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Empires preserve their power with the stories that they tell, but just as critical are the stories they don’t—the dark silences they impose, the pages they tear out.

This quote comes from the final chapter of The Wager, Chapter 26: The Version That Won, and refers to the conspicuously missing testimony of free Black seaman John Duck. Though Duck survives along with midshipman Isaac Morris and two others after the Speedwell abandons them on a coast in Patagonia, he is kidnapped and sold into slavery upon reaching Buenos Aires. In Grann’s view, the erasure of Duck’s story reveals as much about the era in which the events take place as the numerous post-voyage publications of his shipmates. By drawing attention to Duck’s inability to tell his story in his own words, Grann suggests how often important stories go untold when some voices are valued more highly than others.

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