Speaker 1: If this is the me Eater podcast coming at you, shirtless, severely,
Speaker 1: bug bitten, and in my case, underwear, listencast. You can't
Speaker 1: predict anything presented by First Light, creating proven versatile hunting
Speaker 1: apparel from Marino bass layers to technical outerwear. For every hunt,
Speaker 1: First Light, Go Farther, Stay Longer, Good Lord. David Grant
Speaker 1: is here staff writer at New Yorker Magazine, number one
Speaker 1: New York Times bestselling author of, among other books, the
Speaker 1: book I'm probably most jealous of because it was one
Speaker 1: of those books you just see so much you get
Speaker 1: sick of seeing it. The Lost City of z I mean,
Speaker 1: how what a huge success?
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah it was.
Speaker 3: It was.
Speaker 2: It was a big success. You would have done much
Speaker 2: better on your journey through the Amazon, and I get
Speaker 2: that way, Yeah, it would have been a totally different
Speaker 2: book had you done it.
Speaker 1: The Los Cities, the Killers of the Flower Moon, the
Speaker 1: oce Age Murders, and the Birth of the fbi Ano
Speaker 1: They're like just huge book, Los Cities. He became a movie,
Speaker 1: So some people are probably sitting there being like, is
Speaker 1: that a movie?
Speaker 2: There's a movie? Yes?
Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, uh, Killers of Power Moon becoming.
Speaker 2: A movie, becoming a movie be out in October.
Speaker 1: Perhaps you've heard of uh fellers like Martin Scorsese, Leo DiCaprio,
Speaker 1: de Niro. I don't know. Maybe those names are ring
Speaker 1: a bell. These are people who would be affiliated with.
Speaker 4: This.
Speaker 1: But the one that makes me most jealous is a
Speaker 1: lot of jealousy in the room today, Stergil Simpson. I
Speaker 1: didn't know this, ty. I read it in Krin's note.
Speaker 4: Yeah, I saw that in there.
Speaker 1: What the hell is he doing?
Speaker 2: That's you know, Scorsese loves his musicians. So you have
Speaker 2: and you have Adjason is spell too is another great
Speaker 2: they're both terrific in it too. And yeah they're they're terrific.
Speaker 2: I don't know if any of them acted before. They're fantastic.
Speaker 1: Oh that's great, man. But what we're here taught about
Speaker 1: is uh David Grand's latest book, The Wager, the Tail
Speaker 1: of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. Just as a quick little
Speaker 1: just a quick little thing that we got. We got
Speaker 1: to touch on a couple of quick things and we'll
Speaker 1: come back to you.
Speaker 2: I was.
Speaker 1: The I could tell this amused you too. I was
Speaker 1: amused by Uh. Well, first I say, you know, it's
Speaker 1: a tail of shipwreck, So it involves ships. Obviously. How
Speaker 1: many things we say today are nautical terms.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there there's so many there. It's kind of wonderful.
Speaker 2: It's like and I had no idea how I did
Speaker 2: this book. So, I mean, there are just so many ones. There's,
Speaker 2: for example, scuttle butt, Yeah, scuttle but with this barrel
Speaker 2: on the ship where the seamen would gather around they
Speaker 2: get their water rations, what would they do around their breath?
Speaker 2: They gossip? The other one that really well, there were
Speaker 2: so many there was like piping hot was the Boson's
Speaker 2: whistle for a hot meal. Pipe down was the Bosn's whistle.
Speaker 2: To quiet down under the weather. Under the weather is
Speaker 2: the best. I mean, I always just let under the weather.
Speaker 2: It was this perfect metaphor for sickness, but it turns
Speaker 2: out it's completely literal. When you were on a ship
Speaker 2: and you were sick, you could not serve on deck
Speaker 2: on watch, so you stayed below. You were quite literally
Speaker 2: under the weather. And perhaps the most popular one was
Speaker 2: was to turn a blind eye, which was when Vice
Speaker 2: Admiral Horatio Nelson wanted to ignore his superior's signal flag
Speaker 2: to retreat in battle, he took his telescope and he
Speaker 2: put it up to his blind eye. So that's why
Speaker 2: we say, to turn a blind die to this thing. Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like it's look that it's tied to, it's
Speaker 1: tied to an actual person.
Speaker 2: Yeah yeah.
Speaker 1: I Unfortunately, once I knew where they all came from,
Speaker 1: I felt weird that I use them all without knowing
Speaker 1: what I'm saying. Yeah, what am I? What was I saying?
Speaker 1: I don't know, I knew what I meant, But the
Speaker 1: fact that you could live your whole life with an
Speaker 1: expression and it never occurs to say when I say that,
Speaker 1: what am I talking about?
Speaker 2: I think that's always just because this is like another
Speaker 2: example of like how history completely shapes us even more
Speaker 2: utterly oblivious to it.
Speaker 1: Uh someone, Yeah, we're gonna get this story has Oh
Speaker 1: it's just it just turns into uh, just a sickening
Speaker 1: just sickening aspects to the story. Heartbreaking. But some people
Speaker 1: live to tell the tale. So and not only that
Speaker 1: they live to tell the tale, they live to argue
Speaker 1: about the tale. And we're gonna get pretty heavy into
Speaker 1: into this story of the Wager in a couple minutes,
Speaker 1: so we'll come right back to that. But we got
Speaker 1: a couple things to hit on in the This is
Speaker 1: now the fourth time we've discussed the fifth time. Actually
Speaker 1: this might be the this might be the end. Yeah,
Speaker 1: I think you're honest. If you honestly, I don't know.
Speaker 5: If I've been in these conversations.
Speaker 1: A lot of companies came out and and just and
Speaker 1: have recently distanced themselves from kangaroo leather. And so we've
Speaker 1: been talking about where how all this kangaroo leathers generated
Speaker 1: in Australia and how just the the geopolitics around kangaroo leather.
Speaker 1: And we were talking, someone was saying that it's not
Speaker 1: a popular food item, all right.
Speaker 4: That was Morgan on the Cape Buffalo.
Speaker 1: Yeah he was from That's right. We had a genuine Australian. Yeah, say,
Speaker 1: it's not a you know, I grew up in Australia.
Speaker 1: It's not a common food item. This guy says, I
Speaker 1: am Australian and currently we have kangaroo tenderloins in supermarkets.
Speaker 1: He eats it every week. He says, one reason why
Speaker 1: ozies don't eat kangaroos because it's part of our coat
Speaker 1: of arms. And he tries to equate it to uh,
Speaker 1: if we were to eat the bald eagle.
Speaker 4: Right, we're trying to figure out, you know, like why
Speaker 4: is it like tainted in people's minds when it's you
Speaker 4: know potentially I mean the numbers of kangaroo are so
Speaker 4: so insane.
Speaker 1: I mean, yeah, they're like they're for crop damage purposes.
Speaker 1: This is kind of the crux of what we're talking about.
Speaker 1: For crop damage Australia is killing millions of kangaroos. You
Speaker 1: not buying the products has no impact on that. That's happening.
Speaker 1: Oh the killing of the end, it's like and looking
Speaker 1: at the issue there and how it's worked and how
Speaker 1: the government approaches it. That's happening, that will continue to happen.
Speaker 1: Whether or not they go into a hole in the
Speaker 1: ground or not is a completely different issue. But you
Speaker 1: saying no wor kangaroo leather is not having it's not
Speaker 1: a social activism. That is that it has consequences on
Speaker 1: the ground.
Speaker 5: I imagine it probably has a pest like uh you know,
Speaker 5: aura around it, and that probably prevents people from eating it.
Speaker 5: I mean there's so many just everywhere. He's sort of like, eah,
Speaker 5: hit him with cars. They're eating your garden and.
Speaker 1: They see human advertizing.
Speaker 4: People at restaurants. They're also it's served at fine dining
Speaker 4: establishments in Australia. So we were just trying to figure out, like,
Speaker 4: what's what the issue is.
Speaker 1: The Audubon society. Man, I don't know how. I didn't know.
Speaker 1: I didn't know as much detail this. I just read
Speaker 1: Dan Floy's very great book, Wild New World, which is
Speaker 1: a ecological history of Well, he came on the damn Show,
Speaker 1: so he wrote an ecological history of the continent. It
Speaker 1: where do you begin? He began with the chick Salube strike,
Speaker 1: which is the asteroid that collided with into the Gulf
Speaker 1: of Mexico off of tells that place over there off
Speaker 1: the Yucatan Peninsula, at a angle that he described very
Speaker 1: eloquently when it struck, I used to think of it.
Speaker 1: I don't know, I thought of the asteroid. I never
Speaker 1: thought of the angle. The impacts of the angle at
Speaker 1: a very shallow angle, struck the earth and blasted, you know,
Speaker 1: like the sun died for years, all the dinosaurs, a
Speaker 1: most all the dinosaurs died, the biggest sort of ecological
Speaker 1: disaster to ever befall the earth, and then takes it
Speaker 1: from there. Eventually he gets to this fella Audubon and
Speaker 1: Audubon and Dan Floyd's Wild New World. Audubon is a
Speaker 1: somewhat celebrated figure because he he starts to paint all
Speaker 1: these these endemics. He starts to paint these beautiful paintings
Speaker 1: of birds from North America, including the ivory will build woodpecker,
Speaker 1: which when extinct. He has paintings of the passenger pigeon,
Speaker 1: and he he he brought them to life. He would
Speaker 1: paint them in uh, in a sort of context of
Speaker 1: how they interact with them each other, how they interact
Speaker 1: with their environment. And so he became synonymous with American
Speaker 1: wildlife birds in particular. He did not found the Audubon Society.
Speaker 1: Later when they when they created the Autobon Society, they
Speaker 1: named it after this individual who was had such a
Speaker 1: profound impact on the way people perceive wild birds and
Speaker 1: celebrate wild birds. Uh. The dude own slaves and the
Speaker 1: guy he owned slaves, and not only that I don't
Speaker 1: understand the details of this, but he was rolled into
Speaker 1: efforts to dig up Native American burial sites. I don't
Speaker 1: know the details on that. Damn sure own slaves. Was
Speaker 1: not an abolitionist, and it came up with the Audubon Society.
Speaker 1: They conducted this like internal this internal review that recommended
Speaker 1: that the Audubon Society change its name. The board rejected
Speaker 1: the recommendation, and now in places where you could picture,
Speaker 1: places that you could picture just saying we're going to
Speaker 1: change our name anyway, changing the name anyway. And saw
Speaker 1: this little fight brewing within the Audubon Society about what
Speaker 1: does Audubon stand for? Does he stand for his work
Speaker 1: on behalf of Birds? Does he stand for slavery? I
Speaker 1: don't need to. I mean, you know, uh, culturally, we've
Speaker 1: been talking for a long time and about what one
Speaker 1: should do about that. The end of this, the end
Speaker 1: of this conversation Will Will will someday land On, Does Washington,
Speaker 1: d C. Become something different? And do we throw away
Speaker 1: the Constitution because of the the what what the people
Speaker 1: that wrote that were up to? If we throw away
Speaker 1: the Constitution because it was drafted by people who held slaves,
Speaker 1: then what framework do we use to have debates about
Speaker 1: what's legal? I don't really know. It's very puzzling, It's
Speaker 1: it's a tremendous intellectual exercise. What do you think, David,
Speaker 1: just your top bosch shit.
Speaker 4: Just hit you with that light.
Speaker 1: So that's that's a thing. That's a conversation happening out
Speaker 1: there in the in the wildlife. Uh, in the wildlife space.
Speaker 5: We should give a shout out. I read that article
Speaker 5: too that Karin has paceded in here. That was a
Speaker 5: good article.
Speaker 1: I thought it was a great Did.
Speaker 5: You read it all?
Speaker 1: I read the whole thing.
Speaker 5: Adam pop Aescu, I don't know how to pronounce his name.
Speaker 5: Where do you find that article?
Speaker 1: Kri Karinn pointed out that the quote she uses from
Speaker 1: someone defending Audubon and defending the name. They follow up
Speaker 1: the quote. It's very subtle, so the writer quotes it's
Speaker 1: almost like I don't believe it. The writer quotes someone
Speaker 1: defending Audubon.
Speaker 4: And not changing the name, and.
Speaker 1: Then it's like they give his quote comma as he
Speaker 1: nudged a dead catfish with his foot by the side
Speaker 1: of the pond.
Speaker 4: Sure, it was bizarre because some of the interviews canducted
Speaker 4: for this piece were conducted over the phone and some
Speaker 4: of them were conducted in person, so you can picture
Speaker 4: the writer walking and talking and recording and then transcribing
Speaker 4: notes from there. But it was the first and I
Speaker 4: think almost only time in this multi page piece of
Speaker 4: writing where the quote, this quote was juxtaposed with like
Speaker 4: a pretty profound, substantial, like well written, uh thought by
Speaker 4: people who were in favor of changing their Audubon chapter's name,
Speaker 4: so juxtaposed with this one quote. I mean, I don't
Speaker 4: know how much this individual said and how much there
Speaker 4: was the writer you know, could pull from, but it
Speaker 4: was just kind of like basic plane speak and then
Speaker 4: qualified with as he a dead catfish by the end
Speaker 4: of the pond, And it was just very bizarre. I
Speaker 4: was like wondering if that was some kind of covert
Speaker 4: I don't know, I just felt a certain way reading that.
Speaker 1: Well, maybe it was right. Maybe the guy was like, yeah,
Speaker 1: I don't know if he asked me, it's a bunch
Speaker 1: of bs. And then.
Speaker 5: Kick he I mean the first three paragraphs are there
Speaker 5: really is three or four sentences, but I mean he's
Speaker 5: talking about a seventy six year old bird watcher at
Speaker 5: a sewage treatment pond, and he goes on to describe
Speaker 5: this and he even uses uh he says it one
Speaker 5: guy uh says there's this quote says on dale side
Speaker 5: stepping a human turd. I mean, I was I was
Speaker 5: like hold on, what are we talking about again?
Speaker 4: Here?
Speaker 5: This is a story about Audubond, but he's side stepping
Speaker 5: human turns.
Speaker 4: He's painting the picture for where the conversation's taking place.
Speaker 5: But he did a good job of getting hooked.
Speaker 2: No.
Speaker 1: I think that they were like, well, you can come
Speaker 1: to two events. We have one of at a sewage
Speaker 1: facility and one is at a beautiful park. And the
Speaker 1: writers like dude as one that likes a good metaphor.
Speaker 4: That was in the free press. Yoh, need just to
Speaker 4: ask your question, answer your question?
Speaker 1: Uh uh, data graand we almost bumped you for this.
Speaker 1: We got a note that says a guy writes in
Speaker 1: I can tell his name, says, if you're looking for
Speaker 1: a podcast, guess with a crazy story, I can get
Speaker 1: you in touch with my brother in law. His wife
Speaker 1: slowly poisoned him over the course of a year or so.
Speaker 1: She also poisoned his mom and sisters. She's bad, shit crazy.
Speaker 2: That'll be my next book.
Speaker 5: There's a title for it there.
Speaker 1: I laughed so many times that note, because I was
Speaker 1: kind of like, oh, I'm it, is this an exclusive figure?
Speaker 1: Well no, there's more.
Speaker 4: There's more to it. It could be an exclusive.
Speaker 1: All right diving in. I want I want to I
Speaker 1: want to make sure we have tons of time to
Speaker 1: talk about the wager. I want to you know how
Speaker 1: we talked about the all the terms that came up.
Speaker 1: I want to want to go a little bit out
Speaker 1: of order. Can you explain the the great details you
Speaker 1: have about the burial at sea and that you would
Speaker 1: with the needle, just explain it is the weirdest thing.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So when you when you died at sea is
Speaker 2: a last Unfortunately, many people died at sea on this expedition,
Speaker 2: about nearly two thousand people went, and only about of
Speaker 2: them about more than thirteen hundred parish and many of
Speaker 2: them were buried at sea. And so when you when
Speaker 2: you died at sea, they would have a ceremony and
Speaker 2: they would usually wrap you in a hammock, your hammock,
Speaker 2: and they would put up some kind of weight, sometimes
Speaker 2: of cannonball or some other weight in the in the
Speaker 2: hammock attached. But before they they would sew you into
Speaker 2: the hammock, and before they dumped you overboard, they would
Speaker 2: make sure the last stitch they put through your nose,
Speaker 2: just to make sure you were actually dead. They didn't
Speaker 2: want you waking up going down into the ocean with
Speaker 2: a cannonball, dropping you to the depths of the bottom
Speaker 2: of the sea. So one of the rituals was they
Speaker 2: would they would.
Speaker 5: Was there ever an account of the last stitch waking
Speaker 5: someone up?
Speaker 2: Well, you know, you do have to realize medicine back
Speaker 2: then was so primitive that it actually it sounds absolutely naughty.
Speaker 2: You know, you could seem comatose to somebody. They wouldn't
Speaker 2: have the mechanisms, so and you know, you're at sea
Speaker 2: in a storm, so you know, you kind of you know,
Speaker 2: it's it's both crude. But yet, yeah, I suspect there
Speaker 2: probably was sometime. I mean, the thing about seamen and
Speaker 2: rituals that they did actually develop for a reason they
Speaker 2: wouldn't waste time. So I suspect there must have been
Speaker 2: in some story that they had that motivated to do it,
Speaker 2: because they're not gonna waste time sewing something through your nose.
Speaker 2: But that's what they did.
Speaker 1: Yew.
Speaker 5: There was a couple of successes of medical treatments that
Speaker 5: were you wrote about in the book. And I was
Speaker 5: surprised to hear that, oh, there's a surgeon on the
Speaker 5: boat and he actually like had success doing this thing.
Speaker 5: It was christ surprising.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there were surgeons on board, but you know, but
Speaker 2: you know, the the you know, the key thing that
Speaker 2: the surgeon had to do was basically amputate. I mean,
Speaker 2: that was the thing they had to amputate. They had
Speaker 2: to amputate quickly with no you know, you had no anesthesia.
Speaker 2: You know, they didn't give you booze because it actually
Speaker 2: would make it more dangerous and your two of your
Speaker 2: seamen would hold you down and they chop off your limb.
Speaker 2: That was usually the main, you know, the main thing
Speaker 2: a surgeon did on board. But they did have certain
Speaker 2: medicines that they would try to give you. But you know,
Speaker 2: they didn't know what germs were back then. So you know,
Speaker 2: on this expedition, first they suffered from typhus, and you
Speaker 2: know they're going around the ship trying to figure out
Speaker 2: what causes this. And of course this was during COVID too,
Speaker 2: when I was writing about a lot of this, and
Speaker 2: I'm leaving packages at the door, thinking I can't do
Speaker 2: I touch the package, get the package, come inside. Is
Speaker 2: it like twenty four hours outside and and you know
Speaker 2: these guys are all you know, there's like you know,
Speaker 2: often on the ship to be like five hundred people
Speaker 2: all cloister together. They're social distancing, and you know they're
Speaker 2: going around thinking, you know, is it in the air,
Speaker 2: you know, you know, you know, you know malaria, you
Speaker 2: talk about words, it's the French or mill area bad ear.
Speaker 2: So in that day they were thinking, you know, so
Speaker 2: they're going around sniffing everything. Is it your breath? What
Speaker 2: is it? What causes these things?
Speaker 1: We should I want to set the scene a little
Speaker 1: bit and get to well. In order to set the scene,
Speaker 1: I want to like begin with the thing that that
Speaker 1: seems like a fairy tale. I want you to talk
Speaker 1: about the year and who and what and why. But
Speaker 1: this expedition that we're going to discuss, and the voyage
Speaker 1: of the Wager and an accompaniment with a bunch of
Speaker 1: other boats. It seems so crazy to me that here
Speaker 1: we are in the seventeen hundreds and they get intel,
Speaker 1: the English get intel of a gold lace. It sounds
Speaker 1: like like a like a setup for a pirate movie.
Speaker 1: They get intel of a gold laden Spanish galleon that
Speaker 1: will be showing up at such and such time in
Speaker 1: the Philippines. Yes, let's send a two thousand people and
Speaker 1: I don't know how many boats to sail across the Atlantic,
Speaker 1: duck around Patagonia, get up to the Philippines and catch
Speaker 1: the boat.
Speaker 2: Yes, that was like, how is it?
Speaker 1: If that wasn't a movie, I would be like, this
Speaker 1: is a bad setup for that movie. It's so implausible,
Speaker 1: it's so crazy.
Speaker 2: And it's also crazy about it too, is that this
Speaker 2: was a naval mission, so you know, but it had
Speaker 2: a complete whiff of pirates. I mean, and I was like,
Speaker 2: is this part of the naval mission? But that ship
Speaker 2: was worth you know, it was laid in with treasure
Speaker 2: plunder taken by the Spanish from Mexico and Peru, and
Speaker 2: then they would haul it over to the Philippines where
Speaker 2: they would use that plunder to buy Asian commodities. So
Speaker 2: that's why it was filled, and that's why they knew
Speaker 2: it would be going there.
Speaker 1: And this is an annual and it's an annual trip
Speaker 1: to the market.
Speaker 2: An annual trip with exactly with lludic gold and silver
Speaker 2: and jewels and gems. And it was worth about you know,
Speaker 2: eighty million dollars. Eighty million dollars.
Speaker 1: Did you do the did you do that? What that
Speaker 1: I did?
Speaker 2: That little inflation cockcat. What does that mean now, Yeah, no,
Speaker 2: it's about eighty two million dollars, yeah, by in today's money,
Speaker 2: my little inflation caculat. But yeah, and the ship was
Speaker 2: known as the you know, to Europeans, the ship was
Speaker 2: known as the Prize of all the Oceans. I mean,
Speaker 2: that's how the seamen referred to it.
Speaker 1: Uh, layout who and and and how many ships? Because
Speaker 1: when I you know, it's it's it. It's about a ship.
Speaker 1: But there's a there's a narrowing processes where we would
Speaker 1: end up focusing very intently on this this one. But
Speaker 1: it's part of a much It's like not even the
Speaker 1: most impressive ship. Yeah.
Speaker 2: No, In fact, it's kind of the ugly duckling of
Speaker 2: the squadron. I mean, the squadron consisted of five warships,
Speaker 2: including the Wager and a scouting sloop. The largest ship
Speaker 2: was the Centurion, which was led by the commodore Georgia
Speaker 2: Anson and the Wager. Yeah, it was a little bit
Speaker 2: the ugly duckling of the expedition because it was not
Speaker 2: unlike the other warships, it wasn't born for battle. It
Speaker 2: had actually been a merchant ship trading and they needed
Speaker 2: ships for the war, so they remade it. It was
Speaker 2: about one hundred and twenty three feet long, had twenty
Speaker 2: eight cannons, which made it the kind of lowest rank
Speaker 2: warship was known as the sixth sixth rate warship in
Speaker 2: the British Navy, which was the lowest rating, and on
Speaker 2: board that ship was about two hundred and fifty men.
Speaker 2: But even before you know, the squadron sets off, and
Speaker 2: just just to comment on these ships too, is like
Speaker 2: they really were these engineering marvels of their time, you know,
Speaker 2: because they were these instruments designed for battle, yet also
Speaker 2: these homes, these fortresses where people had lived together for
Speaker 2: years at a time. They had three masts. The wager
Speaker 2: could fly about twelve sales. The larger warships could fly
Speaker 2: as many as eighteen saals to propel them. But they
Speaker 2: were also very, very vulnerable to the elements because they
Speaker 2: were made primarily of wood. A single warship could take
Speaker 2: as many as four thousand trees oaks, yeah, oaks, hard
Speaker 2: oak wood to build. And then the other huge challenge
Speaker 2: of getting this squadron off, you know, even before we
Speaker 2: get into the mission, was they also had to find
Speaker 2: men and boys and the British Navy back then, you know,
Speaker 2: Great Britain didn't have conscription and they had exhausted their
Speaker 2: supply of volunteers. So they are going about desperate to
Speaker 2: find men and boys, you know, demand these complex engineering ships.
Speaker 1: The way you describe it the ships there, Yeah, it's
Speaker 1: ready to go. And it's not like like you know,
Speaker 1: you go to high schools and recruit people and then
Speaker 1: they enter and boot camp and then they get trained,
Speaker 1: you know, and then years later they wind up like
Speaker 1: in combat. It's they're like, we're ready to go. Where's
Speaker 1: the people. We'll go to the tavern.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they go quite literally go to the tavern. They
Speaker 2: go to the tavern, and they send out the press gangs,
Speaker 2: and they go to the taverns, and they go to
Speaker 2: the ports and anyone coming in and they would basically
Speaker 2: eyebaw you and if you you know, had any telltale
Speaker 2: signs of a marina you had, like a little check
Speaker 2: or shirt or one of these little round hats that
Speaker 2: seeming off of more and the thing that also fascinatings,
Speaker 2: they would inspect your fingernails for tar because tar was
Speaker 2: used on chips to make everything water resistant. And if
Speaker 2: you had those things. You were basically seized and in
Speaker 2: effect kidnapped and dragged onto one of these voyages. You
Speaker 2: wouldn't even have time to say go by to your family.
Speaker 2: You might even be returning from a trading ship from
Speaker 2: some long trip to the Asia. You've been gone for
Speaker 2: two years. You get home and you think, I'm gonna
Speaker 2: go see my family. Yeah, I'm coming home, and then
Speaker 2: your your season, your and you're dragged on the ship.
Speaker 2: And even then they were short of men, and so
Speaker 2: they went they I laugh on because you develop a
Speaker 2: gallows seamen sense of humor when you when you're right
Speaker 2: about the stuff. But they they would go to they
Speaker 2: went to a retirement home. They went to a retirement home,
Speaker 2: and they seized retired soldiers and seamen who were in
Speaker 2: their sixties and seventies. Many of them were missing an
Speaker 2: assortment of limbs, you know, one was like you know
Speaker 2: something that some were missing a leg. One tried to desert,
Speaker 2: hopping on one leg away, and and some were so
Speaker 2: sick they had to be hoisted on stretchers onto these vessels.
Speaker 2: So the seeds of destruction, which we will get into,
Speaker 2: i'm sure, but they were planted at the very inception
Speaker 2: of the sex position.
Speaker 1: Yeah, the was the term like gang press, right.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, press gangs. Yeah, and they would just press you, Yeah,
Speaker 2: they would. They would they would roam around, they'd be armed,
Speaker 2: and they would seize you and take you.
Speaker 1: I can't remember if one of the guys you mentioned,
Speaker 1: if he was on the wager, if it was just
Speaker 1: an anecd pulled from another ship. But there's a guy
Speaker 1: that gets press ganged, gang pressed, and he writes a
Speaker 1: letter to his wife being like, hey, I'm just right
Speaker 1: down on the shore here, but I'm not going to
Speaker 1: like it looks like I'm going away for a couple
Speaker 1: of years.
Speaker 2: I can't get away. And what they would do, Yeah,
Speaker 2: there's a letter from a semen. Because one of the
Speaker 2: things they would do is they you know, most semen
Speaker 2: back then could swim, and so they would take the
Speaker 2: ships and rather than keep them at the dock yard,
Speaker 2: they would actually anchor them out to see so that
Speaker 2: way you couldn't escape.
Speaker 1: Oh that's right. Yeah, he's looking, he's looking, and.
Speaker 2: There's no way for no way for him to get ashore.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Uh.
Speaker 1: So the wager had the total expeditions two thousand people, yep,
Speaker 1: and roughly how many boats there.
Speaker 2: Were ship, five warships, a scouting sloop, and then these
Speaker 2: two little cargo ships that are supposed to company them
Speaker 2: part way.
Speaker 1: When they set off at that time, do they set
Speaker 1: off knowing that, Hey, we're gonna get going and then
Speaker 1: we're gonna start dying from scurvy. No, So it's it's
Speaker 1: a surprise every time it is.
Speaker 2: I mean, they they you know, they know this is
Speaker 2: a perilous expedition, which is why so many people tried
Speaker 2: to desert. I mean they were all trying, many many
Speaker 2: of them. Some people volunteered for the mission. Some people
Speaker 2: thought they were going to come back with plunder. They have,
Speaker 2: you know, visions of glory and ambition, but I don't
Speaker 2: think anyone expected the level of hors that they encountered.
Speaker 1: But walk through the scurvy challenge, it I get it.
Speaker 1: Like you said earlier, they people didn't understand infectious disease, right, Yeah,
Speaker 1: how does it play out? And if you know, I
Speaker 1: can't know if you talk on your book, how does
Speaker 1: it play out? And how does someone eventually say I
Speaker 1: think this might have something to do with vitamin C.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So, so they crossed the Atlantic. Everything early on
Speaker 2: begins to go wrong. First they have a typhus epidemic.
Speaker 2: They cross the Atlantic, they're being chased by a Spanish
Speaker 2: or Mada, which is larger. And then get to Cape
Speaker 2: Horn where they're facing these storms. And it's at that
Speaker 2: very point where they need every person to persevere, where
Speaker 2: they begin to grow mysteriously sick. They can many of
Speaker 2: them could no longer rise from their hammocks. Their skin
Speaker 2: is changing texture and color. Then their teeth begin to
Speaker 2: fall out, then their hair begins to fall out. And
Speaker 2: then this just amazed me that the cartilage that seemed
Speaker 2: to glue together the bones seem to be coming undone
Speaker 2: within the bodies. There's an account from one Semen who
Speaker 2: had broken a bone fifty years earlier at a battle,
Speaker 2: and that bone, which had obviously long since haled the fracture,
Speaker 2: suddenly mysteriously breaks in the very same place. And then
Speaker 2: the other thing I didn't know about scurvy until I
Speaker 2: researched the story was how it can affect your senses.
Speaker 2: One Semen described to getting into our brains and we
Speaker 2: went raving mad. And of course, yeah, they did not
Speaker 2: know that the cure was so simple that all they
Speaker 2: needed was more vitamin seeing their diet. Now, these ships
Speaker 2: did not have refrigerators, so it wasn't common to bring
Speaker 2: fruits and vegetables on the ship, so their diet completely
Speaker 2: lacked it, and they didn't know what the cure was,
Speaker 2: and of course, very tragically before the outbreak in which
Speaker 2: hundreds of men perish. It's considered one of the worst
Speaker 2: scurvy outbreaks ever recorded maritime moss.
Speaker 1: So that was one of the worst.
Speaker 2: Oh, one of the worst.
Speaker 1: Yeah, really, I didn't know if they just started to
Speaker 1: take it as a matter of course that there would
Speaker 1: be like a high level of attrition due to this
Speaker 1: weird thing that happens in body.
Speaker 2: But to your point, the scurvy was known as the
Speaker 2: great killer of seamen. It killed more people than anything else,
Speaker 2: other diseases, combined, naval battles, shipwrecks. So they did know
Speaker 2: that scurvy was the great enigma of the age of
Speaker 2: sail and the great killer. But they had actually stopped
Speaker 2: in Brazil before for the outbreak, and there were all
Speaker 2: these lines where they had stopped, and they just brought
Speaker 2: these lines on the ship. And of course, as you said,
Speaker 2: you know, later the British Navy would learn about vitamin
Speaker 2: secured scurvy and they would bring lines, which is another
Speaker 2: term that we now known. British semen were known as Limey's.
Speaker 2: Interesting enough that it was actually after the horrors of
Speaker 2: this expedition and the scurvy outbreak, there was a scientist
Speaker 2: who actually conducted one of the earliest kind of controlled experiments,
Speaker 2: and he dedicated to the commodore of this expedition, to
Speaker 2: Commodore Georgia, and he did actually learn He didn't know why,
Speaker 2: but he proved that vitamin C when they were given
Speaker 2: it helped semen with scurvy. But it would still take
Speaker 2: decades more. Really be the end kind of the beginning
Speaker 2: of the turn of the century, the end of the
Speaker 2: eighteenth century that the British Navy and others finally adopted
Speaker 2: this knowledge to save human lives.
Speaker 1: When I'm talking with my kids about yeah, I I
Speaker 1: share with them how my dad was a big smoker, okay,
Speaker 1: and that when my dad was in the war, they
Speaker 1: would put in your sea rations, there were cigarettes in
Speaker 1: your sea rations. In boot camp you would get a
Speaker 1: smoke break, okay. And they're like, oh my god, that's
Speaker 1: so stupid. How can people and you know think that,
Speaker 1: And I said, well, here's a riddle for you. Right now,
Speaker 1: today we are using things, eating things, doing things that
Speaker 1: in one hundred years your descendants will be having a
Speaker 1: chuckle about if you can identify those. That's a great
Speaker 1: path toward heroism. Yes, it's perpetual. But this thing that
Speaker 1: was kind of interesting that you brought in your book
Speaker 1: was not kind of very interesting. They made the association
Speaker 1: with being at sea and being at land to the
Speaker 1: point that for a while they experiment with the recipe
Speaker 1: or remedy. Being land seems to fix this. Yes, let's
Speaker 1: take them ashore and bury them up to their neck
Speaker 1: and dirt because it must be something about the soil.
Speaker 2: Yeah. They basically concluded there was something unnatural for humans
Speaker 2: to be at sea, and they would obviously realize when
Speaker 2: they came home and they would begin to change their diet.
Speaker 2: They didn't connect it. They would get better. And there's
Speaker 2: a wonderful letter from the lieutenant on this expedition saying
Speaker 2: there must be something in the natural particles of land
Speaker 2: and so Yes, one of the cures was they would bury.
Speaker 2: There's this description of a seamen describing the strangeness of
Speaker 2: seeing all these seamen buried in land up to their
Speaker 2: heads hoping that might cure it.
Speaker 1: Wow, lime peels.
Speaker 2: Yeah.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 2: The one thing I would say when you read this
Speaker 2: book you'll get away is just bring lines. You go
Speaker 2: to sea, just bring a line.
Speaker 1: There's so much to cover here. Explain how the the
Speaker 1: a real shitty part of this boat ride is going
Speaker 1: around the bottom of Patagonia. So what happens there and
Speaker 1: how we wind up where your story narrows in on
Speaker 1: the Wager.
Speaker 2: Yeah, So while all these men and boys are dying
Speaker 2: on these ships, they are encountering and trying to get
Speaker 2: around Cape Horn, which is a very tip of South America,
Speaker 2: kind of the farthest landpoint in Ireland. And I always
Speaker 2: knew it was a place with some of the worst
Speaker 2: seats in the world, but I never understood why until
Speaker 2: researching this. And what happens is it's an area where
Speaker 2: the sea funnel between Antarctica and the tip of South America.
Speaker 2: It's actually only place on Earth where the seas travel
Speaker 2: uninterrupted around the globe without ever hitting land. Oh really, Yeah,
Speaker 2: so they travel about thirteen thousand miles, accumulating power and force. Similarly,
Speaker 2: nothing's blocking the winds and then they get funneled into
Speaker 2: this area where it suddenly shallows dramatically, generating these enormous waves.
Speaker 2: So you know you will have winds there that will
Speaker 2: accelerate to hurricane force routinely. You will have the strongest
Speaker 2: currents on earth. And then you'll have what is known
Speaker 2: as the Cape horn rollers, which can dwarf a ninety
Speaker 2: foot mast on one of these ships. Herman Melville, the novelist,
Speaker 2: later went around Cape Horny joined that leak club. He
Speaker 2: compared it to a descent into Hell and Dante's inferno.
Speaker 2: And so this expedition, this squadron of wooden ships, is
Speaker 2: smack in that hell. There's just no question. These ships
Speaker 2: are being bandied about as if they were no more
Speaker 2: than rowboats. They can't even fly their sails because they
Speaker 2: keep blowing out in the storm. At one point, one
Speaker 2: of the captains can't control the ship because they can't
Speaker 2: fly sails. So he orders his topmen, which are the
Speaker 2: people climb the mass. Ordinarily to work the sails, but
Speaker 2: he asked them to climb these masks about one hundred
Speaker 2: feet and to hold on to the rope spider like
Speaker 2: like in a web, and use their bodies as concave sails,
Speaker 2: as a gale force wind is blowing into them, and
Speaker 2: they're about one hundred feet in the.
Speaker 1: Air, and that would actually change the course of the boat.
Speaker 2: That would they hope that would change the course. And
Speaker 2: just one other thing to remember. They're also in waves,
Speaker 2: so that the ship is rocking about forty five degrees
Speaker 2: to one side and forty five degrees the other, so
Speaker 2: you're on a complete pendulum, hanging onto a rope. And
Speaker 2: in fact it did enable the captain to maneuver the
Speaker 2: ship a little better. But one seaman was cast into
Speaker 2: the sea and around and his companions could describe him.
Speaker 2: It was just the most heartbreaking scene.
Speaker 1: That is one of the more you talk about cases
Speaker 1: in which people would fall to their death from the mast. Yes,
Speaker 1: it'd be especially bad when you fell and hit your
Speaker 1: head on a cannon.
Speaker 2: Yes that would be the end.
Speaker 1: But oh, it's just like soul. He falls off the
Speaker 1: winds blowing the ship and they just stand there's no
Speaker 1: way to go back, there's no way to go you
Speaker 1: can't reverse now, and just he's swimming and swimming and swimming,
Speaker 1: and then he's not swimming anymore.
Speaker 2: Yeah, until it's completely heartbreaking, and so you know, they're
Speaker 2: in these circumstances and the ships are desperate to stay together.
Speaker 2: You know, you appreciate some of the technological advances when
Speaker 2: you read about this stuff. So for example, the ships,
Speaker 2: you know, you just take communication for granted. You know,
Speaker 2: they could have the only way they could shout to
Speaker 2: each other, but in a storm, you can't you can't
Speaker 2: get that close in those waves anyways. And so what
Speaker 2: they would do is they were desperate to stay together
Speaker 2: because they knew if one ship, if the ships got separated,
Speaker 2: there'd be no one to save them if something went wrong.
Speaker 2: And so they would fire their cannons, just you know,
Speaker 2: blasting to signal of the location. But eventually the sea
Speaker 2: and the sound of the you know, the wind and
Speaker 2: the ways just drowns out that sound, and all the
Speaker 2: ships get scattered in the storm, and the Wager, which
Speaker 2: is under a new commander, David cheap It suddenly finds
Speaker 2: itself all alone and left to its own destiny.
Speaker 5: Did they have any like now that they would have
Speaker 5: prior knowledge? But was there any any accounts before they
Speaker 5: went through there that they would give them some idea
Speaker 5: of what to expect.
Speaker 2: So they did you know, one of the things they
Speaker 2: would do, they say, were fairly uncharted realms that were
Speaker 2: not a lot of people of British seemen who have
Speaker 2: gotten around Cape Hoorn. But they did have some accounts
Speaker 2: that they would bring and they would actually bring the
Speaker 2: books with them to hopefully give them some as sense
Speaker 2: and also used for mapping, because they didn't have any
Speaker 2: detailed charts for this area. What's more, they never knew
Speaker 2: exactly where they were precisely on the map. They could
Speaker 2: determine their latitude easily, they would just read the stars,
Speaker 2: see men Magellan had done that for ages, but they
Speaker 2: had no way of knowing their precise longitude because that
Speaker 2: would require reliable clock which had not yet been invented,
Speaker 2: and so they had to essentially rely on what was
Speaker 2: known as dead reckoning. That's where that phrase comes from,
Speaker 2: and that the simplifier was essentially informed guesswork and a
Speaker 2: leap of faith. And so when the wager it gets
Speaker 2: around the horn, it's coming up the Chilean inside of Patagonia,
Speaker 2: they they not only miscalculate their longitude, they miscalculate it
Speaker 2: by hundreds of miles, and suddenly they are in this
Speaker 2: bay which is now known as a Golf of the Painos,
Speaker 2: which translates as the Golf of Sorrows, where some prefer
Speaker 2: to call it the Gulf of Pain. And that's when
Speaker 2: it first hits a.
Speaker 1: Submerged rock and demolishes it.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's crazy. So again, these ships are wooden. You
Speaker 2: gotta imagine the level of terror. This is their home,
Speaker 2: many of them, most of them can't swim. First they
Speaker 2: hit one submerged rock, the rudder shatters, an anchor which
Speaker 2: weighed two tons, falls and plunges through the hull, leaving
Speaker 2: a gaping hole. Then another huge wave comes in. It
Speaker 2: sweeps the wager, this one hundred and twenty three foot
Speaker 2: wooden vessel, off the rocks. So suddenly the ship, their home,
Speaker 2: is careening through this mindful of rocks. But they have
Speaker 2: no rudder to stare by, and water is pouring through this.
Speaker 1: Hole, killing people right in their place.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, drowning people instantly. And then at last they
Speaker 2: smash into more rocks, and that's when the ship completely
Speaker 2: begins to shatter. You know, the wooden planks are all
Speaker 2: breaking apart, the decks are caving in, the mass are
Speaker 2: coming down. All this water is surging upward through the
Speaker 2: bottom of the ship. Many of the men who have
Speaker 2: been suffering from scurvy, they can't get out of their
Speaker 2: hammocks in time. They drowned. Rats are scurrying upward, but fratuitously,
Speaker 2: if you can call it that. The one bit of
Speaker 2: fortune they have is that the ship gets wedged between
Speaker 2: these rocks and so it does not yet completely sink.
Speaker 2: And the survivors climb upon the remnants of the wreck
Speaker 2: and they peer out, and that's where they see through
Speaker 2: the mists, this desolate island.
Speaker 1: Yeah, I didn't. I assumed you did. I didn't know
Speaker 1: that you did, And so I saw the sixty minutes
Speaker 1: bit you did. Yeah, you went, you went and visited
Speaker 1: where they landed.
Speaker 2: I did. I did not. One of the smarter things
Speaker 2: I've done. Yes, Yeah. I spent the first two years
Speaker 2: doing research on this, just in archives. And then after
Speaker 2: about two years, I was like, I just started to
Speaker 2: have that doubt that gnaws that you was a writer, Like,
Speaker 2: can I really understand what it was like on that island.
Speaker 2: So I found this Chilean captain in an island off
Speaker 2: Chile who said he could take me there. It was
Speaker 2: about three hundred and fifty miles south to get to
Speaker 2: Wager Island. He had initially sent me a photograph of
Speaker 2: the boat, and I thought, oh, this looks good. This
Speaker 2: looks like a Jack Gustav vessel. I'll be good, no
Speaker 2: problem here. And then of course it took me days
Speaker 2: to get there. I finally get to this island and
Speaker 2: I see the boat and it's this kind of small
Speaker 2: wood it's a wood heated vessel. You know, it's kind
Speaker 2: of like you living off the land here. You know,
Speaker 2: it was like it was, it was completely it was
Speaker 2: you know, I had a stove. It was wintertime, heated
Speaker 2: by stove. It was so tepestuous, the weather was so bad.
Speaker 2: They were supposed to leave right away, and we couldn't
Speaker 2: even leave the port. The coast guard had closed the
Speaker 2: port down. They just would not let you leave the wind.
Speaker 2: Nobody could leave the port. And after four days I
Speaker 2: started wondering if I was ever going to get there.
Speaker 2: And then finally the coast guard they lift the their
Speaker 2: blockade or whatever it was, and they say you can
Speaker 2: go out. And initially we go in between these channels.
Speaker 2: I don't know how many people have been down to Patagonia,
Speaker 2: but have you ever been a.
Speaker 1: Patagonia, I've bolted down that cochd okay, so yeah, not
Speaker 1: that far. Yeah yeah, out of the south the Santiago,
Speaker 1: and then we went a couple hundred miles down the
Speaker 1: coach okay.
Speaker 2: So you know, like there's a lot of islands, and
Speaker 2: you know, it's like the end the coastline is very shattered.
Speaker 2: Its like it's it's all these is lits, and so
Speaker 2: you can weave behind these islands and stay pretty sheltered.
Speaker 2: And so that's what we did for the first several days.
Speaker 2: We didn't see another soul for days. No other boats,
Speaker 2: oh nobody. It was just desolate out there. We would
Speaker 2: stop at these little islands to chop down wood, to
Speaker 2: get the wood to bring it onto the boat so
Speaker 2: we could heat our stoves. Yeah yeah, and then we
Speaker 2: would get our water. We would take a hose and
Speaker 2: we would hook it up to the glacial stream. So
Speaker 2: that's how we got water. Let me just tell you
Speaker 2: it's the cold shower I ever had. Two seconds. I
Speaker 2: was awake for a week. But and then after about
Speaker 2: five days of this, the captain comes in and he says, okay.
Speaker 1: But I don't know you guys, they didn't get that
Speaker 1: level of detail.
Speaker 2: But yeah, no, I don't know.
Speaker 1: You guys would like stop and split stove with.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's yeah, yeah great, yeah yeah.
Speaker 2: And you're getting your water. I mean that's how we
Speaker 2: got water to drink, lie and and to and to
Speaker 2: keep the boat going. And uh and then a five
Speaker 2: days the captain says, all right, well, you know, now
Speaker 2: if we're going to get to wage On, and we
Speaker 2: have to go out into the ocean and and so yeah,
Speaker 2: that's when I got my first glimpse of the seas.
Speaker 2: I mean it was just a fraction of what the
Speaker 2: wagress saw. We get out there. This boat was really
Speaker 2: designed for the channels. It was not designed for the ocean.
Speaker 2: And uh, we are just getting pitched and rocked. So
Speaker 2: you just I had to sit on the on the deck.
Speaker 2: You could in the cabin. You could not stand. If
Speaker 2: you stood, you were going to get chucked. I mean
Speaker 2: you you just you held on. I had about every
Speaker 2: seasickness sickness medicine going to Humankind. I was like a
Speaker 2: little experiment, you know. I had like the I had
Speaker 2: the you know, dramamine and the thing on my ear
Speaker 2: and I'm used to seas I don't get seasick, but
Speaker 2: I was like, I need everything for this one, and
Speaker 2: and uh, you know, we're just bouncing about. And then
Speaker 2: I also made the mistake because I'm not the smartest
Speaker 2: adventure I was like, all right, I got it. Distract myself.
Speaker 2: And the one thing I had you couldn't read because
Speaker 2: your eyes would, you know, going up and down. But
Speaker 2: I had my phone with me, and I had an
Speaker 2: audible recording of Moby Dick. So I put that movie deck,
Speaker 2: which really, in retrospect, was the stupidest thing because it's
Speaker 2: completely unsothing, you know, so they have. But any case,
Speaker 2: it's a very long story to tell you. We did
Speaker 2: eventually go get across. We got out. The captain was
Speaker 2: very skilled. We get through. We go through the Gulf
Speaker 2: of Pain. We get to this island where these castaways
Speaker 2: went and just as they they thought it might be
Speaker 2: their salvation. And it is a place a complete wild desolation.
Speaker 2: The trees are all bent at forty five degree angles
Speaker 2: because the winds. It was winter when they were there,
Speaker 2: it was winter when I was there. Uh so the
Speaker 2: temperature hovers about freezing, very heavy precipitation. It rains or
Speaker 2: sleets every day. And worst of all, like the castaways,
Speaker 2: the worse for them. I brought food. They could find
Speaker 2: virtually no food on they could have really used you guys,
Speaker 2: I mean.
Speaker 3: I just.
Speaker 1: I disagreed because when I was down there. One of
Speaker 1: the things that the lack of there's a real lack
Speaker 1: of land.
Speaker 2: Mammals, no animals on that island.
Speaker 1: Yeah, and you spend a lot of time You're like,
Speaker 1: there is a wild celery, yes, and you you couldn't
Speaker 1: believe it, and you went and looked. There's not rats,
Speaker 1: there's not some kind of rodent. There's not a bunch
Speaker 1: of shore nesting birds because the shores are just wave
Speaker 1: battered rocks. It's just there's not.
Speaker 2: There's nothing to eat. I mean, there was, there's some
Speaker 2: you know, there were some birds, but they stayed off
Speaker 2: the coastline, you know, off the you know, made it
Speaker 2: very hard for the castways to ever be able to
Speaker 2: hunt them. There were some muscles along one of the beaches,
Speaker 2: but they gradually exhausted that supply. They did eat celery,
Speaker 2: which I tasted when I was there, was kind of
Speaker 2: dry and salted a little bitter, And didn't you know
Speaker 2: they would kind of mix it with stuff cook. But
Speaker 2: any case, the thing for them actually, which was really
Speaker 2: life saving, was that they didn't know why, but the
Speaker 2: celery cured their scurvy. Oh it cured they'ir scurvy because
Speaker 2: it had some vitamin seeing it and they had no
Speaker 2: idea why. But they ate the cellar you so, but so, yeah,
Speaker 2: so they are they begin to starve, they are. They
Speaker 2: they try to build a settlement on the island, an
Speaker 2: imperial outpost. You know. The captain wants to set up
Speaker 2: He wants it to be governed by the same rules
Speaker 2: that had existed on the ship, and the same regiment
Speaker 2: they do early on shore, some real ingenuity. They build
Speaker 2: little shelters and hamlets and whatnot. Only set up a
Speaker 2: little irrigation system so they can get fresh collect fresh water.
Speaker 5: But sorry, how many at this point.
Speaker 2: Of forty five, about one hundred and forty five, including
Speaker 2: the captain, David Cheap, the gunner, a guy named John
Speaker 2: Bulkeley who plays a very key role on the island,
Speaker 2: and a midshipman named John Byron who had been only
Speaker 2: sixteen years old when the voyage sets sail. And if
Speaker 2: the name misfamiliar at all to listeners or sounds familiar
Speaker 2: because he would later go on to become the grandfather
Speaker 2: the poet, Lord Byron, and Lord Byron's poetry is greatly
Speaker 2: influenced actually by John Byron, the Midshipman's Oh yeah.
Speaker 1: And a father son father son, that's another heartbreaker.
Speaker 2: And a cook who's in his eighties. A cook who's
Speaker 2: in his eighties. It survives the records. I'm that. And
Speaker 2: there are boys as well.
Speaker 1: There's a you get into an interesting little intellectual exercise.
Speaker 1: They get into where I can't remember at what point
Speaker 1: it happens, but at a point it comes to be
Speaker 1: that the ship's gone, you are no longer on payroll.
Speaker 1: If I'm not on payroll and the ship's gone, why
Speaker 1: do I have to listen to the captain? Yes, but
Speaker 1: doesn't it be that he's not in charge anymore? Yeah,
Speaker 1: and it was.
Speaker 2: It was a bit of a murky and yeah, they
Speaker 2: would hold that debate. So some of the people who
Speaker 2: are like sick of the captain and want to go
Speaker 2: on their own, they're like, well, do we have to
Speaker 2: follow them? They're always very conscious of the rules and
Speaker 2: what might happen to if they ever get back to England,
Speaker 2: because if they mute me, They'll get hanged. So they're
Speaker 2: very country. They're like, well, have we found a loophole?
Speaker 2: Have we found a loophole? So would this justify it?
Speaker 1: It's like you can picture that, you can picture them
Speaker 1: lawyering it out, but I'm not on pay, Like the
Speaker 1: boat's gone.
Speaker 2: The boat's got and then you know, what's a counter amendum.
Speaker 2: So you know what's so interesting too, is that there
Speaker 2: was then a like there was like you know, you
Speaker 2: know these bureaucratic rules, so like the rules of the rules,
Speaker 2: and then there's like an amendment to the rule. Actually,
Speaker 2: so in the rules at the time, he said, if
Speaker 2: you were actually still getting any provisions off the ship,
Speaker 2: you were then still actually under naval command. So they
Speaker 2: are trying to send out some salvage expeditions to see
Speaker 2: if they can fish out of the wreck anything. So
Speaker 2: the fact that then food. So you just see the
Speaker 2: lawyering going on, like which amendment do we follow?
Speaker 1: And they u talk about that that the Minnesota starvation
Speaker 1: experience because you can see where this is going. Yeah,
Speaker 1: this becomes a tale of great starvation and desperation. Yes,
Speaker 1: And the book spends a lot of energy on the
Speaker 1: I don't know what do you call like the soul
Speaker 1: like sort of the social cultural decay? I don't know.
Speaker 2: The Yeah, what happens to human dynamics in society under
Speaker 2: that kind of stress? You know, I mean the ship
Speaker 2: is a floating civilization with its rules and order and regiment,
Speaker 2: and what happens when that world disintegrates and then when
Speaker 2: you're under the pressure of starvation. So I was very
Speaker 2: interested in how this hunger affect the human body and
Speaker 2: the psyche. And there was an experiment actually done in
Speaker 2: Minnesota in the nineteen forties, it's now known as the
Speaker 2: Minnesota Starvation experiment, where they cut over several months. The
Speaker 2: people had volunteered for this experiment. They were all pacifist,
Speaker 2: interestingly enough, and they cut their caloric intake by about half,
Speaker 2: and they studied what happened. This experiment would never happen today. Yeah, yeah,
Speaker 2: this would not have gone past the lawyers, but in
Speaker 2: nineteen forty it got past the lawyers and so, and
Speaker 2: they would study what happened, and you know, with half
Speaker 2: clark intake, you know, they described how the people became
Speaker 2: just increasingly obsessed with food, many of them who had
Speaker 2: volunteer for the experiment thought because they were kind of spiritual,
Speaker 2: they were pacifist. The thought, well, maybe this would give
Speaker 2: them a deep part.
Speaker 5: You just explain pacifism.
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah, they were just basically conscientious objectors. They didn't
Speaker 2: believe in violence, they didn't believe in fighting, and so
Speaker 2: that's in that sense, that's what they were pacifist.
Speaker 1: So they were like stack of the deck. Yeah yeah, right,
Speaker 1: instead of just going getting something they want the bar fight.
Speaker 2: No no, yeah, no, theyk they took the people right
Speaker 2: and and instead, you know, just with even half the
Speaker 2: clerk intake. Over a period of time, you know, they
Speaker 2: watch how they got. They just become increasingly obsessed with food.
Speaker 2: They become more and more irritable, they begin to fight.
Speaker 2: One of the people in the experiment eventually says I
Speaker 2: want to kill myself, and then he turns to the
Speaker 2: one of the doctors or medics who's overseeing and says, no, actually,
Speaker 2: I want to kill you. The same person as actually
Speaker 2: began to fantasize about cannibalism. He was removed from the experiments.
Speaker 2: But it just gives you a window in and I
Speaker 2: think also a deeper understanding of how you know the
Speaker 2: body and how much food can affect it. And of
Speaker 2: course on that island they were suffering far greater nutritional
Speaker 2: deficiencies than they did in that experiment. And how would
Speaker 2: that affect them? How do you maintain social order? How
Speaker 2: do you work with each other? Because working with each
Speaker 2: other is in your interests, and yet you are starving
Speaker 2: and consumed also their own self.
Speaker 1: Interest and they have some factionalism.
Speaker 2: Oh yeah, they splinter. They splinter initially into three groups.
Speaker 2: One group, the others referred to as the Seceeders. The
Speaker 2: Seceeders are basically they're like the barfighters. They break off
Speaker 2: and they're like marauders, kind of roaming the island, pillaging,
Speaker 2: and everyone's afraid of them. And the leader of that
Speaker 2: group had allegedly respective murdering at least two people and
Speaker 2: stealing what food and rations that person had. So that's
Speaker 2: one group. And then in the main settlement there are
Speaker 2: two main factions. One remains loyal to the Captain David
Speaker 2: Cheap and it's his loyal followers, and Captain Cheap is
Speaker 2: speaking about notions of duty and patriotism and order and
Speaker 2: naval rules of regulations. Another group is increasingly drawn to
Speaker 2: John Bulkley, who was the gunner on the wager, and
Speaker 2: he's interesting guy. He was devout and he was in
Speaker 2: many ways the most skilled seamen on the wager. But
Speaker 2: because he did not come from the aristocracy in those days,
Speaker 2: he knew he was never going to become a commander
Speaker 2: of a warship. Yet suddenly, in these circumstances, you know
Speaker 2: what I describe as almost this democracy of suffering, he
Speaker 2: begins to emerge as a commander in his own right
Speaker 2: and more. And where he's very self sufficient, he's he
Speaker 2: knows how to survive and so and many of the
Speaker 2: people gravitate to them. And he would stir the people.
Speaker 2: This is before the American Revolution, but he would stir
Speaker 2: his followers with the phrase life and liberty. So these
Speaker 2: are the factions. I mean, it's amazing. At the camp,
Speaker 2: they're separated by about you know, they don't describe it exactly,
Speaker 2: but it's probably like fifty one hundred feet or maybe more,
Speaker 2: maybe two hundred feet, and yet they have to send
Speaker 2: it some points. They have to send emissaries back and
Speaker 2: forth to communicate negotiation. Yeah, it's to negotiating because they
Speaker 2: won't speak to each I mean, it's like it's their
Speaker 2: becoming warning campments.
Speaker 1: The you touched on this, but I think it warrants
Speaker 1: a little revisit. Uh. While this is going on, you know,
Speaker 1: people argue about whether capital punishment is a deterrent or not.
Speaker 1: In those days, it's like they're thinking about how do
Speaker 1: I like everybody's dying, and it gets down to where
Speaker 1: it gets down to whatever number than one hundred and forty,
Speaker 1: and then it gets down to like a very very
Speaker 1: small handful of people, but a lot of their actions
Speaker 1: are governed by whatever I do to get out of this.
Speaker 1: Can't be such that I get hung. Yeah, that's great,
Speaker 1: And they like they've they've like these people in their career,
Speaker 1: they have seen people hung from the mast. Yeah, and
Speaker 1: it's like you're not like, hey, no, when I get home,
Speaker 1: I don't care what no punishment be bad?
Speaker 2: Is this?
Speaker 1: You're calculating it, Like, at at a point, I got
Speaker 1: to start thinking about how I'm going to explain this
Speaker 1: because they're going to hang me.
Speaker 2: Yes they are.
Speaker 1: And if I survive, it's almost like that almost makes
Speaker 1: me guilty.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they are so conscious. It's so interesting. You know,
Speaker 2: they're thousands of miles away from from from England and
Speaker 2: yet there's this eye of the Admiralty always kind of
Speaker 2: peering down upon them, like the eye of God, and
Speaker 2: they're deeply conscious of it. And so yes, they are
Speaker 2: so conscious of having to justify their actions. And they
Speaker 2: was amazing they were able to salvage paper and ink,
Speaker 2: you know, the writing with a quill and with ink
Speaker 2: and a container, and they're you know, and they're creating
Speaker 2: documents and contemporaneous evidence so that they can present if
Speaker 2: they get back to England, you know, present this. They
Speaker 2: are basically trying to create an unassailable story that could
Speaker 2: withstand the attrition of public scrutiny. And at Marshall, yeah.
Speaker 1: Like regardless of what Bob might.
Speaker 2: Say, and we didn't talk about it, but at a
Speaker 2: certain point during this where they have to abandon some
Speaker 2: people and they would literally they would have them sign
Speaker 2: a document basically saying this indemnifies I mean they used
Speaker 2: the word indefy.
Speaker 1: It's dudes on the beach, yeah, yeah, one.
Speaker 2: Yeah, just could you sign this so that when I
Speaker 2: get back to England, I've been indemnified. So they are
Speaker 2: very they are, they are very conscious that. But you
Speaker 2: know what is interesting is when they're even in that
Speaker 2: state of starvation and descending into murderous anarchy. They do
Speaker 2: hold these like really interesting philosophical debates, you know, about
Speaker 2: the nature of leadership and duty and patriotism and loyalty.
Speaker 5: It's almost a weird sense of optimism that they think that, oh, well,
Speaker 5: we're in hell, but obviously we're going to make it
Speaker 5: back to England, sometimes not too long.
Speaker 1: That's why I feel like I would get to a
Speaker 1: point where, you know, I would quickly get to a
Speaker 1: point where that just whatever was going to happen back
Speaker 1: there was like completely beside the point, like it just
Speaker 1: wasn't you were never gonna come up. Yeah, you would think, Uh,
Speaker 1: there's a When I say this, I don't mean to
Speaker 1: detract from the story, but uh, I've I've long been
Speaker 1: a fan of shipwreck stories, typically in the Arctic, so
Speaker 1: the other bad area. There's a part I like, and
Speaker 1: it's and it's it comes up so much in these
Speaker 1: maritime disasters is the indigenous people show up and here
Speaker 1: you have all these trained here, you have all these
Speaker 1: trained men equipped from the like the the most powerful
Speaker 1: imperial force on the planet. They have hierarchy, right, career warriors,
Speaker 1: and and they're just dying every imaginable way. But then
Speaker 1: here lo and behold, one day comes a family in
Speaker 1: a boat. Yeah, who's just fine with with all homemade
Speaker 1: material everything they're wearing their boat, everything is made from
Speaker 1: the same pool of resources. They've been there thousands of years.
Speaker 1: They have children with them, and they come and be
Speaker 1: like what has come over these people? And they often
Speaker 1: have like there's often this sense on them being like,
Speaker 1: I don't know that I need to get involved with
Speaker 1: these these people eating each other stuff, like a great
Speaker 1: reticence to engage, but also sort of a moral like
Speaker 1: a little bit of a you you get into it,
Speaker 1: you send it, like a little bit of a Now
Speaker 1: that I found these people, like, I probably try to
Speaker 1: do something for them, but I don't trust them. You know.
Speaker 2: The people that initially merge out of the mist, you know,
Speaker 2: while they're starving and fighting, are a group known as
Speaker 2: the Karrasquar and the Kearra Squar. As you said, they
Speaker 2: had lived in that region for ages. They had adapted
Speaker 2: to that region over time. They lived almost exclusively off
Speaker 2: marine resources, and they spent much of their time in canoes.
Speaker 2: They usually traveled in small kind of familiar groups. They
Speaker 2: had learned where to find the food because it was
Speaker 2: hard to find food. But they knew all the places
Speaker 2: along the coastline.
Speaker 1: Would hunt sea lions.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they knew how to hunt sea lions, where to
Speaker 2: find sea urgeons. The women would dive down in the
Speaker 2: cold water and be able to withstand it and get
Speaker 2: these se urgeons and bring them up.
Speaker 1: And because the detail you talked about two that I
Speaker 1: really liked is that they in their canoes they would
Speaker 1: keep a fire kindled. The fire was like such a
Speaker 1: great little like it's like a great image and something
Speaker 1: I hadn't heard of before, but they like they have
Speaker 1: a campfire going in a canoe.
Speaker 2: They learned how to stay warm. I mean they they
Speaker 2: were no is the nomads of the sea, or they
Speaker 2: sometimes called that. And they had adapted so well to
Speaker 2: the environment that Nassau, when they were considering putting humans
Speaker 2: in space, actually study the care square. They went to
Speaker 2: try to figure out how had they adapted to their
Speaker 2: environment this kind of seemingly inhospitable place that they had
Speaker 2: seemed to be fine it.
Speaker 1: And they coat their bodies with oil.
Speaker 2: Yeah, they would, Yep, they could take a blubber, you know,
Speaker 2: from even from a seal and that would help them
Speaker 2: stay warm. So you know, all these little things just
Speaker 2: to basically stay alive and live and have you know,
Speaker 2: a society. And and so they come and you know,
Speaker 2: they're actually they go out and they actually are like,
Speaker 2: oh my god, these kind of these hairy castaways, and
Speaker 2: they're all starving. So they're actually they go out and
Speaker 2: they go bring them back food. They go out and
Speaker 2: they get them food, they bring them back.
Speaker 1: But there in their memorialized by as these crazy savages.
Speaker 2: Yes, yeah, in their journal as they describe them as.
Speaker 2: And some of and some of the castaways mistreat them
Speaker 2: and you know, they think their civilization must be superior
Speaker 2: and think and we don't get to see it because
Speaker 2: we don't have a recording from the Carroscuar's point of view,
Speaker 2: but we can see it from the at least in
Speaker 2: the journals of the castways. And John Byron describes as
Speaker 2: very well on his account, you know, he's so Saturday,
Speaker 2: at a certain point, the caris guard basically they are
Speaker 2: looking at them and watching the spiral into islands and
Speaker 2: being mistreated and they're just like, you know what, we're
Speaker 2: out of here. And they disappear and and that's and
Speaker 2: and then the castaways only just send further into their
Speaker 2: spiral of violence at Hobsey and State, and some of
Speaker 2: them are succumbing to cannibalism at that point.
Speaker 1: How many people, uh, and this is by no means synonymous,
Speaker 1: would survive? How many people get off the island.
Speaker 2: So there are a couple different attempts to flee the island,
Speaker 2: and in one group there are about eighty or so
Speaker 2: try to go pack together in a little castaway boat.
Speaker 2: So you have to imagine you have survived going around
Speaker 2: Cape Horn, you survived scurvy, you survived the shipwreck, you
Speaker 2: survived the violence on the island, you survived intense, excruciating starvation,
Speaker 2: and now you're going to get in a little castaway boat.
Speaker 2: They're packed so tightly together they can't stand. And they're
Speaker 2: at least for this castaway boat. They're hoping to travel
Speaker 2: three thousand miles three thousand miles all the way from
Speaker 2: the coast of Chile down south through the Straight of Magellan,
Speaker 2: which is really rough to has lots of squalls, and
Speaker 2: then up the coast to Brazil. And that group about
Speaker 2: thirty make it, and they're just basically almost wasted to
Speaker 2: the bone, but they do make it, and most of
Speaker 2: them then return to England. And then they're about another
Speaker 2: little castaway.
Speaker 1: Well, return to England, but considerable delay.
Speaker 2: Oh, yes, with considerable delay. Yes, yes, so in that group,
Speaker 2: with considerable lay. And then there's another little group that
Speaker 2: eventually another little boat that eventually, well, let me just
Speaker 2: step back for one second. This little boat washes off
Speaker 2: the coast of Brazil and on board of these thirty men,
Speaker 2: almost wasted to the bone, and they announce that they
Speaker 2: are the survivors of His Majesty Shift the wager, And
Speaker 2: at first nobody can believe it how far they've gone.
Speaker 2: And they're initially greeted, you know, his heroes, and celebrated
Speaker 2: for their ingenuity. But then several months later, another little
Speaker 2: castaway boat will wash ashore, this time on the other
Speaker 2: side of South America, on the Chilean side. This one
Speaker 2: is just like a dugout. It has a seal which
Speaker 2: is stitched together from blankets. On board are just three men,
Speaker 2: including the captain David Cheep, who is so delirious he
Speaker 2: can't even recollect his name. But after they begin to recover,
Speaker 2: they then tell a very different story than those people
Speaker 2: who have gone to prision and they say those people
Speaker 2: aren't actually heroes, they were mutineers. And it takes a
Speaker 2: long time because there's lots of mishats, people end up
Speaker 2: in prison all these things, but eventually they do could
Speaker 2: make it back to England.
Speaker 1: There's a two you're right. I mean, there's so much
Speaker 1: we're missing out on, skipping over so much, but there's
Speaker 1: two little stunning things about the escape. Is that there's
Speaker 1: a he's not a slave on the there's a former
Speaker 1: slave on the wager or was he a slave on
Speaker 1: the wager?
Speaker 2: No, he was a free black seaman on the wager.
Speaker 2: He was from London. He was a freeman, so I
Speaker 2: hadn't been born into slavery to the best. We don't know,
Speaker 2: to be honest, we don't know because we don't know
Speaker 2: that about his past, but we know he was a
Speaker 2: free black seaman when he was on the wager.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this guy lives through all of this and then
Speaker 1: just gets kidnapped by people that could find a black
Speaker 1: man kidnap him and it's almost a slave. Yeah, it's like,
Speaker 1: oh my god, like what.
Speaker 2: A I know, it's just terrific. And he you know,
Speaker 2: he is somebody who had survived all those things we've described,
Speaker 2: and he survived that castaway voyage. And then yeah, and
Speaker 2: and and one of this. You know, the themes of
Speaker 2: the book Stories Survive on Venture may all these kind
Speaker 2: of different theme society, leadership, but it's also about the
Speaker 2: way we tell stories and the way we shape our stories,
Speaker 2: but also some of the stories we can't tell. And
Speaker 2: as a historian who's trying to research these stories and
Speaker 2: tell them, you know, this free black seaman, his name
Speaker 2: was John Duck. He's one of the stories I couldn't
Speaker 2: tell because we don't know what happened, and we don't
Speaker 2: know there's no record of his face.
Speaker 3: Yeah.
Speaker 2: Yeah, so he's he's somebody whose story isn't shared. You know,
Speaker 2: he can't be told other than the fact that that's
Speaker 2: what we that's what we know.
Speaker 1: The real fighting begins when everybody gets home. Yes, it's
Speaker 1: like when my reminds me of you know, my kids
Speaker 1: come in the house and they're both crying. You're like,
Speaker 1: what happened? One of them is like hey, she like
Speaker 1: it becomes a but in this case, it becomes like
Speaker 1: a national inquirers sort of public fixation.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, it's a scandal. I mean, it becomes a
Speaker 2: scandalous story, you know, because.
Speaker 5: Sorry, real quick, how many years have gone by since
Speaker 5: they left and then everybody's back and start fighting.
Speaker 2: It's a really good question. So some will make up
Speaker 2: back to you know, England in about three years, but
Speaker 2: some of them, and like John Byron and the Captain
Speaker 2: David Cheap, it's six years before they get back to England.
Speaker 2: John Byron left England when he was six sixteen years old.
Speaker 2: He returns to England he is twenty two. He goes
Speaker 2: to First of all, he can't find where his family
Speaker 2: lives anymore. He's like looking from where he's trying to
Speaker 2: find his sister. He finally finds his Sister's sister doesn't
Speaker 2: recognize him and had presumed he was dead, and there
Speaker 2: he is dressed as a pauper, and she realizes that
Speaker 2: this is her long lost brother come back to life.
Speaker 2: So he's six years and then they are summoned to
Speaker 2: face a court martial for their alleged crimes on the island,
Speaker 2: and so this generates the scanon so here these people
Speaker 2: had waged his furious war against the elements all these years,
Speaker 2: and now they get back to England, and they begin
Speaker 2: to wage this furious war over the truth, you know,
Speaker 2: with each offering their version of story, and they're so
Speaker 2: afraid to be hanged, so they they begin to publish
Speaker 2: their accounts. And there are these people known as grub
Speaker 2: Street hacks, which is like the early kind of professional
Speaker 2: scribblers in the media, from grouvestry to a generating you
Speaker 2: know who sees on this story. It's a big thing.
Speaker 2: You know, this is the National inquir getting hold of this,
Speaker 2: and and they're all releasing their testimony and giving their
Speaker 2: testing and so there's this kind of warring story and
Speaker 2: they're each trying to emerge as the hero of their
Speaker 2: own story to kind of live what they have done
Speaker 2: or they haven't done, but also quite literally, to save
Speaker 2: their lives. There's a great line by Joan Diddy and
Speaker 2: the writer who said, you know, we all tell ourselves
Speaker 2: stories in order to live. And yet in this case
Speaker 2: it's quite literal. They have to tell their stories.
Speaker 1: And there's a lot of there's a lot of stuff
Speaker 1: we haven't gotten into today. I mean, on this island,
Speaker 1: on the ships, there's there's shootouts or there's gunplay, there's
Speaker 1: can't there's a lot to hash out back home, who
Speaker 1: did what? And what was whose idea and who last
Speaker 1: saw who? And and uh, and it was just it's
Speaker 1: so reminiscent of so reminiscent of way that you might
Speaker 1: play a public sentiment campaign.
Speaker 2: Today, Yes, very much so. And there are I mean
Speaker 2: it's crazy because you know there are you know, there's disinformation,
Speaker 2: there's misinformation, their allegations of quote unquote fake journals, and
Speaker 2: some people like sometimes they would have takes an authentic
Speaker 2: journal and then someone would rewrite it and kind of
Speaker 2: skew it so that the actually the person who wrote
Speaker 2: it will then look bad. I mean, the original author
Speaker 2: will look bad. These kind of fake journals are kind
Speaker 2: of proliferating them being published, and like you know, people
Speaker 2: are like figuring out like what is the truth? How
Speaker 2: to and and your version of the truth will kind
Speaker 2: of depend on what you read. And so yeah, it
Speaker 2: is and there are these like the are these campaigns.
Speaker 1: Without without getting into the the trial and and and
Speaker 1: where guilt wise and all that, what, uh explain who
Speaker 1: the sort of primary factions are the people that want
Speaker 1: to spin narratives. They're they're divided in a way.
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are really two principal groups. There's there's Captain
Speaker 2: Cheap who is determined to have what he calls my
Speaker 2: mutineers hanged and he is burning for vengeance. And then
Speaker 2: there is the side of John Bulkeley and those who
Speaker 2: had uh abandoned their captain on the island, who believe
Speaker 2: they were justified in their actions and are spinning their
Speaker 2: own uh version of the truth. And of course they're
Speaker 2: leveling one of the more you know, they're leveling charges
Speaker 2: of homicide against the other side, so you know, they
Speaker 2: had good reason to fear they were going to get hanged.
Speaker 2: And you know, John Buckley and his group are praying
Speaker 2: before they go into the court martial.
Speaker 1: You know. One of the craziest things the like structurally,
Speaker 1: it's it's such a gray element of the story is
Speaker 1: you know, we start with these two thousand people and
Speaker 1: all these ships, and then this becomes uh, it gets
Speaker 1: whittled down so it's a known boat and then it
Speaker 1: gets whittled down. So it's like this known handful of
Speaker 1: you know, co conspirators against this other handful, and you
Speaker 1: kinda forget, like at least I did as a reader.
Speaker 1: You forget that what all these other people are doing
Speaker 1: and I couldn't believe. Towards the end of the book,
Speaker 1: it was like they I mean they find the gold,
Speaker 1: they find the gold bearing vessel.
Speaker 2: Yes, they get it's like it.
Speaker 1: I was like, oh, sh I forgot about all that.
Speaker 2: Yeah, it's that weird. That's that thing like that. You know,
Speaker 2: you're saying like this sounds like an up movie. That
Speaker 2: wouldn't be true. And that's the part that I could
Speaker 2: see them going out after it. But then after everything
Speaker 2: they've been through this squadron, there is one ship that survived,
Speaker 2: only one ship of the squadron.
Speaker 1: Like not even fully male, Like holy shit, it's the
Speaker 1: Spanish GID.
Speaker 2: And they actually get the Spanish guy in and then
Speaker 2: come back to England and they have these wheelbarrows with
Speaker 2: the treasure being brought through the through the streets. It's
Speaker 2: just it's kind of it's almost hard to believe it is.
Speaker 1: It was so that what as you explain it and
Speaker 1: how it occurs, it's so ridiculously tidy that again you
Speaker 1: feel like you're watching a pirate movie. Yeah, it's like
Speaker 1: how ridiculously tidy it is.
Speaker 2: Yeah. And then the other crazy thing is just that
Speaker 2: you know there are this is a battle over stories.
Speaker 2: So the book is really narrated between the primarily with
Speaker 2: the perspective of three people are always fighting in their
Speaker 2: own accounts, so John Byron, the Captain, Davy Cheap, and
Speaker 2: John Bulkeley. So you get to see how each of
Speaker 2: them are shaping their stories along the way. And it's
Speaker 2: interesting is they never outright lie. They're not they're not
Speaker 2: they but they tell stories the way we often have
Speaker 2: a tendency to do, which is like kind of leave
Speaker 2: out certain parts that they might not lie, and they
Speaker 2: kind of emphasize other parts they may like. The most
Speaker 2: vivid example of this is one of them would say
Speaker 2: in his account on the island, I was forced to
Speaker 2: proceed to extremities. That's like, so we got to like
Speaker 2: world War two, right, I was forced to proceed to extremity.
Speaker 2: That's what he writes to amiralty do in his account.
Speaker 2: And then John Byer and the boy on the island,
Speaker 2: he says, oh no, yeah, he shot him right in
Speaker 2: the head and the guy bled out in my arms.
Speaker 2: And so you get to see how they're each doing it.
Speaker 2: But then we also get to see how history gets
Speaker 2: written because you know, once this paradic mission succeeds and
Speaker 2: they capture this galleon and they come back. The war
Speaker 2: had gone disastrously, but here is this great victory, and
Speaker 2: so some power like, can we just tell this story?
Speaker 2: Do we have to tell this other story about what
Speaker 2: happened on the island because when we were on the
Speaker 2: island are officers of the empire. They look more like
Speaker 2: brutes than like gentlemen. And so it's also a battle,
Speaker 2: you know, kind of shows how both people tell stories,
Speaker 2: but also how nations tell stories.
Speaker 1: Yeah, you don't. You leave a lot of the you
Speaker 1: let a lot of the different competing narratives play out.
Speaker 1: I was laughing that. There's two points I was gonna make.
Speaker 1: One was when you were saying, what did the guy.
Speaker 2: Use force to proceed to extremities?
Speaker 1: You probably know the writer Ian Frasier.
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah, yeah.
Speaker 1: He was talking about when he's doing an interview with
Speaker 1: someone and the minute they say and then I proceeded
Speaker 1: to his his internal like radar like me like he's like, okay,
Speaker 1: now we're entering into like a like something that may
Speaker 1: or made a with you. And then I proceeded to Uh.
Speaker 1: The other point is one of my favorite books of
Speaker 1: all time, it's called the Sun of the Morning Star,
Speaker 1: and it gets in it's about the events that played out,
Speaker 1: and it's about the events that played out around the
Speaker 1: Battle of a Little Big Horn when when Custer was killed. Ah.
Speaker 1: And he does a similar thing with what people put
Speaker 1: in what they leave out. And there's this great anecdote
Speaker 1: early in the book where there's a physician who just
Speaker 1: keeps meticulous notes of what he saw that day. This
Speaker 1: is this is the people that fought that the first
Speaker 1: soldiers that come across the battlefield, and what he saw
Speaker 1: and who did what, what did what not? In his
Speaker 1: journal is an observation by another person about something the
Speaker 1: physician did, which he went into a teepee and tried
Speaker 1: to remove the moccasin of a warrior who had been
Speaker 1: killed days before. It was very hot, and the warrior's
Speaker 1: skin slipped and he was trying to so he's trying
Speaker 1: to loot a body, and then he gets physically ill.
Speaker 1: And the writer points out that did not make the
Speaker 1: journal of the physician, who is otherwise quite meticulous.
Speaker 2: Yeah, and you could see that here. I mean, you
Speaker 2: get to see it as each one and you get
Speaker 2: a sense of human character from each one. What we
Speaker 2: leave out what we leave in, And yeah, it's a
Speaker 2: very very same, very nature in this case as well.
Speaker 1: Uh, did you you've had great success in finding uh
Speaker 1: stories that are gonna make great movies? Do you? At first?
Speaker 1: It was probably a surprise? Maybe was it a surprise
Speaker 1: at first?
Speaker 2: Yeah, one hundred percent. If anyone ever thinks of things
Speaker 2: is gonna be a movie? I would tell you a delusion.
Speaker 2: Even now they've made some much Even now, if I
Speaker 2: think so there's gonna be a movie, I think I'm diluted.
Speaker 1: So that's what I was gonna ask, is has as
Speaker 1: you work now?
Speaker 2: Uh?
Speaker 1: Are you are you in writing a script too? In
Speaker 1: the back of your head? Are you are you like
Speaker 1: making a story that will work as a script or
Speaker 1: have you not allowed that to come in?
Speaker 2: You know, I try never to let that come in,
Speaker 2: And in part because I never actually i've never tried
Speaker 2: a screenplay. And also I'm really just I'm seized by curiosity.
Speaker 2: And so, for example, how did I come across the wager?
Speaker 2: I was like, I'm kind of interested in mutinies, you know,
Speaker 2: that's kind of an interesting form of rebellion. And then
Speaker 2: I came upon an eight. It was actually online. It
Speaker 2: was a digital copy, but it was you know, it
Speaker 2: was in its old English of John Byron's account and
Speaker 2: the Midshipman on the Wager. And I start reading this
Speaker 2: thing and like, I don't think you know, nobody looking
Speaker 2: at the thing that think would be a movie. It's
Speaker 2: written in this stilted prose. You know, the s's are
Speaker 2: printed as f's, and it's kind of tangled in that
Speaker 2: eighteenth century language. And I'm just kind of reading. But
Speaker 2: then I just like there's these little descriptions that just
Speaker 2: like get their hooks into me. It's like describes like
Speaker 2: Cape Horn is the perfect hurricane, used that phrase, and
Speaker 2: then he's like he's describing the madness and the scurvy.
Speaker 2: And then he describes the cannibalism, which he refers to
Speaker 2: simply it doesn't like to call it cannibals, and versus
Speaker 2: that last extremity, which ways, yes, yes, uh we ate
Speaker 2: the last yeah exactly.
Speaker 1: So uh.
Speaker 2: And so you know, I don't know, I know, you'd
Speaker 2: have to be nuts if you would look at that
Speaker 2: journal and be like, no, I just like, this is crazy,
Speaker 2: this is so interesting. And then you know, I go
Speaker 2: to these archives and you know, you start going in
Speaker 2: these boxes and you can pull out these primary materials
Speaker 2: that went around the world, and so you know, you
Speaker 2: you know, I can read the log books from these
Speaker 2: ships and diaries and you know, you go to England
Speaker 2: and you pull them out of these boxes like you
Speaker 2: and heal a cloud of dust.
Speaker 1: I thought that you had to you have to place
Speaker 1: it on a pillow.
Speaker 2: Yeah, you got to place it on a pillow, or
Speaker 2: you know, the binding is disintegrating. You have to, you know,
Speaker 2: you have like watchers because you don't want to do anything.
Speaker 2: You're like, you're terrified, like you'll be the last to
Speaker 2: damn it. You don't want to damage these these these
Speaker 2: these you know, last records and so you know, but
Speaker 2: you know you can read these things. You got to
Speaker 2: use some I used the magnifying glass. I would spend
Speaker 2: years studying these documents. Never in my right mind when
Speaker 2: I think somebody's gonna come along and want to make
Speaker 2: a movie out of this stuff, you gotta be nuts.
Speaker 2: But I do think there is something in the stories.
Speaker 2: I suppose like that do grip me that I think,
Speaker 2: you know, if you get the right story, I think
Speaker 2: the themes kind of resonate and they can be told
Speaker 2: in different mediums, and the only thing I try to do,
Speaker 2: the only thing I really think about because my process
Speaker 2: is so different. You know, I'm just working with documents
Speaker 2: or interviews and words, and I'm just so I'm just
Speaker 2: trying to create visual images through words, and so I
Speaker 2: hopefully it has a cinemaonic quality, but it's very different
Speaker 2: than cinema. I always find it so strange when they
Speaker 2: make a movie of one of my books and I'll
Speaker 2: go to the set for a few days, so my
Speaker 2: kids will think I'm cool, and I'll go to the
Speaker 2: set and and you know, you suddenly see a recreation
Speaker 2: of things that you just had in your imagination based
Speaker 2: on words. You suddenly see these people who you've written
Speaker 2: about and known through you know, years of research and
Speaker 2: records are something walking towards you. Yeah, You're just like,
Speaker 2: and then they're like smiling or winking or or and
Speaker 2: you're just like, and they're suddenly, you know, deeping into
Speaker 2: a conscious level of these people. So it's to me,
Speaker 2: it's just totally surreal. So no, I never think about it,
Speaker 2: you know, I try not to think about it.
Speaker 5: Do you actually write the script when this process happens.
Speaker 2: No, Now, I help in the sense of just as
Speaker 2: a as a as a resource. Sure, just want to
Speaker 2: help help out. And especially because they're so historical documents,
Speaker 2: answer questions, point them in directions, and help that way.
Speaker 2: So you have a lot of sometimes actors who are
Speaker 2: real kind of method actors will want to call you
Speaker 2: and ask you questions about the part they're playing. So
Speaker 2: and I always find it really interesting, but I consider
Speaker 2: kind of totally separate.
Speaker 1: If you could have it be, if you had to choose,
Speaker 1: you did the same work, but at the end of
Speaker 1: the work there was a film or was a book. Book.
Speaker 2: I figured, yeah, book for me, I mean my you know,
Speaker 2: my kids won't think I'm cool. I'll go just revert
Speaker 2: back to being, you know, the dorky writer in his
Speaker 2: office with lots of archival materials drowning under them. Uh
Speaker 2: so I would lose that street cred. But you know
Speaker 2: that's always kind of what I've been and uh yeah,
Speaker 2: so I think for me it would be the book.
Speaker 2: And but but also just because they're very different, you know,
Speaker 2: they're very different. You know, a film is interpretive and
Speaker 2: I'm really fact based, so I am it's like a
Speaker 2: different almost a different mindset. Like you know, and I
Speaker 2: sometimes envy actually the filmmakers because you know, I might
Speaker 2: just have one or two letters from that person I'm
Speaker 2: writing about, and yet you know, they can imagine and
Speaker 2: go deeper and I'm stuck, like I got I wish
Speaker 2: I had some more dialogue in that scene.
Speaker 1: But yeah, they can build background and the actor in
Speaker 1: his mind has created a family history and this created
Speaker 1: like a psychology, like.
Speaker 2: A Freudian analysis delve in. So yes, sometimes sometimes that
Speaker 2: part of sometimes jealous of, but yes, I've just stick
Speaker 2: to what I've got on that.
Speaker 4: I just have a question about your character development process
Speaker 4: because you're based on the documents that you have, journal entries,
Speaker 4: et cetera. In order to build them up in your work,
Speaker 4: there is an additive imaginative process that must take place
Speaker 4: in that. So as you're are you are you? Is
Speaker 4: there an element of like projecting onto who these people
Speaker 4: might have been? Or are you letting your interpretation of
Speaker 4: their writing knowing that they, you know, maybe haven't divulged
Speaker 4: everything right? How How are you kind of like dipping
Speaker 4: into the psychology that you think may have been there
Speaker 4: for each character?
Speaker 2: So I think it's less projecting you you have to
Speaker 2: do some level of interpretive. You don't really so much imagic,
Speaker 2: but you do have to make analytical judgments or or
Speaker 2: or or you know, but you're basing that based on
Speaker 2: what they write, so you know, you can make you know,
Speaker 2: John Bulkeley interesting enough, writes exactly the way his personality is.
Speaker 2: So you're reading his text and he writes and he
Speaker 2: you know, for eight early eighteen cents, you write, first
Speaker 2: of all, he didn't come from the upper crest of
Speaker 2: the fact that he can write so well, was it remarkable?
Speaker 2: But the second thing is he writes in a modern
Speaker 2: direct language. It's like verb object action. And he said,
Speaker 2: that is the way he is. And then you'll yeah,
Speaker 2: and so you don't actually I don't ever, I don't
Speaker 2: know if I even make that observation in the book,
Speaker 2: but you get something like that. You're getting to know
Speaker 2: someone based on the way they write and the way
Speaker 2: they think, and even the way they make jokes and
Speaker 2: so you but my what I really try to do
Speaker 2: is do enough research and find everything I can abound
Speaker 2: the person. I'm always just trying to understand them. So
Speaker 2: even somebody like Captain Cheap, who's a very flawed commander,
Speaker 2: you know I could read, I could learn how he
Speaker 2: was kind of plagued by debts on this at sea
Speaker 2: and I mean at land, and he was kind of
Speaker 2: an bitter person and at a ship he had always
Speaker 2: that he had always dreamed of becoming a captain, and
Speaker 2: then on this trip he finally got it. And so
Speaker 2: when others are describing his kind of insecurity about losing
Speaker 2: this crown, you can understand it. So but mostly you
Speaker 2: are just trying to show. I really just try to
Speaker 2: show and let you interpret actions and dialogue that they
Speaker 2: spoke or wrote so that you could kind of find
Speaker 2: your judgment. And you do benefit in a case like
Speaker 2: this that you have multiple layers of commentary, so you
Speaker 2: can have that person's perspective. So it's kind of less,
Speaker 2: but I can have what John Byron is saying about
Speaker 2: this captain, and what John Buckley is saying about the
Speaker 2: what the Admiralty is saying about of what George ants
Speaker 2: and the coven, And so that's how you kind of
Speaker 2: build it out. And then you try to show up,
Speaker 2: but you are making certain interpretive decisions or things you
Speaker 2: want to highlight about their character, but you don't really
Speaker 2: so much imagine.
Speaker 1: Uh have you have you started cranking on a new project.
Speaker 2: I need a new one. Any give I need a
Speaker 2: new one? Yes?
Speaker 1: The way in your head do you have in your head?
Speaker 1: Do you have uh like more than you'll ever get
Speaker 1: to kind of feeling or do you have like you
Speaker 1: gotta hunt them down.
Speaker 2: You gotta hunt them down, you gotta hunt them down.
Speaker 2: It's interesting when I was primarily just did magazine work,
Speaker 2: I had more than I could tell, Is that right? Yeah? Yeah,
Speaker 2: because I could there was just so many. But for
Speaker 2: a book, you know, these books, they take me, like
Speaker 2: to get to your question, how do you know the character?
Speaker 2: Because it takes me five years?
Speaker 1: Five years? What's the longest you ever went down a
Speaker 1: path and then realized wasn't there?
Speaker 2: Always so terrified to that, so I will spend I'll
Speaker 2: do an early early, like just intensive couple months of
Speaker 2: research before I'll ever commit to a book, got it,
Speaker 2: because I'm terrified that two years I'll wake up and
Speaker 2: be like what whoa what about?
Speaker 1: What did I do? And in that phase, you're you're
Speaker 1: like a summary, You're like you're trying to examine the
Speaker 1: whole what's known, what might be found out exactly?
Speaker 2: And you need to hear. You're clearly you're going to
Speaker 2: find out so much more on the path, but you
Speaker 2: need to know, for example, for the wager, before I
Speaker 2: committed to the wager, well, what's in the archives? You know,
Speaker 2: I have John Byron's account or these other are these
Speaker 2: other accounts? And then I found the other accounts. I
Speaker 2: read some of these other kinds like oh, okay, this
Speaker 2: is interesting, and then I thought, oh wow, that's a
Speaker 2: really interesting theme about this war over the truth, which
Speaker 2: is something kind of we having in our own society.
Speaker 2: It's like, oh, that's an interesting theme to be able
Speaker 2: to play with. So you're starting to say okay, okay, okay,
Speaker 2: so you get there, but yes I am, but you
Speaker 2: want to be kind of ruthless. I knew no writers,
Speaker 2: and I probably did when I was younger, make a
Speaker 2: mistake where you're just kind of holding on to like
Speaker 2: a dog or a lemon. I don't know what the
Speaker 2: right phrases for a bad story. You know, you know
Speaker 2: you're because at a certain level, if you if you
Speaker 2: don't have the right story, there's only so much you
Speaker 2: could do.
Speaker 1: Do you do you like to as my last one
Speaker 1: for you on my last craft question, and will wrap up.
Speaker 1: But do you like to at the end of that
Speaker 1: couple of months or when you do your do your
Speaker 1: like feasibility study, do you need to get to a
Speaker 1: point where you're like thinking to yourself, I will add,
Speaker 1: I will my research will add to the story. I mean,
Speaker 1: I will find out things and deliver things to the
Speaker 1: reader that has not been discussed by another writer.
Speaker 2: Yes, I think you want to feel like whatever you're
Speaker 2: doing has not been done the way you are hoping
Speaker 2: to do. It doesn't mean yours will be better, but
Speaker 2: that your vision, your approach, the research you may find
Speaker 2: is gonna be a contribution in some ways. It you know,
Speaker 2: not a regurgitation, not just a regurgitation. I mean, so
Speaker 2: I think that is what's important that you feel like
Speaker 2: whatever it is you know, there can be people have
Speaker 2: written about a subject, but for whatever it is, your approach,
Speaker 2: the things you're thinking about, that you're going to bring
Speaker 2: something new, and then inevitably you do fine stuff you
Speaker 2: just you do and in some cases you're just like
Speaker 2: you just you just never know. I mean, when I
Speaker 2: did The Last City of Zea, I remember trying. There's
Speaker 2: about a British explorer disappeared in the Amazon in the
Speaker 2: early twentieth century, and I went to his granddaughter's house.
Speaker 2: She lived in Wales, and I remember chatting with her
Speaker 2: and she said, well, do you really want to know
Speaker 2: what happened to my grandfather? And I said, well, yeah, sure,
Speaker 2: you know, if that's possible. And she then led me
Speaker 2: into this back room and there was a chest, like
Speaker 2: could you not you talk about like weird like things
Speaker 2: that you're like, I can't believe that there was a
Speaker 2: chest I think it was. It was on the floor
Speaker 2: and she opened it up and inside were all these
Speaker 2: old books and they were kind of somewhere like held
Speaker 2: together by ropes or a little locks or water stained
Speaker 2: and grinding me. I said, what are those? She said, well,
Speaker 2: those are my father's log books and diaries. And she'd
Speaker 2: let me look at them and gave me access to them.
Speaker 2: So sometimes you just never know. So these things are
Speaker 2: The research is its own odyssey, it is its own
Speaker 2: little quest, and I think the most important thing to
Speaker 2: get to the craft question is I think the most
Speaker 2: important thing for me though, is not whether it's going
Speaker 2: to be something you know, just more than the feasibility
Speaker 2: and more you're gonna be doing, just like are you
Speaker 2: obsessed with it, because if you're not obsessed, you gotta
Speaker 2: you've got to be able to walk away. And then
Speaker 2: a couple of days later, shoot, I'm thinking about that again.
Speaker 2: Oh shoot, I can't you know, I want to know.
Speaker 2: I got these questions. And then you know, then you're
Speaker 2: boarding a boat and going to Wager Island like you
Speaker 2: just need that, you need that because otherwise you're not
Speaker 2: going to do something, you know, hopefully good.
Speaker 1: No, uh, fantastic book. The Wager, A Tale of shipwreck, mutiny,
Speaker 1: and murder.
Speaker 2: All three, you got them all and they all We
Speaker 2: didn't even get to the mutiny.
Speaker 1: Again. David Grant The Wager, A Tale of shipwrecked, mutiny
Speaker 1: and Murder, author of The Lost City of z Killers
Speaker 1: of the Flower Moon. Good luck, man, I have no
Speaker 1: doubt that you're gonna you're you're gonna have another You're
Speaker 1: gonna have another success with this one, or are having
Speaker 1: another success to this one. So congratulations and thanks for
Speaker 1: coming and joining us.
Speaker 2: That's my pleasure. Thank you so much for shaw.
Speaker 3: Ride on Seal Gray shine like silver in the sun, right.
Speaker 1: Right on alone, sweet with done this damn horse to death.
Speaker 2: So taking a new one and ride away. We're done
Speaker 2: beat this damn horse today, MH.
Speaker 1: So take a new one and ride on.