Another Strook featuring something I’ve drawn, read, and listened to.

Drawing

In Stockholm, I didn’t get around to my “2 minutes of drawing every day” ritual. I caught up on the drawing when I got home:

Besides the conference where I spoke, I had time to cycle through the city and visit the Naturhistoriska Riksmuseet and the Vasa.

Reading

The Vasa was raised from the seabed in the 1950s after 333 years and is now on display in a specially built museum. You think you know what to expect when you go to see a ship. For years, I’ve devoured books about explorers like Abel Tasman and James Cook, as well as about shipwrecks. But seeing a warship from that era with my own eyes was truly impressive.

The Vasa is a contemporary of the Batavia; both ships were launched in 1628. In *The Sinking of the Batavia*, Mike Dash describes how the ship runs aground on a coral reef off the Australian coast. What follows is a thriller.

The leadership sets off with a small group to Java to fetch help. That takes a while. During their absence, a psychopathic crew member seizes power. He orchestrates a massacre of over a hundred of his fellow passengers, including women and children, to conserve supplies. A group of soldiers splits off to another island and tries to keep the mutineers at bay there.

The Vasa, incidentally, didn’t get nearly as far. The ship sank just fifteen minutes after departure. A design flaw. Most of the crew were even able to swim ashore.

The Wager

David Grann’s The Wreck of The Wager proves that a book about a shipwreck can be even more thrilling. The Wager was part of a British expedition to intercept the Spanish silver fleet, but sank off the coast of Chile in 1741. Nothing more was heard from them.

In 1742, a rickety, homemade ship arrives in Brazil carrying survivors of this disaster. They recount how they managed to escape Captain Cheap, who behaved like a cruel tyrant. They are welcomed as heroes in England.

Years later, however, Captain Cheap also returns to England with a group of crew members. With a very different story: the other survivors are not heroes, but mutineers. What follows is a court-martial and a reconstruction that results in this amazing 5-star book.

Listen

Buck Meek is the guitarist for Big Thief and, like frontwoman Adrianne Lenker, also releases a lot of his own work. His solo work is less experimental than Big Thief’s. His new album, *The Mirror*, is full of lovely, understated songs.

See you next week!