A shipwreck, a boy & the stories that shape us

The Fated Voyage of The Wager & Leadership for Today

For reasons to do with my work, pastoral calling and experience, I hear a lot of stories, often both sides of the story—sometimes multiple sides of the story. I have come to learn that everyone has a perspective and the story they are telling themselves is reality to them. Navigating through the chop of competing perspectives usually opens me up to compassion for the human experience.

We all see only what we see from our place on deck (me included).

I finished the book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder this weekend while recovering from covid. My covid-laced dreams tossed me about on a sea of crazed sailors and scurvy over the past nights, whew, feeling better now, and also glad to have closed the unsettling tale of The Wager.

David Grann's The Wager is a Robinson-Crusoe-meets-Lord-of-the-Flies historical account of a shipwreck and the human disaster of power struggle that unfurls afterward on the beach shadowed by the aptly named Mount Misery.  Reconstructed from the ship logs and sailors' personal journals, the brutal story involves horrific storms, cartilage-melting scurvy, lice that carries an epidemic of typhoid, and then post shipwreck starvation, mutiny, cannibalism, despair and extreme desperation. 

As several competing perspectives are told, the story of one young sailor, Lieutenant John Byron, age 16, grabbed my attention. Byron struggles with his own commitment to ethics and character caught between a narcissistic, maniacal captain versus a mutinous, but competent and ruthless leader.  Byron struggles to be true to his ideals in a life and death situation.  As one of the few survivors (sorry, spoiler), he demonstrates incredible courage in the midst of grief and trauma, while the vast majority of the sailors fall apart physically, emotionally and morally.  Byron seems to be telling himself a different story of survival than the others, one in which character rises above the sinkhole of humanity being left to its worst instincts. While certainly Grann seems to want us to feel a level of respect for Byron's response to unimaginable crisis, we also see Byron as a boy who is looking for a leader to follow and comes up broke again and again. There are no positional leaders to truly admire in this tale. More, it is the crude and often cruel reality of the human instinct to survive that leaves you wondering if there are things worse than death (and the answer seems to be yes to that in this book).

What The Wager is really about is the stories we tell ourselves and how we define reality by those stories. Grann tells the story from several perspectives, leaving it to us to determine who we think is the most reliable narrator and the hero of the story.  What is most clear is that the story is not clear.  Humans are the sum of the stories we tell ourselves. And each account often competes with the other’s reality.

We create the stories we tell ourselves and then the stories we tell ourselves create us.

The tragic tale of The Wager has a few things to say to me about story, truth, human will and leadership.

To me, the real leader of the story is John Byron. When all reality was turned on its end, with nothing to cling to but pure survival, Byron was seemingly upheld by the stories of his childhood and years at school. Byron loved the tale of Robinson Crusoe, and the tales of maritime adventures from navigators like Sir Francis Drake. These stories of noble causes and heroism would grow in him a different story that would inspire ideals and adventure that shaped his worldview at a desperate time.

Only 16, with little power in the hierarchy of the navy, he demonstrates real power: compassion, the struggle to make ethical choices in an impossible situation, the choice of character over almost certain death, and the demonstration of kindness in the midst of misery.

The stories we tell ourselves matter. Not only how we shape reality around the narration of our life events, but the actual stories of other people (real and fictional) shape how we experience and understand life.

If we seek to be a leader, we will no doubt be faced with people who wrong us, leaders who disappoint us or who are out for their own glory and personal gain, people who think the worst of us, and those who seek to survive at all costs in their political context. If we want to lead well, it is all about the stories we tell ourselves. Will we tell ourselves stories of heroism through self-sacrifice or stories that focus on political survival and personal gain?

The stories of faithful leaders who lead with self-sacrifice and undaunted love, following the way of Jesus, will also take us deeper into the story of the Cross and the self-emptying way of the Messiah. Jesus led with sacrificial love and gained authority not by what He controlled, but what He released.

The way we become these leaders is by the stories we tell ourselves.

Lord Byron, the poet of the early 1800s, was influenced by his grandfather, Lieuentant John Byron of the fatal voyage of the The Wager.

Lord Byron penned these words in Don Juan:

"I want a hero: an uncommon want

When every year and month sends forth a new one,

Till, after cloying the gazettes with cant,

The age discovers he is not the true one."

New leaders, heroes even, are paraded by us almost daily, causing us to ask—is this a true leader to get behind, to admire, to aspire to? As Lord Byron expresses, we are disappointed.

We have to look deeper than what comes across our phones for the stories that we listen to and be discerning about the stories we let shape us. It can be the matter of life and death. It’s all in the story we tell ourselves.

That’s why the story of God came to us as a story.

A magnificent tale of innocence, mutiny, murder, desperation, and the worst of humanity, and the people of God that followed a backcountry Messiah whose story of self-sacrifice redeems us for all time. Now that’s a story worth telling ourselves.