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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
David Grann
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February 4 - February 8, 2025
We all impose some coherence—some meaning—on the chaotic events of our existence. We rummage through the raw images of our memories, selecting, burnishing, erasing. We emerge as the heroes of our stories, allowing us to live with what we have done—or haven’t done.
A diplomat later quipped that Anson was so unknowing about the world that he’d been “round it, but never in it.”
As Samuel Johnson once observed, “No man will be a sailor who has contrivance enough to get himself into a jail; for being in a ship is being in a jail, with the chance of being drowned.”
Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.
Teredo navalis—a reddish shipworm, which can grow longer than a foot—ate through hulls. (Columbus lost two ships to these creatures during his fourth voyage to the West Indies.)
One sailor described a man-of-war as a “set of human machinery, in which every man is a wheel, a band, or a crank, all moving with wonderful regularity and precision to the will of its machinist—the all-powerful captain.”
how to measure the ship’s speed by casting a line ribbed with evenly spaced knots into the water and then counting the number that slipped through his hands over a period of time. (One knot equaled a little more than a land mile per hour.)
To “toe the line” derives from when boys on a ship were forced to stand still for inspection with their toes on a deck seam. To “pipe down” was the boatswain’s whistle for everyone to be quiet at night, and “piping hot” was his call for meals. A “scuttlebutt” was a water cask around which the seamen gossiped while waiting for their rations. A ship was “three sheets to the wind” when the lines to the sails broke and the vessel pitched drunkenly out of control. To “turn a blind eye” became a popular expression after Vice-Admiral Nelson deliberately placed his telescope against his blind eye to
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Bold were the Men who on the Ocean first Spread the new Sails, when Ship wreck was the worst: More Dangers Now from MAN alone we find, Than from the Rocks, the Billows, and the Wind.
(When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be “under the weather.”)
Because the far-southern seas are the only waters that flow uninterrupted around the globe, they gather enormous power, with waves building over as much as thirteen thousand miles, accumulating strength as they roll through one ocean after another.
the Trial’s purser, Millechamp, wrote. “They are about the size of a large cat, their nose like a hog’s, with a thick shell…hard enough to resist a strong blow with a hammer.”
Thomas wrote that most of the men who consumed them were seized “very violently, both by vomit and stool.”
An official in Brazil remarked how strange it was that “people who had undergone so many hardships and difficulties could not agree lovingly together.” The forces unleashed on Wager Island were like the horrors inside Pandora’s box: once unlocked, they could not be contained.
London was the pulsing heart of an island empire built on the toll of seamen and slavery and colonialism.
Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.
