In the 1830s, the Massachusetts coastline was a forest of masts, and the whale ships leaving ports like New Bedford and Salem were more than just vessels. They were the high-stakes venture capital of their day.
In Eric Jay Dolin's latest maritime epic, "The Wreck of the Mentor," we follow a New Bedford ship that sailed right off the edge of the known world. What started as a standard whale oil seeking voyage ended in a harrowing survival story.
Carrie Healy, NEPM: Now, it's easy to think of the Age of Sail as a romantic, salty air era, but you really dig into the gritty industrial reality of it. The mentor was a New Bedford ship from the city that was essentially the Silicon Valley of lighting at the time. But what was it about the specific culture of Massachusetts whaling families that prepared these men (or maybe didn't prepare these men) for the total isolation they faced when they hit those reefs in the western Pacific?
Eric Jay Dolin, Author: Well, this is in the heart of the Golden Age of whaling, which began after the end of the war of 1812 and went up through the 1850s. There were hundreds of whaling voyages leaving New Bedford the same year, 1831 when the Mentor took off, and they required thousands of people to work on board. And what had happened was… a combination of both seasoned whalemen as well as green hands…
And those green hands were crewmen who had never gone out to sea before?
…Yes.
The labor demand was so great that they couldn't just rely on seasoned mariners. People who were working on land, mainly young men in their late teens, early 20s, who didn't think their prospects on shore were particularly good, would take a flier and hop on a whale ship. And they had never been to sea before, so the first couple of weeks were absolutely miserable.
There was a lot of sea sickness, but quickly they learned their way around the ship and what they had to do, and hopefully they would have a ‘greasy’ voyage.
"This standoff continued for a few moments, at which point a signal was given. Several Palauans who had been hidden at the bottom of the canoe rose up brandishing spears. Almost simultaneously the Palauan in the whaleboat's stern grabbed the powder canister and a jacket and jumped back into the canoe. Following this lead the Palauan in the bow snatched a bundle of clothes and attempted to make his escape. Twenty-two-year-old green hand and New Hampshirite Benjamin H. Nute, however, was too fast, wrenching the bundle away. Rather than fight, the native dove into the canoe." (from chapter called 'Plunder')
And that was very much the story of Horace Holden, who was born into a farming family in Hillsborough, southern New Hampshire. He left his farm, moved to Boston and then, at age 21, signed on to this Mentor voyage as a green hand. He had never been to sea before.
One thing I had to keep telling myself as I read the book is that this is nonfiction. Unlike the words we read from Herman Melville, the Mentor wreck happened before author Herman Melville ever went to sea and before he later wrote "Moby Dick," while living in the Berkshires.
When you look at the men aboard this real ship, The Mentor, do you see any parallels? Was the story that Melville wrote just a fundamentally different kind of experience than that of the Mentor?
No, it was exactly the same! This is the milieu that Melville grew up in. And although his voyage on the Acushnet (the whaling ship) and him becoming a beachcomber for a while, basically jumping ship and living in the Marquesas for a while [volcanic islands in French Polynesia] are what gave him fodder for his later books. This is all roughly the same time period.
There was fundamentally no difference between the whaling voyage that Melville went on and the one that the Mentor went on. So, he was writing about the very same time, about the very same era and the same kind of people who were on board.
They were pursuing whales in the same manner. They were motivated by profit. They hoped to kill many whales and bring back valuable whale oil. Yes, if you read "Moby Dick" and you read all about the history of whaling that is in that book, much of which focuses on the Golden Age, you would also be getting a glimpse into what the Mentor was facing when it left for its voyage…not necessarily the shipwreck. I mean, there was a shipwreck in "Moby Dick." It was…
Very different.
…wrecked by a whale, which is a little different than knocking into a reef, but, still very traumatic.
Absolutely. Another story of high risk. Now, the survivors who finally made it back to Massachusetts, they came back different men than the men who left. They returned to a state that was rapidly changing, moving away from the sea and towards an industrial revolution. After these men spent so much time with so few opportunities for communication and with their own culture, what do you think their story tells us today about the limits of rugged individualism that we so often associate with New Englanders?
Oh well, any time you go off on an endeavor that is risky, that has the opportunity for great reward, you also face the possibility of great peril and in this case, disaster.
"[...] the fortunes and population of Palau suffered as a result of a variety of factors, among them gun-fueled internecine wars and the introduction of Western diseases, including the flu. Palauans, who had earlier welcomed foreigners and eagerly took their guns and goods, grew to loathe their connections to these outsiders, especially in light of the devastation they wrought." (from "Epilogue")
A broader message, I think, is the message of the East colliding with the West. Palau was very vibrant culture that had been around for thousands of years, but it was far less advanced in terms of material items than the West. So, they, over time, encountered Westerners. And one of the most significant outcomes was the introduction of guns and ammunition, which had a fundamental impact on the relations between the different villages in Palau and the wartime activities.
And then if you read the Epilogue to the book, I also talk about what happened to Palau after the Mentor. Palau became a pawn in international politics. And it wasn't until 1994 that Palau, this rich and vibrant culture, finally became a republic and had ultimate control over its own destiny. So, it's really part of a larger tableau of what happened when the West sort of rolled over to the East, and in particular the Pacific Ocean, which had thousands of islands and hundreds of different cultures that lived on those islands and were in many cases, not ready for the onslaught of the West.
Eric Jay Dolan's new book is called ‘The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail.’
