The Painstaking Journey to a David Grann Book

First, some swashbuckling. 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. 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.

Storms have rolled in. To Grann’s surprise, the captain’s vessel is much smaller than it appeared in the photos. The tiny crew needs to chop wood to keep it heated; they retrieve drinking water from nearby glaciers. Out at sea, the boat’s top-heaviness reveals itself. 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.

As the boat undulates, Grann calms his mind by listening to an audio version of . He’s doing anything he can to pass the time before finally reaching the island he’s been obsessing over for two years. Once ashore, he treks and trudges and bushwhacks, much like the cadre of 18th-century shipwrecked sailors he’s writing about. The goal of this journey is not to find anything per se, but to experience, firsthand, the nothingness