Eric Jay Dolin on the Campbell Conversations

Author Eric Jay Dolin talks about his forthcoming book, "The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail."

Grant Reeher: Welcome to the Campbell Conversations. I'm Grant Reeher. The coming of summer invites a good tale involving the ocean, and my guest today, who has been called the leading maritime historian of his generation, has supplied the perfect voyage for us. Eric Jay Dolin is the author of previous bestsellers such as "Black Flags Blue Waters," and he's written a new book titled "The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail." Mr. Dolin, welcome to the program.

Eric Jay Dolin: Thanks for having me.

GR: We really appreciate you making the time. Now, let me just start with a question about how you got into this particular line of writing. I mean, your beat as a writer isn't exclusively about maritime history, but obviously that is your principal theme. The Washington Post has called you “the expert literary steersman of our time.” How did you originally fall into that current, so to speak?

EJD: When I was a kid, I wanted to grow up and be Jacques Cousteau. I was really into marine biology. I was a very serious shell collector, and I went off, and I wanted to be a malacologist. I wanted to be a professional seashell scientist, so I went off to college. I started going towards that path. I discovered I wasn't very good at science, so I shifted gears. I went into environmental policy. I thought I'd be a professor of environmental policy, and I got a master's and a PhD in that, and then I didn't apply for a single teaching job. I started working. If you looked at my resume, you'd think I couldn't keep a job. I've had so many different jobs in environmental policy, public policy, but through it all, I just loved writing. And because my early introduction to marine biology and my early love of marine biology, I think I naturally gravitated towards stories of the marine environment, and as I said, I'm not exclusively focused on that. But I do live in Marblehead, Massachusetts, which is, and I'm just about a quarter of a mile from the harbor, and I grew up in Long Island in Connecticut, very close to Long Island Sound. So I've always been near the ocean. I've always been fascinated by stories of the ocean, and when I decided I wanted to try this crazy career of being a writer, I, what interests me, and a lot of the things that interested me initially were revolved around the ocean. And once you start writing a couple of books that involve maritime tales, you often find other tales while you're working on those books, and you also, to be honest, you get a little bit pigeonholed. So it, you know, publishers like you to keep writing in the same vein because you can build your audience there. But I love maritime stories. I don't know if my next book will be on a maritime topic. It might be or it might not. It's really the story that compels me to write about it. But because I have this interest in the ocean, that's often where I look first.

GR: Well, I don't want to sound cynical or cheeky, but, as someone that went down the academic path, I think you did just fine. I think you made a good choice here. You've got a nice body of work. So, we will dive deeper into the different parts of this particular story in this book as we go, but just to sort of start us off and give us a context, could you just give our listeners the bare facts about the story of the Mentor and the men on it?

EJD: Sure. The Mentor was a whale ship out of New Bedford. It left in the summer or actually late spring of 1831, on a voyage to go kill whales in the Atlantic Ocean, and there were 22 men on board, Captain Edward Bernard. And they weren't having much luck in the Atlantic, so they went into the Indian Ocean and then finally decided to sail all the way to the Pacific Ocean, which was teeming with sperm whales, the most valuable whale of all. On the way there, some bad weather came. He lost his bearings, and he crashed into a reef in the archipelago of Palau. And it's sort of a complicated story, a lot of moving parts, as we talked about before. But what happens first is they're attacked by natives, viciously. They get away from those natives who attacked them. Then they land on an island, one of the islands in Palau, and the village of Ngerechelong, and there they are drawn into a historical dynamic that goes back decades to when a British ship crashed in the neighboring village of Koror. And in exchange for help in building a ship, the British gave the Kororese guns and ammunition and fought with them against their neighbors, including the Ngerechelong. So here comes the Mentor, only 11 men left, 11 men had died after the crash. Here comes the Mentor and the village of Ngerechelong, who is lorded over by Koror. They say, they're Westerners, they're Americans. We could get guns from them, and we could become powerful. So they strike a deal. “We will help you build a ship and to get away and go back home, and you will send us guns in return.” So they try to build a ship, they fail miserably, and they finally build them a canoe. And, the men patch up their whale boat, and they leave. During this whole time, Koror has been trying to lure them away because the Americans were looked like as pawns because if you controlled the Americans, you would get guns and ammunition as your reward. Well, the Americans finally leave Ngerechelong. They're hoping to go to the Spice Islands. But after a very dramatic voyage in the whale boat where they lose the canoe, they end up on another island called Tobi, which is part of Palau today, but was not back then. And they get a very different reception. And I need to add one other thing. When they left Ngerechelong, they left three of their men behind as hostages so that they would return with guns at a later date. Well, on Tobi, they're treated horrifically, and, over time, two of the men escape on a passing ship. Another two men escape on a passing ship, and this is after many years where they're near starvation. There are men that are killed on Tobi. There are men that die, and, then finally, President Andrew Jackson sends a rescue mission, a naval ship to the Pacific to pick up the remaining men in Palau. They think there are more of them than there are, but a number of them have died in the intervening years, and they successfully rescue the last of the Americans who are held in Palau. That's just the bare bones of the story. It spans over four years. Some of the men spent four years essentially in captivity, some of it fairly pleasant, some of it quite horrific. But it's an amazing story, and luckily, a few of the participants wrote down what happened to them when they returned to America. And that's how I was able to tell the story.

GR: Wow. What a lot of twists and turns there. So, obviously, I was going to ask you, you know, one of the things I was going to ask you about, I'm not even going to ask any more now that you've told that story, was, you know, there's lots of shipwrecks out there. What is it about this one? But obviously this one's really, really interesting. How did you come upon it? I mean, what, you know, it seems like it's a story that we probably should have had a book 100 years ago about. How’d this thing stay until Dolin, that’s now, revealed it to all of us?

EJD: Well, I'm glad there wasn't a book on it recently because then I couldn’t have written it, but the way that it happened is I wrote a book many years ago in, about 2007, it was published called "Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America,” which was a book that spanned four centuries and many, many stories. While researching that book, I came upon the story of the Mentor because it involves a whale ship, but it didn't make it into the narrative of "Leviathan," but it stuck in the back of my head. You fast forward to 2024 or 2023, when I wrote a book called "Left for Dead," which is about five men who are intentionally marooned on the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812. And when I wrote that book, I immediately started thinking about the Mentor again, because it has some similarities. There's a shipwreck involved, there's a duress, a long span of time that people are on another island away from home, and that got me rekindled my interest in the Mentor. And then I had to decide, is there enough here to write an entire book? And I dove into the research, and I decided the answer was definitively yes.

GR: I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm speaking with Eric Jay Dolin, the bestselling maritime historian. He's got a new book coming out in early June, and it's titled "The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail."

So as you dug into this, you decided, okay, I'm going to make this my book. Did you come across new information that you weren't aware of before that allowed you to go even deeper and tell the story in more detail?

EJD: Oh, yeah. Absolutely. I mean, when I wrote "Leviathan," my understanding of the wreck of the Mentor probably spanned a page worth of material. I just sort of read a little bit about it in bits and pieces. When I started to actually write this book, not only did I read the memoir of, one of the men on board the Mentor and the captain of the Mentor, but I also read every single newspaper article that came out at the time and accounts, oral histories from Palau, accounts that came out in later years about the shipwreck and the subsequent events. So I think that I dug up almost everything that's been written on the wreck of the Mentor and what transpired thereafter. And then the job was to synthesize it in a manner that was easily digestible, because when I started reading this story, I said, man, there are a lot of twists and turns and moving parts, and there are historical stories that I have to pull into it, like a wreck of a British ship years before. And then I have to talk about what happens in Palau after the wreck of the Mentor, and it was fascinating, at times vexing, but ultimately very satisfying to me to tell this complicated story in what I think is an easy-to-read manner.

GR: Well, one of the things that struck me in your book was how young the crew was.

EJD: Yes.

GR: The oldest member is, 32 years old. The captain of the ship is 31. I infer from that that whaling must have been an incredibly hard and treacherous occupation.

EJD: Yes. It was an incredibly hard and treacherous occupation. And this was a time at which the United States was the leading whaling nation in the world, and they were expanding by leaps and bounds every year, so more and more men were needed. So, it was getting more difficult to crew your ships. So they were basically where it used to be, a very specialized profession, they, at this point, they were starting to take on a lot of green hands, people who were unfamiliar, but as for the age, that's not so unusual. Keep in mind that in the 1830s, the average life expectancy was much, much less than what it is today. And if you reach 32, you are not an old man. But you were getting up there in your 40s and 50s. People didn't often make their 60s, 70s, and 80s, but also maritime professions historically, even before this, have always been a young man's job because of the difficulty, the danger, the risk, having to leave your family behind. So it was not at all unusual the age profile on the Mentor, and as you mentioned, a number of the people on board were under 20, so very young. Some of them had never been to sea before, inexperienced, and here they were going on this voyage halfway around the world, and everybody hoped that the voyage would end in success. But there was always lurking in their minds the fear that there would be a tragic failure, and they may not come back at all.

GR: Well, and very quickly, where exactly are the Palau Islands in the Pacific?

EJD: They're in Micronesia, which means small islands. And, it's basically 500 or 600 miles to the west, to the east of the Philippines, and about 500, 600 miles southwest of Guam. So it's sort of in that area, the Philippines, Australia, Guam, New Guinea, that area.

GR: Okay. We'll get into some of the details of their experiences. You're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. I'm Grant Reeher, and I'm talking with Eric Jay Dolin, the maritime historian has a new book coming out in June titled "The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail," and we've been discussing his book.

So I wanted to ask you about what happened in the actual moments or the immediate aftermath of when that ship wrecked on the reef. My understanding is, you know, they didn't all continue to follow the captain. Right? There was dissension there.

EJD: Right. Well, not so much dissension, the rules of the road and maritime law or practice at the time was that the captain was the ultimate authority on board the ship while it was sailing. But once a wreck took place and you were stranded someplace, the captain's authority essentially vanished. And it wasn't really every man for himself, but they liked Bernard. They thought he was a good captain. However, right after they crashed on this reef, and keep in mind, this was a total shock. He thought, based on his calculations, even though it was very stormy and he couldn't use celestial navigation, he thought he was about 150 miles out, you know, in the open ocean on his way to Guam, and was not going to have any problem, and then all of a sudden they wreck on this reef, and it was a pretty bad wreck, and they were listed over quite a bit and the waves were very high. So the men had to decide what to do. How did they save themselves? And, the first mate decided that the best option was to take one of the whale boats and leave, and hopefully find an island or some land nearby, and ten other men or nine other men threw in their lot with him. They got in the whale boat went down. They probably made it a few hundred yards, maybe a few thousand yards. And what the other men found out later, the following day is that the whale boat overturned, and those men were never seen again. The captain of the ship, Edward Bernard, also decided that his best bet was to leave. So he got another whale boat ready to go. Two other men decided to go with him, but as they were lowering the whale boat from the davits, which was holding the whale boat up, a wave crashed the whale boat against the side of the wrecked Mentor and smashed it to pieces. One of the men was flung into the ocean and he just drowned. Another guy managed to scamper up and get back into the boat there. There were actually four of them, and Edward Bernard, he was sort of smart. He had a rope around his waist, that he put on before he got in the whale boat with the notion that if they encountered trouble, the remaining men on the Mentor would haul him back in. Well, there he was in the water, being swept away by the waves. Probably about 100 yards away, and the men on board were able to pull the old man, as they called him, 32 old man onto the Mentor. So now we have 11 men still on the Mentor. 11 have died. They wait till the next day and, they spy land in the distance and they get into the remaining whale boat, which is already beat up, and they make it over to this small cay or small island, which is only about 250ft long by 50ft wide. And there they encounter the natives for the first time the following day. And that's where the story really begins, and for some of them, it'll be nearly four years before they get back to the United States.

GR: And then, that initial encounter, as you said before, that one was quite violent. They were hostily received by that group.

EJD: Oh, absolutely. These were the Palau's an archipelago, about 340 islands. There are many different villages in Palau that sort of had their own spheres of influence. The first natives that they encountered were from the island, small island of Kayangel, which is the far northern reaches of Palau. And initially they were not warmly received, but they, they, they communicated in their fashion with the natives. The natives wanted to get muskets and guns that was their main motive to go back to the wreck. But as the men on the whale boat they got out in the whale boat and they were going to go to this island, they thought, some of the natives came alongside and started stealing things from the whale boat. And the men on board the whale boat fought back a little bit, and this became a battle in the open water. And finally the Americans broke away. And what they did is they used the natives avidity against them. They would take a piece of clothes and throw it into the water. As they were rowing away, and the canoe would go right to that piece of clothes to pick it up, and they'd fall a little further behind. And they did this many, many times. And finally the natives in the canoe gave up, turned around, went back to Kayangel, and then the Americans were left in the open ocean trying to find another piece of land to land on, and they did a couple of days later, and the next group of natives that they encountered were initially hostile, but once they determined that they were not British, but they were these, quote-unquote “Americans,” they had no idea what they were, since they didn't like the British because the British had given their enemies arms 40 years earlier. But once they found out they weren't British, they treated them well, and they tried to help them, escape and go back home in exchange for more arms.

GR: Wow, wow. So I just want to clarify one thing and make sure my understanding is correct. And I'm going to introduce a different author here. But Tony Horwitz's account of Captain Cook's voyages in the Pacific called "Blue Latitudes."

EJD: Yes, Blue Latitudes.

GR: Yeah, I love that book. He's got this one section where they, when they encounter the Tahitians, some of those sailors refuse to get back on the boat, the ship, and they, because they were welcomed. And let's just put it this way, every way imaginable. Right. And so that there, there were no Americans that said, I don't want to go back, I'm staying in Palau.

EJD: Right. There were no Americans on the Mentor that said that, and the relations between the Americans and the Palauans were not at all like the relations between Americans and Westerners and Tahitians, especially when it came to the women. Although at one point, one of the chiefs of the Ngerechelong offered the Americans Palauan wives, in exchange for something. And you have to read the book to find out what that is, but essentially, so Tahiti was this image in everybody's mind in the 1800s, in particular, of this earthly paradise where women were very sexually compliant. That does not play into this story at all.

GR: I see, if you just joined us, you're listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media. And my guest is Eric Jay Dolin. He’s the author of "The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail." A little broader now, in the last section of time that we've got, this moment, during the four years in which this takes place, is this happened to be at an inflection point in Western maritime whaling and exploration, or did it have any effect in any important way, maybe situated in the bigger picture here of sort of the age of sail?

EJD: Well, it's hard to point to a single event as having a major effect on broader history. There are other wrecks that took place around, you know, the decade before, decade after. One of the things that I think this wreck showed is Americans' determination to be seen as major powers and take care of their own. Part of the reason that Andrew, President Andrew Jackson sent a voyage to the Pacific to collect the Americans on Palau, as well as Americans on other Pacific islands who were being held captive, is to exert our power across the ocean and say that we will protect our citizens. So it played I think it had an important role to play in that projection of power. But in the broader scheme of things, there were many wrecks. Whaling was getting ever larger year by year. If you read my book, "Leviathan," there are many other instances of very nasty and sometimes pleasant interactions with natives, especially in the Pacific. So that was not at all unusual. But the one of the things that I think is most, interesting about this case is the role of guns and ammunition in the relations between the East and West. It started off with the British ship that crashed there in 1783, but that became a major dynamic that continued up through the wreck of the Mentor and even beyond. And what's really sad is Palauan history after the wreck of the Mentor got worse and worse for them. The Western diseases were introduced. Other countries took over Palau. First it was the Spanish, then the Germans, then the Japanese. And then after World War II, the United Nations sort of oversaw it, and America oversaw it as a protectorate, and it wasn't until 1994 that Palau finally became a republic and were the masters of their own future that we still have a relationship with them, the United States does, and we provide military defense and some aid. But the history, following the Mentor over the next century and a half or so, is a very sad one where the number of Palauans dramatically diminished, and they were not given control over their own destiny, and they were treated as pawns in international affairs. So I do talk about that in the epilogue of the book it's not the main story of the Mentor, but it's part of a larger, tableau of what happened with many other islands and many other small nations in the Pacific and other places in the world where much larger, more advanced powers with a lot of military hardware, were able to decide what they wanted to do with these places and whether they wanted to take them over, exploit them or attack them. And it really is a very it's part of a much larger and sadder story of the spread of Western power over other parts of the world that were not necessarily ready or able to handle that interaction.

GR: Yeah. There's two things that strike me as you're speaking that just I'll mention quickly. One is, you know, Andrew Jackson is President Trump's favorite president. And some of the parallels there of rejecting American power going off, and when there's been a problematic or, conflict between Americans and people abroad, and going, that's an obvious thing that went into my mind. And the other thing is the parallel between our experience here on the frontier and the United States and the expansion of the United States. But the role of guns and the conflicts between different nations, indigenous nations, and how we were involved in those too, often gets overlooked, you know, and that it just there's a lot of interesting parallels there. And again, so very briefly, we've only got about a minute left. So today there are still Palauan islands, right?

EJD: Oh, yes. About 18 or 19,000 of them. Very vibrant community. A great place to go scuba diving.

GR: You've been there? Have you been?

EJD: No, no, no, I have not been to Palau yet. I would love to go there.

GR: Well, I imagine you will after the book comes out. I know where you're going next. Okay. All right. Just a few seconds left, and I know you could probably speak to this for the entire half hour, but I wanted to ask you two questions. Really quick. Sort of lightning round here. What's your own favorite maritime novel? Okay. And then what? Other than the Dolin oeuvre, what's your favorite nonfiction maritime book?

EJD: Oh my goodness. Well, "Treasure Island," Robert Louis Stevenson, I have to give that a nod. And, I really like, let's see. I like "Blue Latitudes" is really great. Tony Horwitz, I love that, Erik Larson's "Isaac’s Storm." I really enjoyed that about the Galveston hurricane. So those are some quick ones off the top of my head. I mean, there are so many good books out there.

GR: Well, we'll have to leave it there. That was Eric Jay Dolin. And again, this book is titled "The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail." And the book is out in June, but it's available now as a preorder on the many online outlets that are out there. Mr. Dolin, thanks so much for talking with me. Fascinating book.

EJD: Well, thank you for having me. Appreciate it.

GR: You've been listening to the Campbell Conversations on WRVO Public Media, conversations in the public interest.