The Past is Never Dead: A Guest Post by David Grann

This seamless slam-dunk of epic history-telling from the author of the bestselling Killers of the Flower Moon is an eighteenth-century puzzle of high seas intrigue, a fateful shipwreck, mutiny, and a real-life “Lord of the Flies” descent into mayhem, culminating in a gripping courtroom battle where opposing truths hang in the balance. Read on for an exclusive essay from Our Monthly Pick author — and 2023 B&N Author of the Year — David Grann on writing The Wager.

The story lay hidden in a British archive—a manuscript from the eighteenth century written by John Byron, who had been a sixteen-year-old midshipman on His Majesty’s Ship the Wager. It was composed in archaic English where the letter “s” was rendered as “f.” And it took me a moment to accustom myself to the tangled, faded prose, but soon I found myself spellbound by Byron’s story—a story of battling scurvy and what he called the “perfect hurricane”; of being shipwrecked on a desolate island, where the castaways descended into a Hobbesian state, rife with mutiny and murder and cannibalism; and finally of a court-martial that revealed a shocking truth about the nature of empire.

Byron became the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, whose work was greatly influenced by what he referred to as “my grand-dad’s ‘Narrative.’” And that manuscript set me on my own half-decade odyssey—one that included a journey on a small, wood-heated boat through violent seas to reach the barren island—in order to tell the extraordinary tale of The Wager. For me, the great pleasure of research is not only discovering these stories largely lost to history but sharing them with readers. Many of my books have started after I stumbled upon a diary or document, hinting at a riveting but forgotten tale.

The seed of my first book, The Lost City of Z, came from reading, in a tedious biography about a Victorian writer, a startling footnote: in 1925, a British explorer named Percy Harrison Fawcett had disappeared with his son in the Amazon, looking for an ancient civilization. I eventually tracked down Fawcett’s granddaughter in Wales, and after I inquired about her relative’s fate, she led me into a backroom, where she opened a large wooden trunk. Inside were leather-bound books, their covers worn and tattered, their bindings breaking apart.

“What are they?” I asked.

She said they were her grandfather’s secret diaries and logbooks. They held clues not only to the mystery of what had happened to Fawcett but also of whether the City of Z really existed—which, if it did, would transform our understanding of what the Americas looked like before the arrival of Christopher Columbus.

My book Killers of the Flower Moon similarly emerged from discovering an artifact, only this one had a gaping hole. When I was visiting the Osage Nation Museum in Oklahoma, I spotted a panoramic photograph on the wall which seemed innocent-looking. Taken at a ceremony in 1924, it showed members of the Osage Nation alongside prominent local white businessmen and leaders. But a section of the picture had been cut out. When I asked the museum director why, she said it contained the image of a figure so frightening that she and her colleagues had decided to remove it. She then pointed to the missing panel and said, “The devil was standing right there.” Trying to understand that mysterious figure would lead me to one of the most sinister conspiracies in American history—to Killers of the Flower Moon.

The past, as William Faulkner said, may “never be dead,” but its stories are often scattered in records, lost and forgotten, crying out to be told. I hope that readers will rummage with me through the vast and wondrous archives to bring them into the light.