(Byron was the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, who drew, in “ Don Juan ,” on what he referred to as “my grand-dad’s ‘Narrative.’ ”) Grann set out to reconstruct what really took place, and spent more than half a decade combing through the archival debris: the washed-out logbooks, the moldering correspondence, the partly truthful journals, the surviving records from the court-martial. In 2016, Grann, a staff writer at the magazine and the author of “ Killers of the Flower Moon ” and “ The Lost City of Z ,” stumbled across an eyewitness account of the voyage by John Byron, who had been a sixteen-year-old midshipman on the Wager when the journey began. They each attempted to shade a scandalous truth-to erase history. Years later, several survivors made it back to England, where, facing a court-martial and desperate to save their own lives, they gave wildly conflicting versions of what had happened. The men, marooned on a desolate island, descended into murderous anarchy. ” It tells the extraordinary saga of the officers and crew of the Wager, a British naval warship that wrecked off the Chilean coast of Patagonia, in 1741. All of these elements converge in David Grann’s upcoming book, “ The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder. A war over the truth and who gets to write history.
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