Seawater seeped through the hull, and a stench emanated from within. Its sails were shredded, its boom shattered. More than fifty feet long and ten 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. Yet 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. Once or twice, the vessel nearly smashed into a reef, which might have ended our story. For days, it watched as the strange object heaved up and down in the ocean, tossed mercilessly by the wind and the waves. During the chaotic voyage, he was promoted to captain of the Wager and, at long last, fulfilled his dream of becoming a lord of the sea-that is, until the wreck. In this excerpt, of the book’s prologue and first chapter, Grann introduces David Cheap, a burly, tempestuous British naval lieutenant. To better understand what the castaways had endured on the island, which is situated in the Gulf of Sorrows-or, as some prefer to call it, the Gulf of Pain-he travelled there in a small, wood-heated boat. (Byron was the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, who drew, in “ Don Juan ,” on what he referred to as “my grand-dad’s ‘Narrative.’ ”) Grann set out to reconstruct what really took place, and spent more than half a decade combing through the archival debris: the washed-out logbooks, the moldering correspondence, the partly truthful journals, the surviving records from the court-martial. In 2016, Grann, a staff writer at the magazine and the author of “ Killers of the Flower Moon ” and “ The Lost City of Z ,” stumbled across an eyewitness account of the voyage by John Byron, who had been a sixteen-year-old midshipman on the Wager when the journey began.
They each attempted to shade a scandalous truth-to erase history. Years later, several survivors made it back to England, where, facing a court-martial and desperate to save their own lives, they gave wildly conflicting versions of what had happened. The men, marooned on a desolate island, descended into murderous anarchy. ” It tells the extraordinary saga of the officers and crew of the Wager, a British naval warship that wrecked off the Chilean coast of Patagonia, in 1741. All of these elements converge in David Grann’s upcoming book, “ The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. A war over the truth and who gets to write history.
0 kommentar(er)
