The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail

Eric Jay Dolin's The Wreck of the Mentor (Liveright, 288 pages) is the story of one ship's end that is also a fine introduction to maritime life of the early to mid-19th century. With its backdrop of berths and hulls, rudders, staysails, and waistboats, Dolin's book fits right in with the other recent chronicles of watery disasters, from David Grann's The Wager to Hampton Sides' The Wide Wide Sea. But The Wreck of the Mentor is not just for readers already committed to oceanic history. Dolin's exploration of the catastrophe, which details the lives of sailors shipwrecked in the Micronesian islands, offers an in-depth understanding of the impact whaling had on the 19th-century world. This story stretches all the way from Nantucket to Palau and, eventually, as far as showman P.T. Barnum's stage.  

The Mentor was a whaler captained by Edward C. Barnard. The ship sailed from Massachusetts in July of 1831with 22 aboard. The youngest of them was 15, the oldest, 32. The captain was 31 years old at the time. Eight of the men had never been to sea before. One was Barnard's brother-in-law, a measure of the familial closeness of the whaling fraternity. The whalemen knew that sailing with the ship was risky, but, as Dolin writes, they "didn't dwell" on that. "The sailing of a whaleship was a time of optimism and hope, albeit leavened with a bit of apprehension and fear of the unknown."

This is how readers set out, too. Even those readers new to shipwreck books know something will go sideways (“Wreck” is in the title, after all), but we have our hope of a compelling adventure. That comes true, but at a price to the people whose story it is – and that isn’t just the shipwrecked sailors stranded on desert islands in isolation. Dolin explains how many others were involved with, and affected by, maritime disasters in the age of sail. There were former sailors on many islands, living as "beachcombers," who may not have had any plans or desire to leave. Others were awaiting rescue. Some were held captive, pawns in the battles of warring island tribes.

Dolin jumps around in time a bit, situating the Mentor in the context of other doomed whalers, such as the Antelope. Such context can come at a cost to the narrative. Though it helps readers comprehend the gravity of the sailors’ situation, sometimes the wrecks blend together. The fate of the Mentor's crew gets misplaced at times. On the other hand, these detours offer fascinating stories of their own, including those of the various people who either stayed of their own accord or were left on the islands. There was more back-and-forth than I had imagined. One Palauan prince, Lee Boo, left his home with some British sailors, and lived as royalty abroad, receiving visitors and learning English.

 On the various islands, leaders decided how they would handle shipwreck survivors and other visitors through many lenses, including access to muskets and humanitarian impulses. Additionally, differences among the islands in the archipelago, including Tobi, Badelabob, and Ngarchelong factored in. For example, various languages and cultures kept American whalemen telling locals that they were not British. "They would need great fortitude and luck," Dolin writes of one escape attempt. "They had plenty of the former, none of the latter."

On Tobi, for example, things go very far south for some sailors, all the way to starvation and forced tattooing. Some particularly egregious wrongs are seen through the limitations of the era that they happen: news traveled very slowly, especially when sender or recipient was at sea. Dolin points out that citizens in one area could be horrified that no one had gone to rescue stranded crew members when naval missions to do just that were already in place. In the Mentor's case, their captain, Barnard, had to navigate issues such as local leaders blaming him for leaving some sailors behind. In his view, he had no choice.

The Wreck of the Mentor works very hard to include native points of view, and descriptions of their ways of life. As Dolin points out in his author's note, historians without native sources can give up on the idea of accuracy, since history is told from the explorer's points of view, or they can, while accepting limitations, keep contextualizing and aim for more than one perspective. Additionally, Dolin juggles various accounts from different sailors in each encounter, and weaves the likeliest scenarios into one narrative. "It spans multiple years and islands and provides insights into the clash of civilizations and cultures that attended the West's commercial onslaught in the Pacific," he writes.