And after all that, Grann added, “I don’t ever write about my own trip in the book. Grann unfurled this yarn to me over a decidedly unadventurous arugula salad outside a sunny SoHo café on a warm April day. This is the sort of place where if, God forbid, you find yourself stranded, you’d almost certainly starve. Even with his long johns and gloves and wool hat and rubber boots, he’s overwhelmed by the uniquely bone-chilling cold. Wager Island is desolate: no Indigenous tribes, no land animals that he can see, a little seaweed, some celery. The goal of this journey is not to find anything per se, but to experience, firsthand, the nothingness that he already knew was there. Once ashore, he treks and trudges and bushwhacks, much like the cadre of 18th-century shipwrecked sailors he’s writing about.
He’s doing anything he can to pass the time before finally reaching the island he’s been obsessing over for two years. No combination of Dramamine and anti-nausea wristbands and behind-the-ear patches can save an uninitiated stomach against these waves near the bottom of the Earth.Īs the boat undulates, Grann calms his mind by listening to an audio version of Moby-Dick. Out at sea, the boat’s top-heaviness reveals itself. The tiny crew needs to chop wood to keep it heated they retrieve drinking water from nearby glaciers. To Grann’s surprise, the captain’s vessel is much smaller than it appeared in the photos. There, he meets the boat captain who has agreed to steer him hundreds of miles farther south, to Wager Island, a place where nobody lives. The journalist David Grann embarks on a multi-leg journey from New York to Florida to Santiago, an annoying combination of planes and customs and cars and ferries en route to Chiloé Island, a little strip off the coast of Chile.
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