The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder

by David Grann

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.

Cool

He wrote that Captain Kidd, on his deathbed, had delivered a prophecy concerning the expedition: “It would end in poverty, vermin, famine, death and destruction.”

Crazy last words. Metal af

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.

Melville wrote that these mountains “loomed up, like the border of some other world. Flashing walls and crystal battlements, like the diamond watch-towers along heaven’s furthest frontier.”

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.