![]() The account had largely faded from public memory, even though it was documented in popular accounts by Byron and other survivors, and went on to influence philosophers like Rousseau, Voltaire and Montesquieu, and inspire the novelists Herman Melville and Patrick O’Brian. “This is a story about the disintegration of a floating civilization.” “When they’re on that island, it became almost like a laboratory, testing human nature under extraordinary circumstances,” Grann said. ![]() Byron, the grandfather of the poet Lord Byron, was one of just a few dozen castaways who escaped the island and survived, out of some 250 who first set sail on a quest to seize a treasure-filled Spanish galleon in 1740. ![]() ![]() Written in florid, 18th-century prose by a midshipman named John Byron, the journal told the story of a British warship that sank off the coast of Chile, leaving its survivors marooned on a desolate island, where they descended into chaos, starvation, sedition and murder. The journalist David Grann was rummaging through the electronic files of a British archive in 2016, researching one of his pet obsessions - mutinies - when he came across an astonishing tale. ![]()
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