The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

Constructing a single large warship could require as many as four thousand trees; a hundred acres of forest might be felled.

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 ignore his superior’s signal flag to retreat.

(When ailing seamen were shielded belowdecks from the adverse elements outside, they were said to be “under the weather.”)

There was a sinister design to these fictions. By portraying the natives as both magnificent and less than human, Europeans tried to pretend that their brutal mission of conquest was somehow righteous and heroic.

Ferreting out and documenting all the incontrovertible facts of what had happened on the island—the marauding, the stealing, the whippings, the murders—would have undercut the central claim on which the British Empire tried to justify its rule of other peoples: namely, that its imperial forces, its civilization, were inherently superior. That its officers were gentlemen, not brutes.

As the historian Jill Lepore has noted, occupied peoples had “revolted again and again and again,” asking the “same question, unrelentingly: By what right are we ruled?”

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.