David Grann on the Wreck of the H.M.S. Wager

Matt Haig was already several books into his career as a writer by the time he published “The Midnight Library” in 2020. One of those books, the 2015 memoir “Reasons to Stay Alive,” had even been a best seller in England, his home nation. Yet, “The Midnight Library” was a true br ...  Show more

“Angel Down,” a grisly novel about World War I told in a single, almost 300-page-long sentence, was awarded this year’s Pulitzer Prize for fiction. In a review for The New York Times, Ben H. Winters described it as a “thunderous gallop” that captures the “cruel and self-perpetuat ...  Show more

They were in a boat all alone on a foggy night in the middle of the Pacific ocean. But they weren’t alone. A strange voice cries out in the darkness, in search of food, but he is unwilling to be seen. The Voice in the Night by William Hope Hodgson, that’s next on The Lost Sci-Fi ...  Show more

In 1740, the Royal Navy ship The Wager set sail for the Pacific to take part in the War of Jenkins' Ear. The unfortunate ship was separated from the fleet and, after pulverising storms and outbreaks of scurvy, ended up sinking near a small island off the coast of Chil ...

This story by Charles Dickens is a part of a larger story about the 1859 wreck of The Royal Charter, a steam powered clipper on its way from Australia to Liverpool, and carrying 370 passengers and a crew of 112. Many of the passengers were gold miners returning from the Australia ...  Show more

In 1808, an American merchant ship happened upon an uncharted island in the South Pacific and unwittingly solved the biggest nautical mystery of the era: the whereabouts of a band of fugitives who, after seizing their vessel, had disappeared into the night with their Tahitian com ...  Show more