Before immersing himself in a new story, David Grann begins his day by pulling down the blinds in his office. From the silent room where he works every day, from 8:30 am until dinnertime, with the occasional break for a walk around the neighborhood, the American writer meticulously studies the piles of documents and archives that overflow from his library and spread across the wooden floor. Even before writing a single line, this task keeps him busy for months, sometimes years.

As a staff writer at The New Yorker, the United States' most prestigious magazine, Grann has already chronicled a series of historic events: from a disastrous crossing of Antarctica, organized in the mid-2010s by a fan of 19^th-century explorer Ernest Shackleton, to the racist murders ordered by a gang of white supremacists locked in US maximum security prisons. He even covered the investigation of a hardened cop who tackled a cold case in Poland only to discover that one of the suspects wrote about his crime in a novel that has remained confidential. These incredible stories have one thing in common: They're all very real.

Le Monde met with the 56-year-old author on a June afternoon, in his comfortable home in the New York suburbs, where he lives with his wife and two children. On his desk was the material he has analyzed over the past five years: a bound work on the different types of British navy ships, old medical treatises on leg amputation, a compilation of academic studies on the work of Moby Dick's author Herman Melville and an account of the discovery of longitude calculation by an English watchmaker, which reduced the number of shipwrecks (The Longitude Prize). These documents, among dozens of others, served as reference and inspiration for his fifth book The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny and Murder, published in April by Doubleday.

Rigorous fact-checking

This time, the subject of his investigation dated back to 1740. At the time, a British naval vessel hunting a Spanish galleon was wrecked on an island off Patagonia, in the southern end of South America. In addition to damage and scurvy, a mutiny, several cases of cannibalism and one murder decimated the 250-strong crew. Only a handful of sailors managed to return to England, where a court martial was scheduled to try them for disobeying their captain's orders. They faced hanging.

To defend themselves, the survivors came up with contradictory accounts, each publishing their version in the press and accusing the others of spreading false information. In this factual battle – which is said to have inspired philosophers Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Voltaire – the reporter discovered a "rare resonance" with today's culture of disinformation and fake news. "It's not just an amazing story in the 18^th century, it's illustrative of the human character, the human condition, and something larger about the search and the meaning of truth in our society," he said.

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