously arrived in Brazil: those survivors are not heroes, but a group of mutineers who must be judged for having risen up against the captain of the ship. Wager.

Which of the two factions is right? This is one of the questions that David Grann tries to answer in his latest book, The castaways of the Wager (Ahora Libros / Literatura Random House, 2025; Catalan translation by Àlex Guardia). Grann (New York, 1967) proposes a journey to the mid-18th century to delve into the reasons of the two groups of crew members and into an adventure story peppered with ruthless violence, plots, cannibalism and devastating diseases such as scurvy. "I would never have thought that I would write anything about warships or about islands lost in remote corners of the geography," he admits. David Grann telematically from his home.

Behind him, on a small table, he has a copy of The infinite joke, of David Foster Wallace, the 1,500-page novel he is now reading and which gives a clue to his working method. "When I left current affairs journalism I realised that being the first to get somewhere was not the most important thing, but rather what counts is the degree of depth in what you explain," he says. "Just as I have not opened The infinite joke Until almost three decades after it was published, I did not learn the story of the Wager until relatively recently, and it was by chance, while looking for inspiration after Killers of the flower moon"It was 2017, the beginning of the editorial journey of that investigation where I denounced the silent massacre to which the Osage indigenous nation was subjected at the beginning of the 20th century, shortly after oil pockets were discovered in the lands where they lived. That story ended up motivating Martin Scorsese's film The killers of the moon (2023), starring Leonardo DiCaprio and Robert De Niro.

Succumb to weaknesses

It was while digging through a British digital archive that David Grann found the diary of one of the ship's crew, midshipman John Byron. After overcoming this maritime nightmare, Byron had seven daughters and two sons: one of them gave birth to George Byron, one of the best-known romantic poets of the 19th century, who went down in history as Lord Byron"I was very pleased to be able to record that some of the passages from John's diary appear in his grandson's work, transformed into epic verses," explains David Grann. As he read the midshipman's story, the author From The Castaways of the Wager contrasted him with the version of another of the crew members, the gunner John Bulkeley. "None of the characters involved in this story represents pure evil, and I think that is the grace," says Grann. "From a certain point in their lives they find themselves in a limiting situation that puts them to the test and from which they believe they will not be able to escape. They have strong points and weak points. or the logic of power, they end up making everything worse."

The Wager The Spanish galleon set sail from Portsmouth in September 1740, along with five other warships. Their objective was to plunder a Spanish galleon full of riches – including silver, silks, spices and raw materials from Asia – in the midst of the struggle between the two colonial powers to achieve hegemony in the Caribbean during the so-called War of Jenkins' Ear (1739-1748). "If they managed to capture the enemy, they would weaken Spanish control over the Pacific coast," says Grann.

During the voyage, the death of the first captain of the Wager, Dandy Kidd – descendant of the fearsome privateer William Widd – had David Cheap take over his command. In the book he is described as a "corpulent man of forty who was fleeing from the quarrels with his brother over inheritance issues, from the creditors who pursued him and from the debts that prevented him from finding a suitable woman." The British squadron wanted to surprise the Spanish positions on the Isthmus of Panama; to do so, they had to go down the Atlantic to Cape Horn and go up the Pacific, but they arrived at one of the worst times of the year, at the end of the southern summer, when the winds blow the strongest and the storms are most virulent. The Wager The ship was cut off from the other ships by bad weather and crashed between two rocks. "At the time of the shipwreck, there were just over a hundred members of the expedition left," says Grann. "A good number of the rest had died as a result of a terrible outbreak of scurvy: it was like a storm within a storm."

Maintaining order or reinventing it

The survivors swam to a small desert island off the coast of Chile, which they would eventually name after the ship. "On the island, the differences between Cheap and Bulkeley grew," says the author ofThe castaways of the Wager–. The captain has a heroic side because he tries to maintain order in this extreme situation, but he clings perhaps too tightly to the military hierarchy, and this ends up working against him. Gunner Bulkeley, on the other hand, realises that this is the opportunity of a lifetime: until then he has felt unjustly marginalised and has done everything possible to get ahead and get to where he is." roles that during the expedition by boat", or "to subvert it, as John Bulkeley proposes, with the promise of offering more freedom to his companions". Between the vision of the captain and that of the gunner who plots the mutiny is the key figure of John Byron: "He has to go through this extreme experience. He is only seventeen years old. He must decide what it means to be loyal and what it means to rebel."

On the island, thefts, punishments and conspiracies lead to some bloody executions, acts of cannibalism and the unrelenting hatred between the two sides of the Wager. Both sides will explain their version of events when they reach dry land. "Underneath the surface of the book, which tells a story of survival and resistance, there is a much more current theme, which is the battle to impose a narrative," says David Grann. "In this sense, what I explain in The castaways of the Wager It is almost a parable of what we are currently experiencing, with the fight between information, fake news and the credibility we give or not to witnesses." Grann recalls that there are several examples of how "human lives are reconfigured through literature": the "real" castaway Alexander Selkirk inspired Daniel Defoe a novel like Robinson Crusoe (1719); John Byron's diary filled some of Lord Byron's verses with veracity; the experiences on board various ships lived by Herman Melville motivated him to dedicate novels of an autobiographical nature such as Redburn (1849).

"As a child I had read Herman Melville with interest and Joseph Conrad –Grann admits–. Later I became interested in the concept of riot, applied to how to rebel against the established order. In the case ofThe castaways of the Wager It has its peculiarities, because it occurs in a military structure: the Wager It was a ship of the English army."

In 2023, before publishing the book in the United States, Grann received "the excellent news" that Martin Scorsese and Leonardo DiCaprio bought the rights to adapt it to film afterThe killers of the moon, although no further details have been revealed at the moment. "In principle, the team that will work on The castaways of the Wager must be the same as that ofThe killers..., and that fills me with pride," says the author.

A previous book by Grann, The Lost City of Z, was already adapted on the big screen by James Grey (2017). "A The Lost City of Z I focused on a British explorer who was searching for the city of El Dorado in the Amazon at the beginning of the 20th century –he recalls–. The killers of the moon I was investigating the silenced massacre of Osage Indians in the 1920s. Here I go further back than ever, to the 18th century. All three books have in common that their characters seek to unmask the truth. It is more complex, disturbing and uncomfortable than you imagine.