How to Fathom the Life of a Claustrophobic Person

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When you decide to take on a story that happened, I mean centuries and centuries ago, you are left with in some ways a perfect storm. How do you get close to their lives? They're all deeply fallible but interesting humans. There was a surprising amount of correspondence and journals and then log books. Some of these journals and records survived the typhoon,. Some went around the world, and a lot of them were daily accounts.

David Grann is a staff writer for The New Yorker. His new book is The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder.

“I became very haunted by the stories that [nations] don't tell. Nations and empires preserve their powers not only by the stories they tell, but also by the stories they leave out. … Early in my career, if I came across the silences in a story, I might not have highlighted them, because I thought, Well, there's nothing to tell there. And now I try to let the silences speak.”

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