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."

Program transcript:

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 Men...