Ep. 928: The Wreck of the Mentor

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Speaker 1: This is the meat-eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten, and in my case, underwear-less.

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Speaker 2: We hunt the meat-eater podcast.

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Speaker 1: You can’t predict anything. Brought to you by First Light. When I’m hunting, I need gear that won’t quit. First Light builds no compromise gear that keeps me in the field longer. No shortcuts, just gear that works. Check it out at firstlight.com. That’s F-I-R-S-T.com.

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Speaker 2: L I T E.com.

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Speaker 1: Holy smokes. Do we got a writer for you today? We’re joined today by Eric J. Dolan. Um, Eric J. Dolan is a maritime and environmental historian, author of 17 books. You could read this guy’s books for the next five years. And that’s all you can just read nothing but his books for five years and you wouldn’t get through them. And you’d learn a lot. You dominate, you would dominate meat eater trivia. If you read all of this guy’s work, um, Among many other cool things, besides being a writer, he served as a fisheries policy analyst at the national Marine fisheries service and an environmental consultant, his books. Now check this out. Leviathan, the history of whaling in America. These are all books that I just, that I know about own a bunch of them. So Leviathan, the history of whaling in America for fortune and empire, the epic history of the fur trade in America. Black Flags, Blue Waters, which is about pirates and privateers too, right?

00:01:39
Speaker 2: Mainly about pirates, but I do talk about privateers, yeah.

00:01:43
Speaker 1: Snakehead, The Fish Out of Water. That’s a good fish fried up. Yeah. Did you eat many of those fried up?

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Speaker 2: I didn’t, but I heard they’re wonderful.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, no, that’s good. Snakehead, The Fish Out of Water. But we’re here to talk about his newest book, The Wreck of the Mentor. Came out this year, hit the New York Times bestseller list. Welcome to the show, man.

00:02:04
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.

00:02:05
Speaker 1: This is the first time we’ve ever had on a writer or anyone to tell a story that involved a dude being forcefully tattooed head to toe. You just don’t think of this as a thing out there on the planet. Is it someone would forcibly tattoo you head to toe?

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Speaker 2: I don’t think it happens too often, but it did happen.

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Speaker 1: I never heard of it. We’re going to work backward for a minute. We’re going to get to where it is, but that just struck me. I was trying to find images of him.

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Speaker 2: Well, the only images come out of one of the books that was written by one of the guys in The Mentor that survived, a whale ship out in New Bedford. And the story of the tattooing is when they landed on the second island in the Palau archipelago, the Tobians, the people on the island of Tobi, they’re tattooed from head to foot. And after the Americans had been there for over a year as captives, pretty much, the Tobians decided, well, you might as well look like us. So they started tattooing them on their arms and chest. Incredibly painful process. They take a sharpened fish bone or a bird bone. First, they outline the image in tarot ink on the person’s body. Then they take this bone, they dip it into taro ink, which is sort of a little bit bluish, purplish, and then they use a two-pound piece of ironwood to pound the bone into the skin over the design, often going deep enough to hit the bone. And during this time, the American whalemen, of course, were screaming, but the Tobians who viewed this as something that’s absolutely wonderful because you’re becoming part of our community, and it was a there was a spiritual component to getting tattooed. They’re singing all the time. And this guy, Horace Holden, a green hand, a guy who’d never been on a whale boat before from New Hampshire, when he later wrote about it, he said, I don’t know if they were singing to drown out my screams or because they were so happy about this. But then once the tattoo was done, it would be a festering open sore for weeks. But what was really interesting to me is the Tobians wanted to tattoo… their faces. And at this point, the American whalemen said, absolutely not. We would rather die than have our faces tattooed. And then they pulled the God card because they had been there for over a year and they had learned the Tobian language. And they had learned that the Tobians believed in a God. They didn’t believe in the Western God, the one that the whalemen believed in, but they believed in a God. So one of the whalemen said, if you tattoo our faces, our God is going to come down and wreak vengeance upon you. And the Tobians decided they didn’t wanna risk it, so they didn’t tattoo their face. And it’s sort of a funny story about this. After the book came out, I had a excerpt from the book on my Facebook page. And a number of people from Palau had sort of found my Facebook page because of this book coming out. And I had this excerpt where I said the Americans, one of the Americans had a volcanic eruption upon being told that his face was going to be tattooed. And this guy from Palau said in the comments, you are a liar. There are no volcanoes on Toby. You write fiction. So I wrote back to him. I hopefully he read it. I said, I didn’t say there was a volcano on Toby. It’s actually the remains of a coral reef. But I just said they had a volcanic eruption. So it shows how the you know, words can be misconstrued.

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Speaker 1: A literal reader out there. Yeah. Uh, let’s work, uh, let’s go back to the beginning on this. Okay. So tell us about like, what is the, when are we talking about? Like set the scene for us. Like, when are we talking about, we’re talking about, we’re going to talk about a ship called the mentor, right? What is this ship engaged in? Um, what is its business?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, well, we’re talking about the 1830s in New Bedford. The mentor was a whale ship out in New Bedford. It was a relatively small whale ship. It was about 84 feet long, 24 feet wide, about 15 feet deep, 213 tons burdened. But I think to understand the mentor, you have to go back a little bit to the importance of whaling in American history. When the Pilgrims got here, they started whaling. They didn’t go out and kill whales, but they took advantage of whales that washed ashore. and they rendered their blubber into whale oil.

00:06:46
Speaker 1: Did they really? Yeah, yeah.

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Speaker 2: Drift whaling went on.

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Speaker 1: For about 30 years. Drift whaling?

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Speaker 2: That’s what they called it?

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Speaker 1: Yeah.

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Speaker 2: There were a lot more whales back then, and when one would die, they would drift ashore on Cape Cod, and they’d take advantage of it. They’d render the oil out of the blubber.

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Speaker 1: God, that had to have been a smelly business, man, because you’re rendering probably some oil with a little rot to it.

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Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. They had their iron tripods in their sheds where they had the fires underneath the iron tripods. render the oil. They also took advantage of the baleen that was in the mouths of, like, right whales to use in hoop skirts or other forms. They didn’t use it as much then as they did in the 1800s. But then you fast forward a little bit, and the number of whales that drifted ashore was not always predictable. Not as many as they wanted as the industry expanded. So they slowly got into small boats, whale boats, about 24, 25 feet long with six men on board. Many of them Indians at the time, which there were many in New England. They later got sort of extirpated due to disease and other factors. But they would go out and they do shore whaling, which is going within a couple of miles ashore, killing a whale, dragging it back to shore. Killing it how?

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Speaker 1: Just getting a harpoon into it?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, getting a harpoon in it and then having droids wearing it out. They’d tie off the rope to the boat and the boat would be pulled, hopefully not pulled down under the water, but pulled for some distance. And once the whale tired out, they would row it back to shore and it would be processed in the regular way.

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Speaker 1: What kind of money was that?

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Speaker 2: Oh, well, it was pretty good money back then. I don’t have exact numbers of shillings and pounds, but some people were making decent money killing whales. But more important than that, they were providing whale oil for the local economy and they used it as an illuminant. But then in about 1700… So.

00:08:37
Speaker 1: That wasn’t primarily, like if you go to the Pilgrim Times.

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Speaker 2: Yep.

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Speaker 1: When they were, what was the kind of drift whaling you called it?

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Speaker 2: They were doing drift whaling.

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Speaker 1: Or like near shore intentional whaling. Right. They were producing a domestic product.

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Speaker 2: Mainly, but they were also sending some back to England.

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Speaker 1: Okay.

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Speaker 2: But it really got bigger later around the late 1600s, the early 1700s, they started to get farther and farther away from shore. And then in 1712, this event took place on Nantucket, which was the leading whaling place in the colonies and At the time, this guy named Christopher Hussey and his men went out in a couple of small whale boats, meaning to hunt within a few miles of Nantucket, this sand spit out in the middle of the ocean. Well, a storm rolled in, they got blown way out offshore, and they fell in with a bunch of sperm whales. No American colonists had killed a sperm whale before. They killed one, they rode it back to Nantucket, and the sperm whale’s the most valuable whale of all, because its whale oil, both that which comes from its blubber and also that which they scoop out of the spermaceti organ, which is in that big bulbous head of a sperm whale, is the brightest burning, cleanest burning whale oil of all. So in 1712, once they killed a sperm whale, all of a sudden the American colony got into bigger and bigger boats and went offshore out to the Grand Banks, other places, and they were in pursuit of sperm whales. And this industry got huge. On the eve of the American Revolution, there were 350 whale ships, some of them traveling as much as 1,000 miles over maybe up to six months or more hunting whales up and down the Atlantic Ocean. And then, of course, the American Revolution, the whaling fleet is totally decimated. Nantucket, which had most of those whaling ships, after the Revolution, there were only about 12 hulks left.

00:10:37
Speaker 1: I’m going to turn to our military expert over here. They were in Scripps. Is that the word? Inscripted?

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Speaker 2: Oh, they were taken into the military. No, actually.

00:10:47
Speaker 1: What happened to the whale ships?

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Speaker 2: Well, what happened is a lot of whalemen continued to try to go fishing for whales, but they were attacked by British ships. Also, the British.

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Speaker 1: Oh, because of embargoes and stuff?

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Speaker 2: Yeah, and the British Navy also destroyed a lot of whale ships that were in ports because the British Navy was trying to hobble the Americans. So they went into various ports, and Nantucket basically had a blockade around it by the British Navy. So during the war, one of the, not funny instances, but one of the pieces of history that’s often forgotten is that the Nantucketers were so diswrought at their whaling fleet, not only being destroyed, but not being able to have a living, that they were going to whale in other parts of the world and maybe even secede from the colonies to get British protection. So some of the whaling fleet in Nantucket went to England and they whaled from there. Some tried to go to the Falkland Islands.

00:11:52
Speaker 1: Traders, man.

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Speaker 2: It wasn’t very successful. And then after the war, the American whale fleet was decimated, but we had the greatest whalemen and we rapidly came back. And by the end of the 1700s, we were going into the Pacific Ocean, which was the holy grail for whalemen, because that’s where there were literally millions of sperm whales, the most valuable whale of all. So all of a sudden, the industry started taking off. Well, what happened? The War of 1812. The industry was knocked back on its heels again, and here we have Nantucket. Right before the Treaty of Ghent, Nantucket actually voted to secede from the United States in order to gain the protection of the British Navy so they can continue whaling. But then the Treaty of Ghent- Oh, them boys are some serious whalers, man. Yeah, yeah. And then the Treaty of Ghent came in and the war was over. And that’s when the golden age of whaling really began. Nantucket was still the biggest port.

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Speaker 1: What date are we at when you say the golden age of whaling?

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Speaker 2: It really started about 1816, 1817, 1819, 1820s, it really took off. When do you feel on that golden age, just to.

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Speaker 1: Bracket it, When did the Golden Age collapse?

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Speaker 2: About 1859 with the discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Because when they discovered oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, then there was suddenly an enormous source of cheap fuel to illuminate people’s lives, which was kerosene. So basically the whale oil industry died in 1859, but American whaling went on until just after World War I, but it wasn’t. It was never as big as it was before. But going back to the beginning of the Golden Age, this is a time that Herman Melville wrote about in Moby Dick, even though his book was basically in the 1840s, about a decade beyond the sailing of the Mentor. But by the 1820s, New Bedford was already becoming the number one whaling port in the country because, I don’t know how familiar you are with Nantucket, but their main harbor, there’s a big bar across the main harbor. So as Whaling ships got larger and larger. They couldn’t make it over the bar. They started to create these things called camels, which are basically floating dry docks, which would grasp the whale ship. Then they’d pump out all the water. It would elevate the whale ship to get over the bar.

00:14:17
Speaker 1: Just to get it into harbor.

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Speaker 2: Just to get it into the harbor. But that got really expensive. And then they started offloading whale oil and baleen on Martha’s Vineyard and transporting it. in smaller vessels over to Nantucket. But all of this was really expensive. So New Bedford, which was on the mainland and was attached to the growing network of railroads, they basically took over and they were started by a bunch of Nantucket whalemen that left Nantucket and went to New Bedford like the Roach family. So by 1832, when the Mentor was getting ready to sail, and it was actually owned by a Roach, New Bedford was the largest port in the United States. There were hundreds of whale ships leaving from New Bedford and hundreds of voyages every year. So the mentor, which had already been out as a whale ship before and had some success, its owner and the men on board, the 22 men on board, captained by a guy named Edward Barnard, who he was only 31. He was 31, and they called him the old man.

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Speaker 1: Yeah, I was going to bring that up. I was going to ask you about that. That he’s 31, but presumably he must have started as an early, he must have started as young teens.

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Speaker 2: Yeah, we don’t have a lot of good information about him when he was very young, but he grew up in Nantucket. And there’s absolutely no doubt that he cut his teeth in the whaling profession very early on.

00:15:43
Speaker 1: He had to have managed to be running that ship at 31. You know, we jumped ahead for the dude tattooed. Yeah. I want to make sure to get to, that guy died in the Great Lakes.

00:15:54
Speaker 2: Yes, he did.

00:15:54
Speaker 1: Yeah.

00:15:55
Speaker 2: Yeah, he died 1844. He was the captain of a schooner, the Pennsylvania on Lake Erie. And what people often don’t realize is that the Great Lakes are like oceans, and they have horrific waves. And I know you did a session with the gales of John Bacon, the gales of November. So something similar happened to the Pennsylvania. A storm rolled in, rolled the boat over. Everybody on board died. including uh captain edward barnard and he was uh 44.

00:16:30
Speaker 1: Years old never found that dude’s body he.

00:16:32
Speaker 2: Never found his body okay.

00:16:34
Speaker 1: So the mentor it’s like so we’re at it’s the height of whaling yep and they’re after right whales is it true that that the term right whale means that just that’s the right whale Like, that’s the one you want?

00:16:49
Speaker 2: Well, first, they were actually mainly after sperm whales, but there were still right whales out there.

00:16:53
Speaker 1: Oh, I’m sorry, I’m sorry.

00:16:54
Speaker 2: No, no, but going back to your question, yeah, a lot of people say it’s because it’s the right whale to hunt. There’s some evidence of that, but really, if you look at the history, deep into the history, the reason it was called the right whale is maybe because it was the true whale or the only whale that they really hunted, not because it was the easiest to kill and tended to float right after being killed, so it was easier to pull into port or pull back to the mother ship. But there still is a debate going on as to why it was called the right whale. But even if it wasn’t the right whale because it was the right whale to hunt, it really was the right whale to hunt, especially early on. I mean, today we only have 300 to 400 maybe right whales in the North Atlantic, and I think actually the South Atlantic. So they’re in, I don’t know if they’re still on the endangered species list, But back then, there were probably tens of thousands. In fact, when the pilgrims arrived in Provincetown, they meant to go to New York, but they got blown off course. When they arrived in Provincetown, the Mayflower was immediately surrounded by a huge number of whales. Somebody writing a few years later in the 1820s and 1830s said there were so many whales that you could walk across their backs from Provincetown all the way to Plymouth. So it was a real different time.

00:18:22
Speaker 1: God, it’s hard to picture now, man.

00:18:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, no.

00:18:25
Speaker 1: So I messed that up. So these guys, when they went out, the preferred whale was the sperm whale.

00:18:32
Speaker 2: Yeah, by the 1830s.

00:18:33
Speaker 1: But would they opportunistically get after other whales, or was it so good that you just stuck with those?

00:18:38
Speaker 2: Oh, no, you would kill a right whale. Right whales were big. I mean, they were heavy. They produced a lot of good whale oil that could be sold. It wasn’t as expensive as sperm whale oil. That was like the holy grail. But they would certainly kill not only a right whale, but also a humpback whale if they saw one. They wouldn’t mess with a blue whale or a fin whale or a sai whale. The first two were just too big, and so they didn’t mess with them. But yeah, if they came across a right whale, they would definitely kill it. But Edward Barnard and the 21 men on board with him, they were really hoping to have a greasy trip which means you kill a lot of whales and put a lot of whale oil in your hold, and they were hoping that most of those whales would be sperm whales.

00:19:24
Speaker 1: And they take off from New Bedford, so they take off on the Atlantic coast. Right. And their aim is to go all the way down around the southern tip of Patagonia and then start heading up north to.

00:19:41
Speaker 2: No, not quite. That’s where a lot of whale ships at the time, that’s the route they would take. The mentor, when it’s left, their sailing directions instructed them, they were going out for a relatively short voyage, maybe a year, a year and a half. And they hoped to stay in the Atlantic Ocean for the North and South Atlantic. But they went out beyond the Grand Banks. They weren’t seeing many whales. They went across to the Azores, picked up some supplies, some water. Then they went down the western coast of Africa. They killed only two whales. So Barnard had to make a decision. He was, as a captain, given permission to change his voyage if he thought it was best for making money. So he decided, well, I’ve been in the Indian Ocean before. Let’s go around the Cape of Good Hope, southern tip of Africa, go into the Indian Ocean around Mozambique and try to find more whales. They found two more whales, which is good, but four whales after being out almost a year is not particularly good. So he really decided to do the ultimate gambit. He knew that the Pacific Ocean is where most of the sperm whales were. So he set a course to go east all the way to the Pacific ocean. And, uh, that’s when the trouble began. When he left the spice islands, he was going north, sort of north, uh, east to Guam, but a storm, a storm rolled in.

00:21:08
Speaker 1: And let me, let me ask a question about this. You go out and you say to your guys, how many guys are on this boat? 22 total. Okay. You say to your guys, let’s just go a little dab north and check Nova Scotia.

00:21:23
Speaker 2: Yes.

00:21:24
Speaker 1: So in their mind, there’s a possibility. Is it a possibility that you’ll just go right up there, kill all the whales you need, and come home? Or is it a possibility that you’re going to wind up off the coast of Africa, in the Indian Ocean, in the Pacific Ocean? You have no concept of when you’re coming home.

00:21:46
Speaker 2: True. I mean, during the Golden Age, the average whaling voyage, and this is mainly towards the 1840s and 50s, lasted for four years. So you knew you were going to be away a long time. The mentor originally wasn’t going to be away that long, but yes, they were opportunistic. Could they have gone to Nova Scotia in the North Atlantic, killed 20 whales, gone back home triumphant? Yes. Is it likely that that would have been the case? No. Especially as more and more whale ships were out there, it was getting harder to find the whales, and some of the whales were getting more skittish. So they knew that they were out for a while, at least a year perhaps, but they certainly, none of the men who got on the Mentor in July of 1831 thought that they were going to end up in the Pacific Ocean. And certainly none of them.

00:22:37
Speaker 1: So you think in their mind that was out of the question. Yeah. That would have been hard to imagine.

00:22:40
Speaker 2: No, they knew that the main, uh, goal, the voyage was go throughout the Atlantic and, uh, and fish there and, you know, whale there. So I think it was a little bit of a surprise, but the captain gets to make the decision. And I don’t think any of them grumbled about it. They wanted to have a greasy voyage. They wanted to make a lot of money. And a lot of them didn’t have better opportunities back home.

00:23:02
Speaker 1: What’s a lot of money for these guys. Um, Is it life-changing money or is it that you went and you pulled a good salary and you were happy?

00:23:09
Speaker 2: Yeah. If you were a captain of a ship and the first mate or second mate or a doctor, sometimes they had doctors on board, and you were on a voyage that was really greasy, that brought back thousands and thousands of barrels of sperm whale oil, it probably wouldn’t set you up for life, but you’d probably make the equivalent of what an average captain of a merchant ship might make in 10 years. And you’d get a short lay. If you’re the captain, if you’re higher up on a boat, you might get 1 10th, 1 20th of the profits of the whaling voyage. But if you were a man before the mast, the guys that did the, as Jimmy Stewart in It’s a Wonderful Life, or the guys that did the living and dying in the world, and you were before the mast, and you were the ones that got into the whale boats, chase the whales, harpoon them, brought them back to the mother ship, your lay might be one 125th, one 150th.

00:24:05
Speaker 1: So they have these just run, like the crew guys.

00:24:10
Speaker 2: Yes, the crew.

00:24:11
Speaker 1: The crew guys, they’re not motivated by, I can go away for four years and I might come back and never work again. That’s like not, that’s not.

00:24:21
Speaker 2: No, they are motivated for something short of that. I can go away for four years, I can come back, And I could have enough money to maybe buy a house and live for certainly a number of years without having another job. So if you are on a really greasy voyage, even if you are earning such a small percentage of the overall profits, you still, it was a good career move. But the problem was a lot of whaling voyages came back and not only did the men on board earn very little, sometimes they ended up being in debt, sort of like going to grad school. Basically, there’s a lot of upfront costs when you went onto a whaling voyage. You had to buy your outfit from people they used to call outfitters, but they also called them land sharks because they would fleece the men for all the clothes and other items that they needed on their voyage. And if they didn’t earn much money while they were out, they still owed that money. So it was kind of a dicey proposition. And what was happening during the golden age in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s is as the fleet expanded, because keep in mind, by 1846, there were 900 whale ships worldwide. 750 of them were American. To man 750 whale ships going out in these voyages, you need a very large labor force. So they started to take the dregs of society on board.

00:25:42
Speaker 1: There were felons.

00:25:44
Speaker 2: There were people that were running away from debts that they had on land. There were also people they picked up in the Azores, in Hawaii, any place, any ports they went to. And there were an awful lot of green hands. Whereas if you were a whaleman on Nantucket in the 1750s, most of the other men on board your ship had whaled before. They were seasoned mariners. If you are on a whaling ship in the 1830s or 40s, it’s likely that a good number of the men on board had never whaled before, much less been on a ship before. And the mentor of the 22 men, I think it’s four or five of them, had never been on a ship before. They were farmers that just were having a tough time on land.

00:26:28
Speaker 1: They probably couldn’t even swim. Yeah.

00:26:29
Speaker 2: Oh, well, that was, even if you were a good whaleman, you probably couldn’t swim in the 1830s because people don’t realize, you know, now we swim a lot. We go to the ocean. You know, it wasn’t until the late 1800s that swimming really started to be a thing in the West, certainly in the United States. In the 1830s, most of the men on board these whale ships, if they were in a whale boat that got destroyed by a sperm whale, which is a very possible thing, they used to call the flukes of the sperm whale, the hand of God. Because if it came down on your whale boat, you were going to meet your maker. And then of course there was the chomping, you know, the teeth of the sperm whale, which could destroy a whale boat. And there is a picture in my book, Leviathan, of a whale boat that’s being destroyed by a sperm whale. And what’s interesting about that, of the six or seven men that are dumped into the water, I can guarantee most, if not all of them, did not know how to swim. So if they couldn’t grab onto something that was floating, like a piece of the remains of the boat, they would drown. And just think about that. These guys are at the middle of the ocean, surrounded by water. No GPS, no cell phone, no nothing. And if they fall in the water, which happens… It’s.

00:27:47
Speaker 1: Their first swim.

00:27:48
Speaker 2: Yeah, it’s their first swim.

00:27:49
Speaker 1: Can you imagine that? One thing I see when I’m reading about these trips… Even if things go smooth, it seems like there’s always fatalities. Yes.

00:28:02
Speaker 2: Yeah, there are.

00:28:03
Speaker 1: So when you go out, 22 guys go out, it’s almost like it seems, and maybe you’ll know better than me, this is more of a question than a statement, but it seems to me if they go out on a whaling trip and 22 guys go on a whaling trip and you look around, it’s like someone’s not coming back. Just statistically, someone’s not coming back.

00:28:18
Speaker 2: Probably, yeah. I mean, there were a number of men who would fall from a mast or a spar during bad weather trying to unfurl a reef the sails. There were men who died when their whale boats got clobbered by whales. There were occasions, didn’t happen very often, when a sperm whale was harpooned. And the goal was to harpoon twice if you could. And the thing that you know very well is that whale blubber is not like our blubber. We’re soft and budgie. Whale blubber is thick and fibrous. So if you’re coming up to a big old bull sperm whale, It’s got blubber that may be 14 to 16 inches thick, and it’s got a thick layer of leathery skin over that. So you can’t pitch a harpoon, which is fairly heavy, 30 or 40 feet and expect it to do anything. It’d be like lobbing a cannonball at old Ironsides. It would just pop off. So what they had to do is get wood to black skin, which means the whale had to be right next to your whale boat, which is very dangerous, potentially. They’d launch one harpoon, and then if they could, they’d launch a second. And then they were off on what was called the Nantucket sleigh ride. They were probably among the fastest humans on earth. They were being pulled along maybe 20 to 25 miles per hour. And there was always a man at the front of the whale boat with a hatchet raised aloft, ready to cut that line. If the whale sounded, if the whale went down, which they did because the whale boat, we just pulled under the waves immediately. But if they were pulled along far enough, the whale would tire out. Then they’d pull closer to the whale. And this is a really dangerous time because the whale would start spinning around and it was very close to the boat. Then they’d take a huge spade or a lance about 15 feet long and they’d plunge it. into the side of the whale, looking for the life of the whale, which would be the lungs or a knot of blood vessels near the lungs. And then they knew they had success, when they’d shout out, chimneys afire, or tapping the claret, which meant that the blood was issuing from the blowhole and probably getting all over them. And then the whale would go into its final flurry. Yeah, then you knew you got him. And then you would tow him back to the mother ship and the processing would begin. And this is a dangerous time because you’d pull the whale up to the side of the the whaling vessel, you’d put down a cutting stage, which was sort of lowered over the side, and the men would stand on wood planks with long spades, and as the whale was rolled in the water, they would strip the blubber from the whale, sort of like stripping an orange in one continuous slice or an apple, and they’d raise the blubber up above the main deck, and then they’d take a boarding knife, they’d cut transversely, this enormous, probably one-ton, maybe two-ton slab of blubber would come flying onto the main deck, and then they’d lower it onto the main deck, and then they’d have to cut it up into these Bible pieces, and they’d flay it some more, and then they’d pitch it into the tripods, which had fires beneath.

00:31:35
Speaker 1: What were they fueling those with?

00:31:36
Speaker 2: Well, they brought wood on board when they went to different ports. They had wood that they would use to.

00:31:45
Speaker 1: So you’re hauling enough firewood around to render all that oil.

00:31:50
Speaker 2: No, they’d get other fire. They could also use, I think some use coal, but what they would also use is the whale itself. Because what you did is when you pitched the blubber into the iron tripods where the oil was rendered out, it was siphoned out with a hose, it was put into caskets. Well, there was a lot of skin, integument, meat that was in those tripods, and it would boil up, and they used to call it cracklins. It was sort of like a modern pork rind. It was very similar to that. And the men would eat that. They’d also cook donuts in the whale oil occasionally. But they’d scoop out the cracklins, and they’d feed it to the fire below to help keep it going. But a lot of whale ships had to make a lot of ports of call, had to stop at a lot of islands to get supplies, water, food, wood. other things. So it was amazing. But what I wanted to talk about, you’re talking about people not being able to swim. When they were on the cutting spades, cutting into the whale, there would be a huge number of sharks, seawolves, taking their bit of the blubber. Well, you know, sharks are not interested in human beings. If sharks were really interested in us, we couldn’t go swimming off the East Coast or the West Coast because there are plenty of them And we’re easy pickings. But every once in a while, a whaleman who was cutting on these planks, which got greasy because they’re cutting blubber, would slip and fall in. Occasionally, they’d be bitten by a shark, but it was just by mistake. But more often than not, the unfortunate man who fell into the water, he might be crushed to death because the whale is right next to the hull of the boat. And we’re in the ocean, so it’s going back and forth. So whaling was a really dangerous profession, sort of like lumberjacking today or being a fisherman today.

00:33:45
Speaker 1: Just as there were so many whales back then, there had to have been so many great whites back then.

00:33:49
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.

00:33:50
Speaker 1: You can imagine.

00:33:51
Speaker 2: Many more sharks.

00:33:52
Speaker 1: So I got a buddy. I’ve done it with him, but these guys, they’ll jump in behind. When shrimp boats are sorting all the bycatch, they’ll jump in and spearfish behind shrimp boats. Really?

00:34:03
Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.

00:34:05
Speaker 1: I’ve done it with them.

00:34:05
Speaker 2: It’s unbelievable.

00:34:07
Speaker 1: I mean, the layers of sharks is unbelievable.

00:34:09
Speaker 2: Oh yeah.

00:34:09
Speaker 1: It was one of my buddies. He jumps in one time behind a shrimp boat. You don’t even ask. You just jump in, you know? Um, and the guy yelled to him, if you’d seen what I’d seen behind this boat, you would not do that.

00:34:26
Speaker 2: Well, it’s very similar. Even during whaling days, sharks would trail whale ships on occasion. And the men would fish. They’d pull up sharks, and they’d eat them.

00:34:37
Speaker 1: Oh, really? Yeah.

00:34:39
Speaker 2: That wasn’t their favorite meal, but they would eat sharks once in a while, or they’d just fish for fun. But more often than not, they’d want to get a tuna or a skipjack or something else on board. So there was a lot of downtime on a whale ship. When you have four years at sea, most of that, you’re not actively whaling. You’re cleaning the ship. You’re doing scrimshaw. You know, it’s pretty boring. You’re drinking if the captain allows you to. If you have shore leave, you’re doing that. So it’s really, it was a horrible way to earn a living but an understandable way to earn a living.

00:35:17
Speaker 1: Yeah, see, I’m sitting here thinking that I wouldn’t mind jumping in on one of these trips, man.

00:35:21
Speaker 2: Yeah, okay. Maybe horrible’s wrong.

00:35:23
Speaker 1: See, don’t go down.

00:35:24
Speaker 2: Contextual, because it’s, you know, back then there were a lot of industries. We know the fur trade was very dangerous. Whaling was dangerous. Just fishing back then for cod and striped bass and other fish off the East Coast on the Grand Banks. I come from Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1846. Marblehead was one of the leading fishing ports in the United States. And they went out during the summer of 1846 onto the Grand Banks. and a hurricane essentially rolled in, and more than 200 men and boats were killed. There were hundreds of widows in Marblehead, many fatherless children because of that, and that is the point at which Marblehead ceased to be a major fishing port.

00:36:15
Speaker 1: And if you go to Marblehead- They just lost like a generation of fishermen.

00:36:17
Speaker 2: They lost a generation of fishermen, and it wasn’t a very large town at the time, so they lost a significant portion of their town. Marblehead, I’m going to give a shout out to Marblehead because Marblehead was really big in the American Revolution with General John Glover and rowing Washington across the Delaware and helping the Americans escape from the Battle of New York before they were going to be clobbered by the British. So Marblehead has a very proud maritime tradition. And if you ever visit Marblehead, there’s a wonderful old burial ground from the late 1620s And in it is a huge obelisk that is a memorial to all the men who died on the Grand Banks in 1846. No kidding. And I live in an old house, 1753. And one of the guys who lived in that house during much of the 1800s was a shipping captain, a guy named Devereaux, John Devereaux. So I feel a little bit of a connection to that.

00:37:19
Speaker 1: Let’s get to the mentor’s troubles. Okay. Yeah. So we were in, at this time, position us in the Pacific. Right.

00:37:26
Speaker 2: They were leaving the Spice Islands, which is a little south of the Philippines. They were heading towards Guam. And all of a sudden, a storm rolls in. They no longer can rely on celestial navigation. So they’re using their compass. They’re using a form of dead reckoning. And Charles and Edward Barnard, Charles Barnard, I remember he was in my last book, Left 4 Dead. It was very confusing, these Barnard guys. But Edward Barnard was a seasoned captain. He thought, and he wrote later, that he was about 150 miles away from any land. So he thought he had plenty of sea room. Because most good mariners are not too concerned when there’s bad weather, as long as they’re not going to knock into a hidden reef or land because they can manage, you can do a lot of things to the sails, take all the sails down. And if you’re a good sailor, you can handle it unless it’s a full blown hurricane. We don’t know exactly the intensity of this storm, but it was bad. And then on the evening, right after midnight on May 21st of 1832, remember they left in July of 1831. on the evening of May 21st of 1832, they ram into a reef, giant hole in the hull. All the men on board knew that the mentor was done for. The only real question is what should I do? And once a ship crashes, the captain loses ultimate authority. So people were free to- Formally lose it? Yeah. Well, it’s just the custom of the, well, custom to see is cannibalism. But yeah, back then it was sort of the rules of the road. Once you crashed, the captain was no longer the leader. Now they liked Captain Barnard, but the first mate decided his best bet was to take one of the whale boats, lower it into the water in the midst of the storm and light out for land. Because just before the mentor crashed, one of the men said he thought he saw land vaguely in the distance. So the first mate, nine other men decide to get in the whale boat with him. He’s lowered into the water. They go off into the gloom. They’re never seen again. They all died.

00:39:45
Speaker 1: No kidding. Yeah. Just gone.

00:39:46
Speaker 2: Just gone. Well, they found the whale boat later sort of wrapped up on a reef. So I think the men got pitched out of the boat and they all drowned. So then Captain Barnard.

00:39:57
Speaker 1: So there’s 22 guys.

00:39:58
Speaker 2: 22 guys. Now 10 are gone.

00:40:00
Speaker 1: 10 die in that boat. Within an hour.

00:40:01
Speaker 2: Within an hour of crashing probably. Oh. Then Captain.

00:40:04
Speaker 1: They die in the storm. No, no, no.

00:40:06
Speaker 2: They die after lowering the whale. But yeah, the storm is still going. They die after lowering the whale boat.

00:40:10
Speaker 1: So.

00:40:12
Speaker 2: Uh, Captain Barnard decides his best bet is to leave on a whale boat too. Three other men decide to go with them, but Barnard wants a life insurance policy. So he ties a rope around his waist, the other end of which is the rope you used to attach our boon to. He ties a rope around his waist. The other end of it is on the mentor. So he says, well, if this whale boat overturns when we get in the water, they can reel me back in like a fish. Well, he gets into the whale boat. Three other men get into the whale boat. As they’re lowering it from the davits, which are the curved wooden arms on the side of a whale boat, a wave smashes the whale boat against the mentor, destroys it, pitches all four men into the gloom, into the ocean. One of them dies immediately. He drowns. Two of them, amazingly enough, were swimmers at this time. They were able to swim back to the Mentor. They pulled themselves up onto the main deck using the rigging, much of which was over the side of the ship, because the ship was canted over a bit. It was almost on its beam ends. And then Captain Barnard, well, he’s pretty smart for putting a rope around his waist, because he was pulled about 100 yards away from the boat before the men on board started Pulling him back in. And the bottom of his feet, because he was barefoot, were cut up. But he made it back to the mentor.

00:41:39
Speaker 1: From the reef.

00:41:39
Speaker 2: From the reef, yeah. So the men on the mentor, they had to wait till the morning light. They would grab onto any part of the ship they could. They’d tie themselves to the rigging because they didn’t want to get swept overboard by an errant wave. And then dawn comes, and they have to decide what to do. Huh.

00:42:00
Speaker 1: At this point… All money is gone. I mean, this is just like it’s done. Done.

00:42:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, they’re just thinking of survival. And keep in mind, they don’t know exactly where they are. They only find out they’re in the Palawan Archipelago a couple of days later. So they don’t know quite where they are. They know their voyage is over. They know there’s no money involved whatsoever. In fact, most of them are thinking we may never make it back home again because they’re very familiar with the tales of whale ships and merchant ships that have crashed In the Pacific, some have been killed by locals, natives that were on those islands. Others were just, they starved because nobody was there to come pick them up. So the next morning, they do see land off in the distance. It’s a very small island. They get into the last whale boat on the Mentor, which is the one that they had in reserve because it had gaps in some of the planks. It wasn’t as seaworthy as the other ones, but they get into it. And they start rowing and sailing for this K, this small island. It’s only about 250 feet long and 50 feet wide. They eat some food. They catch some mollusks, some seashells, some crabs. They cook them on fire. They feel a little bit better. And then the next morning, well, actually that day, roughly that day, Captain Barnard uses his sextant. to find out sort of where they are. And he discovers, oh, we’re in Palau. Well, the next day.

00:43:32
Speaker 1: And he knows what that means.

00:43:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, he knows what that means. Palau was an archipelago that not many people went by, but it was on all the maps of the day. Because it wasn’t really part of the normal merchant trade route. But a whaleman definitely knew what Palau was. So he’s in Palau, and they’re there the next day. And then what happens? A canoe comes up. with about 20 warriors on board. Well, they row the canoe up to the beach, pull it onto the sand, step boldly onto the ground, and these guys are a sight to see. They have long, greased black hair. They’re tattooed from head to foot. They’re completely naked. They look particularly angry. And worse than that, they’re carrying spears, knives, and clubs, and the men of the mentor have no idea whether they’ve come for good or ill, and they soon found out because the natives, the Palauans, sort of beckoned the whalemen to follow them to get in their whale boat. Now, Barnard and the men thought they were being led to a local village, so they get into their whale boat, they follow the canoe, And no sooner did they get on the water than some of the natives jump into the whale boat and start stealing items that were on the whale boat, like clothes and canisters, and they try to steal a gun. And the Americans don’t very much like this, so they fight back. The Palauans don’t like that, so they start chucking spears and coconuts at the whalemen. Now, Barnard’s in a really difficult position. What does he do? How does he get away from a canoe that’s much faster than a whale boat especially a whale boat that’s not in great shape. So he knows that islanders in the Pacific are really fond of Western objects, especially iron and mirrors, things like that, but also Western clothes. So there’s a lot of clothes at the bottom of the whale boat. So he tells his men to take individual pieces of clothes, wad them up, throw them as far away from the whale boat as they can, and each time they do that, the canoe races over to pick up the piece of clothes, and the whale boat gets a little bit farther away, and finally, they get so far away from the island of Kiangle, which is where these warriors are from, that they decide to turn about and leave the whalemen alone.

00:46:04
Speaker 1: Now, this- But these guys, these plowans, they know exactly what’s going on. I mean, they know that there’s whalers, They know that these islands are scattered at times with castaways. Like this is a thing they’ve been through before.

00:46:18
Speaker 2: Right. They’ve experienced Westerners before. There’s probably a story that’ll come up a little bit later about a ship called the Antelope, a British ship that crashed in Palau in 1783. So yes, they know that there’s a wider world out there.

00:46:32
Speaker 1: This is a thing that happens.

00:46:32
Speaker 2: They know about guns already. They know about clothes. They know about iron. So the men of the mentor in the whale boat, broiling son, in the middle of the ocean, and they start rowing for what comes up next. They don’t know. They find another island. They get off. This is a bigger island. They’re there for a day. The next morning, what happens? Another canoe comes, approaches the island. But this one only had an old man and a boy in it. And they beckoned for the whalemen to follow them. So the whalemen once again get in their whale boat, start following the canoe. The canoe races around the promontory. and is soon out of sight. And just as the whale boat reaches that promontory, what happens? An armada of canoes, 20 or more, filled with natives, whooping and hollering, comes down upon the whale boat.

00:47:25
Speaker 1: They led them into a little ambush or?

00:47:27
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, no, but this time they didn’t attack. They didn’t attack. They basically led the whalemen into the village of Engarchalon, which is where these warriors came from. Now we have an interesting situation. the American whaleman who could speak English, stepped foot in Ngarshalong, a Palawan village, where they just speak Palawan. They can’t communicate with one another. But using signs and gestures, the Palawan chief makes it clear that he wants to know if these Americans are British. Now, why the heck does he wanna know if they’re British? And it’s all because of the wreck of the Antelope in 1783, a British East India ship that crashed into the island of Karur, off the island of Karur in the Palauan Archipelago. I need to step back for a second and tell you the Palauan Archipelago is 340 different islands, about 500 miles to the east of the southern tip of the Philippines. At this time, there are numerous villages in Palau They each have their own sphere of influence and power center. So the Americans crashed up here, and they’re in the village of Engarchalong. The Antelope in 1783 crashed maybe 80 miles further south off of Coror, another village. And the Cororese chief agreed to allow the British to build a new boat, salvage it from the Antelope, that they could use to get back to Macau or Canton or the Spice Islands and then get back to London. But in exchange for this hospitality, the Corarees required the British to engage in four inter-village wars with the Corarees, and to give them guns and ammunition. Guns and ammunition are a huge thing in the Pacific at this time, because a lot of islanders never saw them before. And you realize, once you have guns and ammunition, you have a lot more power than somebody who has a spear.

00:49:34
Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you could kick some ass, so they got some guns of their own.

00:49:37
Speaker 2: They got guns and ammunition. The British helped them in four battles. They routed their enemies. Four years later, another British East India ship came by to give them more guns and ammunition as a thank you for helping the men of the Antelope escape, and they ultimately did make it back to London. So what’s one of the villages that Karur vanquished during their killing spree in Garshalong, where the American whalemen ended up? So, of course, the Garshalongese hate the British because the British are the ones that allowed their enemies to become so powerful. So the Americans, Captain Barnard, using signs and signals, is able, once again, somehow to communicate that he’s not British, he’s American. Well, the Ngarchalangese have no idea what an American is, but they’re just happy that they’re not British. So the priestess says, let’s welcome these guys in as honored guests. They start to have a feast. Just as the feast begins, coming down the pathway, is what appears to be a white man, 60 years old, long gray hair, not a tooth in his mouth, and he’s tattooed from head to foot. But better yet, he speaks English. It turns out he’s a beachcomber named Charlie who jumped ship from a British ship in the early 1800s and decided to, quote unquote, go native. And they used to call them beachcombers in the early 1800s. Actually, Richard Henry Dana two years before the Mast coined that term. And then Herman Melville was a beachcomber who jumped ship from a whale ship, the Akushnet, and he landed on the Marquesas for a couple of years and actually used that experience to write two of his most famous novels, Umu and Taipi. So anyway, backtracking. So Charlie comes walking up. He’s English. He suddenly can act as a translator.

00:51:36
Speaker 1: Now, why aren’t they pissed at that Englishman? Because he was a defector?

00:51:40
Speaker 2: Yeah, he was a defector. It was just him alone. He was defenseless. And he offered them information about the West. And maybe he was a nice guy. And he’d tell good jokes. I don’t know. But he actually ended up marrying a Ngar Shalangi’s woman. And he rose to the rank of a minor chief in the village. But the reason it’s so important for this story is… is that he acted as a translator between the Americans and the Ngar Shalongese. So now all of a sudden, they could communicate freely. And the Ngar Shalongese decided, they said, okay, we’ll help you build a ship. Not out of the remains of a mentor, but from wood on the island, breadfruit or coconut or whatever. We’ll help you build a ship. But we’re not doing this just because we’re nice guys. We’re doing this because when you go back home to the United States, We want you to come back with 200 guns and gunpowder and balls and flints so that we can become powerful and we can go kick the quarry’s butts. So that, you know, guns plays a big role in this story. Well, the Americans agreed to this deal, even though they have no faith that the United States government is going to live up to it. Yeah.

00:52:54
Speaker 1: And the, I mean, they gotta be thinking once we’re out of here, we’re going to forget about.

00:52:58
Speaker 2: This whole deal.

00:52:59
Speaker 1: I’m not coming back.

00:53:02
Speaker 2: So the Ngarchalangese say, okay, we’re going to help you build a boat. They try to start building a boat. They have nails from the ship. Every time they put a nail through one of the planks of a breadfruit tree, it splits. It’s not as strong as an oak or live oak or anything like that or pine. So the Ngarchalangese are getting very frustrated. The Americans are getting very frustrated. So finally, the Ngar Shalongese says, okay, we know what we’re going to do. We’re going to cut down the largest breadfruit tree in the island. We’re going to carve you a mighty canoe, and you’re going to use this canoe along with your whale boat to get to the Spice Islands where you can get a ship back to the United States. So the Americans say, fine. So it takes months to build this canoe. And finally, six months after the Americans arrived in Ngar Shalong, The canoe is ready to go. And it’s an outrigger canoe. It’s got two outriggers for balance. It’s pretty big. They load it up with a lot of food and water. They load food and water into the whale boat. But this is, it’s got a string attached to it. The Ngar Shalongese are no rubes. They’re not dumb. They said, how are we going to guarantee these Americans come back? So they require Barnard to leave three of his men as hostages behind in Ngar Shalong. So the Americans sail off and they take three Ngar Shalangis with them to see the wider world and come back home at a later date and tell all their peers about what’s out there in this world.

00:54:35
Speaker 1: You see this type of exchange all through history. Yes.

00:54:41
Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely.

00:54:41
Speaker 1: It’s like when the colonial superpowers were in South America, like when the French came up with St. Lawrence, this like… Yeah, Indians. This taking and leaving of people and this exchange and sort of almost like collateral, you know, holding your people’s collateral.

00:54:56
Speaker 2: Exactly. Well, in 1783, I mentioned the Antelope, the British ship. When they left, they took Libu, a prince, the son of the king of Karur, back to London. Huge stir. Books written about it. Unfortunately, he died of smallpox a couple of months after he arrived. But it was a really big news of the day. And I have to tell a little funny story. I sent a copy of my book to the president of Palau. And about a month ago, I got an email back from him. And he said he really liked the book. He hoped it would be made into a movie. I said, oh, that’d be lovely. And he said, you know, I was just in England and I was discussing this book and the story of Li Bu, the Palawan prince who got taken to London with King Charles. So I thought that was kind of cool. I have no idea if King Charles bought a copy.

00:55:46
Speaker 1: There’s a Cartier, the French explorer. At one point in time, he takes a bunch of Native Americans back. They all die very quickly from disease. When he comes back, when he returns, the peoples that he took them from are like, hey, what happened to everybody you took? Oh, man, they became lords, and they married local French women.

00:56:15
Speaker 2: Really?

00:56:16
Speaker 1: And they just decided to stay.

00:56:18
Speaker 2: That’s a good cover story. It’s better than we killed them.

00:56:24
Speaker 1: They all kind of died right away. He just flat out tells them something, and they’re like, oh, that sounds great.

00:56:29
Speaker 2: Wow, I didn’t know that story. That’s a great story. Yeah, it is amazing how many, you’re right, in so many instances in history, people either voluntarily or by theft would take the indigenous people they knocked into to bring them back as show pieces or just curiosity.

00:56:48
Speaker 1: So how did he pick the three that got to stay? Did he get to pick or did they pick?

00:56:53
Speaker 2: Exactly how they did it, I don’t know. They didn’t talk about it in the books they wrote later.

00:56:57
Speaker 1: And what was the envious position? You could see that staying, because you’re like, I don’t know, man, you guys are going to die in this canoe. I’m going to stay, and maybe I’ll get a better opportunity to jump on a ship down the road. Or you could be like, man, I’m not going to stay here. These people are going to turn on me or something’s going to happen.

00:57:16
Speaker 2: Well, you have the benefit of hindsight. Going back to that era and what they were dealing with in the moment, I might have chosen to stay because they had been there for six months. they were treated very well by the Ngar Shalangis.

00:57:31
Speaker 1: Got it.

00:57:31
Speaker 2: And they had plenty of food, plenty of water, beautiful surroundings, a happy people. The Ngar Shalangis were very happy people despite their internecine, their warfare with other villages. So, and in hindsight, certainly given what happens later to the whalemen, it would have been better to have stayed on Ngar Shalang, but they didn’t know that at the time. And if you were given the option of getting in a boat with, trained mariners and hopefully a good canoe. And it might be very enticing to leave the island and ultimately get back home. But maybe six on one hand, half dozen on another.

00:58:09
Speaker 1: So we’re dealing with 11 guys now or 12 guys?

00:58:13
Speaker 2: Well, there were a total of 11 guys left after the shipwreck.

00:58:20
Speaker 1: Ten died in one shipwreck, one drowned.

00:58:22
Speaker 2: Yeah.

00:58:22
Speaker 1: And no one’s died since then.

00:58:24
Speaker 2: Right, no one’s died.

00:58:25
Speaker 1: So now three stay.

00:58:25
Speaker 2: Three stay behind. So there’s eight. Eight leave.

00:58:28
Speaker 1: And they’re going to boogie for somewhere else.

00:58:31
Speaker 2: They were hopefully going to go to the Spice Islands, which is 800 miles to the southwest. That was their hope. And they had a rudimentary compass. Actually, they had the compass that was left behind by the antelope in 1783. to use as a guide along with celestial navigation. So they left. Unfortunately, even though the Palauans are well known for being excellent craftsmen, having four types of canoes that are very seaworthy, this did not burnish their reputation because as Horace Holden said, this canoe, you sort of floated in the water like a bobbing trunk of a tree. And not long after they left, it swamped. And what was worse is half of their food floated away into the Pacific Ocean. They tried to bail… canoe but they couldn’t so they ultimately had to leave it behind so everybody 11 men had to climb into a 25 foot long whale boat and continue hopefully onto the spice islands for 14 days they sailed under the broiling sun they started to run out of food and water and what was worse is the water was held in these bamboo canteens. You know, a large bamboo, they have these septums that separate different parts. Well, they basically would cut it off above the septum, below a septum, then they put a little hole in it and they’d cork it with some resin. And that was their canteen. Well, after drinking from this canteen for days on end, the bacteria from their mouths and the sap from the bamboo mixed to make this fetid, water mix to, you think that castoreum with alcohol is bad enough. And they could barely drink this without retching. So after about 14 days, all of a sudden, Barnard, who was the only one that was sitting upright in the whale boat, sees land in the distance. He knows it’s not the Spice Islands. Spice Islands are big, a bunch of islands, but some of them are huge. Well, the island that he sees in the distance is about a mile long and a half mile wide. But if they stayed on the open ocean any longer, they would start dying. So they decided, okay, we’re gonna go for that island. And he told his men, as soon as he saw, what does he see coming from the island? A bunch of canoes racing towards them. And he said, you know, we can’t do anything but submit. And they submit. And this was a much rougher reception because these canoes surrounded the whale boat. They pitched all of the men into the water They destroyed the whale boat down to the water line because they wanted the iron nails and the wood. And then finally, after the men in the water were begging for some time, they pulled them from the ocean into the canoes, stripped them of all their clothes, and then landed them on the beach on this island of Toby. Now, it’s important to understand that at this time, the island of Toby It’s a mile long, half mile wide. 400 people are living on this island. It is not part of Palau at the time. It’s part of Palau today, but back then it was not part of Palau. And in fact, the Tobians spoke an entirely different language than the Palauans that the whalemen had recently left. And Toby’s about 800 miles south, a little southwest. of in Garchelong, where they left from. So they’re pulled onto this island.

01:02:17
Speaker 1: But they got Palauans in the boat.

01:02:19
Speaker 2: They got Palauans, but the Palauans can’t communicate.

01:02:21
Speaker 1: With the Tobians. But the Tobians recognize them as enemies or not?

01:02:24
Speaker 2: Yeah, they recognize them as other islanders because they’re tattooed like they are. One big difference is in Palau, it was common to blacken your teeth or lacquer your teeth. And some people later We call it Japaning your teeth. And they did that probably to reduce rot. It’s actually proven that it helps the teeth stand up over time. but it makes for a funny-looking smile because your teeth are totally black. And then their saliva was red because Palauans chewed on betel nuts all day as mild narcotic. So it’s kind of a horrifying visage that greeted these American women.

01:03:01
Speaker 1: Yeah, I’ve hung out with guys that had all those red teeth and that stuff.

01:03:03
Speaker 2: Yeah. But the Tobians did not blacken their teeth, so they had white teeth, so they looked different. And whether they knew that the— they probably didn’t even know what Palau was.

01:03:14
Speaker 1: Maybe they did.

01:03:15
Speaker 2: That Tobians were really off the beaten track. Only one or two Western ships had ever even come by there in hundreds of years, and they didn’t have much interaction with other islands in the area because they were in the middle, in Micronesia, but they were very far away from other islands. So anyway, so now the Americans and the three Ingar Shalanyis are on Toby. It was clear immediately they were going to be treated as captives. each one of them was given to a different family. And they were forced to work harvesting coconuts, fishing on occasion, but mainly what they did is tended to the taro pits, which is sort of like a potato, but thicker and richer, and they make poi out of it. And so they tended to the taro pits, which are these muddy slurries in the middle of the island from morning to night. And they had no idea how or if they were ever going to be able to leave the island. But after two months, what happens? A Western ship, the Sabina, which was heading to Macau, a Spanish ship, comes by. The natives, the Tobians, they know enough about Westerners that Westerners have iron. They haven’t gotten guns from Westerners, but they have iron. So they take their canoes out to the Sabina. Well, the American whalemen and the Ingarchalangese wanted to get on the canoes because they viewed the Sabina off in the distance as their ticket to going home. Well, the Tobians had no interest in any of them getting into any of the canoes. But Captain Barnard and one other guy, a guy named Bartlett Rollins, was able to fight their way onto two separate canoes. So the canoes go out to the Sabina. Captain Soames is on the main deck. He’s surrounded by a bunch of Canoes full of warriors. And Captain Barnard yells out in English. Well, Captain Soames is pretty surprised. Yeah. So he sends one of his boats out. Finally, Captain Barnard and Whaleman Rollins are taken on board the Sabina. And Barnard immediately pleads with Soames to go to Toby and get the rest of the Americans and the Ngar Shalangis. But picture this. The Sabina has maybe 13 men on board. They have limited arms. They’re surrounded by very angry-looking natives. And to make matters worse, Captain Barnard, the first thing he told Captain Soames when he got on board the ship was how they arrived there. And when they arrived, their whale boat was destroyed and they were… beaten, essentially, and taken to the beach. So Soames is thinking, well, this is not… I don’t want to go to the island and try to extract more people. So he gives them some iron in exchange for letting these two people go. The iron gets back to the island of Toby. The sabina takes off. And on the island of Toby… Barnard, keep in mind, he wrote about this later, he thought that he had convinced Soames to give enough iron to make the Tobians happy with the exchange. Well, they weren’t happy. They thought that the amount of iron that they had been given was woefully inadequate.

01:06:37
Speaker 1: Wasn’t enough to buy two slaves.

01:06:38
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

01:06:39
Speaker 1: You know, just a comment about that is a thing that’s frustrating is the modern American comprehension of slavery.

01:06:48
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:06:49
Speaker 1: Like, The way it’s taught, people don’t realize how global it was.

01:06:53
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Oh, it goes back thousands and thousands of years.

01:06:55
Speaker 1: It’s sort of like in people’s heads now, there’s like this American invention or something. No, no. Not realizing just like slavery at this time, slavery was everywhere. Yes.

01:07:04
Speaker 2: And absolutely, slavery is as old as humankind.

01:07:08
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s unbelievable the way that it’s been sort of like taught and misunderstood to be that it was this kind of like invention or something, you know?

01:07:18
Speaker 2: So they’re there. The Tobians come back. They’re pissed off. Who do they take out their anger on? The whalemen and the Ngar Shalangis who are left behind. So this begins a prolonged period of suffering for them. And then a typhoon comes along, which is the hurricane by another name. I wrote a book called A Furious Sky About Hurricanes. Great fun writing. A lot of people die in the book. But anyway, typhoons are just hurricanes by another name. So this typhoon almost destroys Toby, knocks down a lot of their best-producing coconut trees, swamps their taro patches with sand and salt water. So the Americans and the Ngar Shalangese are required to rebuild the taro pits. And part of that involves taking very jagged coral stones from the periphery of the island to the center to make walls around the taro pits. So they’re doing this. They’re emaciated because the Americans and the Ngar Shalangis are the bottom of the food chain, so to speak, on Toby. And they’re going through a period of sort of limited resources. So they look like walking skeletons. In fact, at one point, Horace Holden described his skin as looking more like that of a rhinoceros than a human being. But they’re forced to work on meager rations. Right after the tattoo is when we get to the part of the story which we started out today on, the tattooing, the forced tattooing. And then about a year, a little more than a year after they were there, Uh, was a year and a half, no, it was a couple of years. A couple of years after they were there, what happens? Another ship comes by.

01:09:07
Speaker 1: But before- Is Barnard hatching a plan to go get him, or is he just out?

01:09:13
Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Barnard ultimately makes it back to the United States. He makes it back to New York and New Bedford years after they left on the original ship. One of the first things he does is he writes a letter to Levi Woodbury, the Secretary of the Navy, telling him what happened in Palau, what happened to the mentor, and pleading with him to send a naval rescue mission to get the rest of the whalemen, and also, he mentions, get the Ngar Shalangis back to their home Village. But then what is, what does Barnard do? I mean, this, this, this concept blows a lot of people away, but Whaleman back then, they were more married to the ocean than they were to their wives. When Barnard got back, he met a daughter he had never seen before. He was bereft of, not bereft. He had no money. In fact, he was in debt. So what does he do? He immediately goes back on a whale ship soon after penning this letter. And he goes on a couple more whaling voyages.

01:10:11
Speaker 1: He doesn’t have the financial means to go get the people.

01:10:14
Speaker 2: Oh, no, he couldn’t. No, he couldn’t. He couldn’t mount a rescue operation. He’s the captain of a whale ship.

01:10:19
Speaker 1: He’s not a wealthy man. But why does he get all the way back to America before he starts dealing with this problem? I mean, he must have made a dozen stops on his way back to America.

01:10:26
Speaker 2: No, he did. He stopped in Batavia, which was Dutch at the time, and he knocked into a U.S. naval ship, the USS Boxer, and he told the captain the same story, and he said, go get them.

01:10:37
Speaker 1: And what did the captain do with that?

01:10:39
Speaker 2: Oh, nothing, essentially. You can’t do anything without orders from the Secretary of the Navy. I think at that point, the captain of the Boxer did not go to Palau. He probably had orders. I don’t know what the rest of his voyage was supposed to be. Something else. So Barnard did his best, or at least what he thought was his best. And there were a lot of articles in American newspapers when he and Rollins returned. And so a lot of people knew what had happened in The Mentor, including the family members of the people who were still missing. And they started lobbying for the U.S. Navy to send a rescue mission, which ultimately happened later, but later in the story. But back on Toby, we’ve got Horace Holden and the rest of them in absolutely miserable shape. So they’re so ill, they’re so skinny, that they finally beg their Tobian masters or overseers to be released from work. And at this point, they’d been there more than a year. So they spoke Tobian, so they could speak directly to the people that were holding them. So at first, the Tobians didn’t want to release them, but then they said, okay, if you don’t work, you don’t get any food. And the Americans and the Ngar Shalangis said, okay. And this time it was fewer of them because over the span of a year, year and a half, three Americans died of starvation. One was killed when he was accused of stealing something. And then two of the Ngar Shalangis were, died of starvation. So now, a couple of years after arriving in Toby, you have three men left. You have Horace Holden, Benjamin Newt, another whaleman, and a guy named Kobach, who was a, in Garchalongese, prince or chief. And they’re the only ones left. So they beg not to be, they beg to be released from work. They know that that means they won’t get food. They accept that as a deal they’re willing to make. And from that point forward, they spent a lot of time crawling around the island, eating bugs, leaves, and also the entrails, which was particularly, a lot of the Tobians, after they finished their main meal, sometimes they would feel sorry for these men, and they’d give them the entrails to eat. So they were nothing but skin and bones.

01:12:59
Speaker 1: I mean, like fish guts and stuff.

01:13:00
Speaker 2: Yeah, fish guts. Yeah, intestines, stuff like that. So they were in really bad shape. And then what happens? Oh, the other thing. Horace Holden tells his overseer, who seemed to be a nice guy, and Horace Holden’s given name while he was on Toby was Temit, T-E-M-I-T. And he talks to his overseer and he said, you know, if there’s another Western ship that comes by and you put me on board that ship, I am going to reward you with a lot of iron. So what happens a couple of years after they’ve been there? A Western ship comes by. It’s a British ship. It’s called the Britannia. And it’s captained by a guy named Henry Short. The same play unfolds. The warriors and the men in the canoes go out to the ship hoping to trade for iron. This time… Realizing that Holden had made this pledge, they let Holden and Newt get onto a couple of canoes. They go out to the Britannia. Holden yells across the water in English, telling him who he is. Captain Short is dumbfounded, and he sends his men off in a longboat. They go to within about 100 feet of the canoes, because they were told to stay farther away, because these warriors had weapons.

01:14:24
Speaker 1: Yeah.

01:14:26
Speaker 2: Holden tells him more of his story. The men on board the longboat tell Holden to jump into the water and swim to the longboat. But Holden is, you know, partially starved, weak, but he summons up his strength. He dives into the water, claws his way forward. And then right when he’s at next to the longboat, the men, a couple of the British guys, pull him onto the boat. One of them exclaims, we have just saved him now. And he wasn’t referring to the simple act of plucking Holden out of the water, but rather to the fate that he had just avoided. Because there, next to the longboat, was a huge shark, rolling on its side, mouth open, ready to make Holden its next meal. So they saved him. He got on board. Newt, who was almost dead, got on board the Britannia. And they begged Captain Short, just like the other people had begged Soames, to go to the island of Toby to rescue Kovac. Because this is a fascinating part of the story to me. When the Americans arrived in Palau, even after they got along with the Palauans, their initial attitude towards the Palauans was that they were nothing but savages, barbarians, and brutes. And that was a common attitude of Westerners at the time. But once they got to know the Palauans and the Garchulong, they had a much more favorable opinion. And once they spent years on Toby with Kobach, they thought they viewed him as a brother and they wanted to save him.

01:16:01
Speaker 1: It’s always that way. It’s like you trivialize their economy, you trivialize their religion, you trivialize their social structure, you disparage it. And then oftentimes, over time, some percentage of the people that experience it prefer it.

01:16:17
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:16:17
Speaker 1: Prefer the cultures.

01:16:19
Speaker 2: Or just accept their humanity.

01:16:20
Speaker 1: Accept it or absorb into it.

01:16:23
Speaker 2: Well, just think about a common story. A lot of our countries, I mean, I don’t want to get into modern politics, but a lot of our countries are loggerheads right now. Very angry. But if you get individuals from different countries together in a bar, they often get along famously, person to person. So that’s what happened. Captain Short was not. He also had only about 12 or 13 men on board. There’s no way that he is going to go to the island of Toby to rescue.

01:16:52
Speaker 1: And they don’t have enough loot on these boats. They don’t have enough stuff on these boats, extra stuff to go to buy the guy.

01:17:00
Speaker 2: No, that did not come up in the discussion. Whether they tried it or not, it didn’t come up. But I don’t think they would have because.

01:17:07
Speaker 1: You see the rope and chain and stuff. You could come up with a human price.

01:17:10
Speaker 2: Well, I think the Tobians… You’re right. But I think the Tobians viewed Kobach differently. He was a fellow Pacific Native Islander than the Americans. So there might have been some differential… treatment because of that he also had a wife on toby he took a wife.

01:17:25
Speaker 1: Oh he did okay so he was doing better yeah he was doing better no.

01:17:28
Speaker 2: Horse yeah he’s doing he’s doing better so the britannia sails off goes to canton goes to macau and uh holden and newt finally make it back to the united states and holden writes a book about his experience that came out in 1836. But they make it back to the United States almost five years after they left.

01:17:50
Speaker 1: Oh, man. You know what I was asked about that guy? I wasn’t putting the timeline right. What I was talking about, I was trying to find, I had him lined up with the advent of photography. No, daguerreotypes? Yeah, but he wouldn’t have lived long enough to ever have his tattoos photographed.

01:18:05
Speaker 2: No, no, no. He lived until the early 1900s.

01:18:08
Speaker 1: He did.

01:18:09
Speaker 2: Yeah, but Horace Holden made a conscious decision. When he came back, he was interviewed by numerous newspapers and magazines. The North American Review, which was a really big magazine at the time, did a lengthy article about And the journalists got to see his tattoos. He mainly had tattoos on his chest and his arms. And they saw them and they described them. But Horace Holden decided never to show his tattoos publicly, like as a curiosity. He showed it to friends and family.

01:18:39
Speaker 1: I thought he went to Barnum or something. No, no.

01:18:41
Speaker 2: That’s another guy.

01:18:42
Speaker 1: That’s a different guy that did that.

01:18:44
Speaker 2: That’s another guy. A guy that came back about seven months after… Holden. He had been on the island of Panpei, which is about 1,600 miles to the east of Palau. for almost a decade. He actually married a chief’s daughter. He was tattooed from head to foot, much more heavily than Holden. He finally got on a ship going back to Salem, Massachusetts. When he got back to the United States, this guy O’Brien, which they later called the tattooed Irishman, he was a born salesman. He decided to capitalize on his tattoos and even though they didn’t use the term at the time, he sort of became part of a freak show. P.T. Barnum hired him as part of the American Museum and people paid to see this guy. And he was the first Westerner who was tattooed that was seen in the United States. There had been other Islanders and other people who had been seen and some Chinese, but he was the first American that had tattoos that was seen widely in the United States.

01:19:45
Speaker 1: Is there any idea what came of what was the Palauan’s name?

01:19:50
Speaker 2: Kobach?

01:19:51
Speaker 1: Yeah. Is there any idea what came to him?

01:19:52
Speaker 2: No, you know, he made it back to Engarshalong. Well, what happened is Holden got back. He wrote a book. He wrote a book for two reasons. One is he wanted to make some money. I could have told him, what a fool you are, writing to make money. But the other thing that he wanted to do was to incite action. He wanted to encourage the U.S. Navy to send a rescue mission. But unbeknownst to him, a rescue mission had already been sent. The USS Vincennes was heading to Palau to recover whatever whalemen were there and to reunite the Ngarchalangis with their home village. And so they ultimately did that. So Kobach was ultimately picked up after they discovered, after the Vincennes discovered there are no more Americans there. Kobach was picked up. He was reunited with his brothers. In Gar-Shalong, they rub noses to say hello. And the remaining Americans, there are only two Americans left. Because one of them in Gar-Shalong had escaped on a passing ship. The other two were still there. And an interesting coda to this story is that one of them, James Mader, I got in touch with his ancestors because he apparently got married and had children while he was in Gar-Shalong. Because there to this day is a Maidar clan which claims to go way back to when a white man from the ocean married a local woman.

01:21:13
Speaker 1: But when he got picked up, he ditched his family.

01:21:15
Speaker 2: Yes, he ditched his family. So did Kobach. When Kobach got picked up by the Vincennes, the Tobians pleaded with him to come back. And one of the angles of attack that they used is to say, you know, Kobach, you’re leaving your wife behind. Don’t you want to come back? And Kobach reportedly said no. screw my tobian wife i want to go back to my and garcia langi’s wife so he left he left happily as well.

01:21:41
Speaker 1: It’s amazing that like i know you think about those first 10 dudes got wiped out but it’s amazing that so many of these guys made it.

01:21:48
Speaker 2: Seven seven out of 22 made it back and you mentioned horace holden he lived to the age of 94. he died in oregon and he played a minor role in other interesting stories in american history He went to Hawaii very early on. He helped introduce sericulture or silk culture to Hawaii. Then he was one of the first people in the 1840s to go to the Oregon Territory to help populate the Oregon Territory so the United States could have a better claim on taking it later in negotiations with Canada. And he had a cattle farm. He was a farmer. Died when he was 94. And I am so upset with one of his granddaughters. Okay. Because after he died, a reporter in Oregon went to his daughter trying to find out more information. He wanted to write a history of Oregon settlement, but also write about Horace Holden’s life. So Horace Holden’s daughter told him, oh, there’s a sea chest that we have that has a lot of dad’s stuff in it. It’s with my daughter. Here, I’m going to write you a letter of introduction. Go talk to my daughter. So this journalist is all excited. He thinks there’s going to be a trove of materials. He goes to the daughter, hands over the note. The daughter essentially says, oh, my mother must think that I’m a horrible housekeeper. The first thing I did when I got that chest is I threw everything in it out and I now use it for my linens. So whatever information he had in there, log books i mean other i’m sure he wrote more about it to himself or diaries.

01:23:25
Speaker 1: Gone got it yeah that’s incredible so you mentioned just kind of as a following these people through we talked about horace like oddly he came to be out in oregon cattle ranching yeah um his art is his his belongings are gone yep um it was bedford right new bedford no no sorry no the name of the captain Oh, no, Barnard. Yeah, Barnard. Yeah, Edward Barnard. He did some more whaling. Yes. Did he wind up back out in the Pacific? Where did he wind up when he later? Because, I mean, he dies in Erie.

01:23:59
Speaker 2: Right.

01:23:59
Speaker 1: But does his whaling trips bring him back through these places?

01:24:04
Speaker 2: You know, you asked me a question that’s really good. I know that he took two more voyages, but I’m pretty sure they were in the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. I don’t think he made it to the Pacific.

01:24:14
Speaker 1: Okay.

01:24:15
Speaker 2: But he might very well have had, but he wasn’t a sentimental guy. I don’t think he would have thought twice about that. He needed to go out and make money. He had two greasy trips, so they made some money. They came back with 1,800, 2,000 barrels. But then he decided to go into the freshwater ocean, and he was the captain of the schooner of Pennsylvania, and it sank, and all men on board died and he was never seen.

01:24:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, but the thing is- He’s dead in his 40s.

01:24:41
Speaker 2: Yeah, dead in his 40s. Well, that wasn’t that young back then. You made it to your late 40s, you were doing pretty well, especially if you were a fisherman or a whaleman or a laborer. You know, the life expectancy was much, much less back then. But it’s a fascinating story. And luckily for me, because that isn’t a story and you want to have as many firsthand experiences primary materials as possible. He wrote essentially a book-like manuscript about the voyage of the mentor and the crashing in Palau. And it was among his effects when he died. He maybe was going to publish it, or maybe he was dissuaded from publishing it because Holden published his first. I don’t know. He never got around to it. But his daughter kept it, and it was handed down through the family. And ultimately, sometime in the mid-1900s, It was given to the Kendall Whaling Museum, which is the precursor of the New Bedford Whaling Museum. And then in the 1970s, a curator was rooting around downstairs in the archives, and he came across this handwritten manuscript by Edward Barnard, and they published it.

01:25:52
Speaker 1: The whole story.

01:25:52
Speaker 2: Yeah, they published the thing, they transcribed it, they published it. And that’s one of the first ways I found out about the story, is reading that account and reading Horace Holden’s account.

01:26:03
Speaker 1: You know what seems to be absent from this story that’s usually a part of every whaling story? Is no one ever eats anybody.

01:26:10
Speaker 2: Oh, wait a second. I had to set the record straight. Very few whaling stories have cannibalism. Yeah. In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick’s story about that whale ship.

01:26:19
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s like Arctic exploration.

01:26:21
Speaker 2: The Essex, not to be confused.

01:26:23
Speaker 1: Yeah, it’s like when people start eating each other, that’s when things go downhill.

01:26:27
Speaker 2: There were a couple of whaling ships where that happened. More common with Arctic and Antarctic. Well, Arctic exploration. I don’t think it was very common, Antarctic. I don’t recall any stories of Antarctic exploration where they ended up.

01:26:40
Speaker 1: Resorted to that.

01:26:40
Speaker 2: Cannibalism. But definitely, you know, John Franklin and trying to find the Northwest Pass is just littered with apparently tasty dead bodies.

01:26:49
Speaker 1: I don’t know. Sure, yeah. What are you going to work on now? You starting another one yet?

01:26:54
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, this is strange. For the last nine books, I’ve always had another book I’m working on when my next book comes out. But this has been a, I’ve taken a little break part of this because we bought that house, that old house, and Marvel had been working on that. I’ve gone through about four or five ideas, and I’ve shot all of them down.

01:27:13
Speaker 1: How long do you spend on an idea before you shoot it down? What do you give yourself?

01:27:17
Speaker 2: Certainly weeks, if not a month or two. I keep trying to convince myself. I have an idea right now. I wrote a proposal. My agent loves it. I like it. I think it could be a great book, but I’m not 100% convinced. In fact, after I go back east, I’m going out to Michigan to give a talk, and then Once they go back east, I’m gonna really sit down and focus on it.

01:27:41
Speaker 1: And- Does it involve salty water?

01:27:43
Speaker 2: Yeah, but it’s a maritime story. I’ll tell you, yeah. And a lot of people die. That’s always good. That’s always good. No cannibalism, but a lot of people die. I don’t know, but I suspect by the end of this year, I will be working on another book because I don’t like, I’m like a dog without a bone. You know, I like having something to do.

01:28:02
Speaker 1: Yeah, you gotta have a dragon to slay, man.

01:28:03
Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.

01:28:04
Speaker 1: Gives like, gives shaped life, you know? yeah yeah so salty water dead people dead people what else what else can you give me.

01:28:13
Speaker 2: Uh it involves uh it’s in the early 1800s dead whales in it no no whales uh it might involve a little bit of piracy all right sounds i don’t want to i don’t want to give any more because i might not even end up writing.

01:28:30
Speaker 1: It you know years ago man it’s funny years ago there was this uh This writer, I can’t remember who it was. It was Ben, I don’t think it was Ben. it was ben metcalf some writer wrote a thing about there was kind of like a southern literature craze yeah okay oh confederates in the attic and stuff like that yeah so this writer wrote this piece of like the from a scholarly perspective all these scholars at the time were trying to like you know cormac mccarthy and and in um in uh faulkner you know right and people are like wrestling with this southern literature right and a scholar wrote a piece where he’s like well how do you define southern literature you know same way i’ll sound but in my mind like exploration books tend to have people eating people in them yeah he wrote it’d be like here’s the way you can tell he’s like is there a dead mule in it If there’s a dead mule in it and he does like a check, he goes through all Faulkner’s work. He’s like, you will find in that work a dead mule. If there’s no dead mule, it’s not Southern literature. So you got to ask yourself, like of all your books, you got to be like, like a Dolan book has to.

01:29:45
Speaker 2: Have. The main thing for me that my books have to have is I have to be interested in I mean, we didn’t go over my educational background. I won’t go just other than I say, I have an undergraduate master’s and a PhD, not in history, in biology and environmental policy and conservation. So. Every book I write is like getting a mini master’s degree, because I didn’t learn about it in school, and most of the books that I read are out of print or article. I don’t read a lot of modern literature, unfortunately, because I’m focusing on a book and a topic.

01:30:19
Speaker 1: You know what you might find is a natural resource theme.

01:30:22
Speaker 2: Yeah, there’s a lot of natural. Yeah, a lot of my books basically look at the development. The way I look at a lot of my books, not so much, not the mentor, but Leviathan, The History of Whaling, Fur Fortune Empire, When America First Met China, A Furious Sky, my Lighthouse book, Brilliant Beacons, all of them use a specific subject, whales, lighthouses, hurricanes, to form the narrative arc or backbone for a larger story about the evolution of the United States. That’s what gets me interested. Just telling a story about a lighthouse is not interesting, but telling a story about a lighthouse that played an important role in the American Revolution or the Civil War or helped the country develop as a maritime nation and then the leading maritime nation in the world, that’s exciting. Whaling was such a huge topic the fur trade which is very huge out here. I loved writing that book I knew very little about fur trade before I started it but man the fur trade is a major major force in the evolution and development of the colonies and then the United States you cannot understand American history certainly westward expansion without understanding intimately The fur trade. So that’s what got me interested.

01:31:39
Speaker 1: I’m working on a project right now and in it, trying to make the point that like, there’s this point where reality kicks in, in the colonization of North America, in the North. Right, okay. Like, if you look at like in South America, Mesoamerica, you have legitimately, like they’re legitimately finding cities of gold.

01:32:02
Speaker 2: Right.

01:32:03
Speaker 1: I mean, they’re finding like extraordinary wealth. Right. But then you get up into the areas we’ve been touching on. Right. Right? Like, what is present-day northeastern U.S., southeastern Canada.

01:32:18
Speaker 2: Right.

01:32:19
Speaker 1: When people arrive there, they’re holding out that there’s going to be, like, that you’ll go up the river and there will be China.

01:32:25
Speaker 2: Right.

01:32:26
Speaker 1: Or you’ll go up the river and there will be white people and they have all kinds of gold.

01:32:30
Speaker 2: Right.

01:32:30
Speaker 1: There’s all these fantastical ideas.

01:32:32
Speaker 2: Right.

01:32:33
Speaker 1: But then there’s, like, a thing clicks. you know, and it clicked like in the late teens, 1600s, whatever, somewhere in there. Yeah. It clicks. And it’s like, you know what, man, really? It’s like fur.

01:32:47
Speaker 2: Right. Fish. Yeah.

01:32:48
Speaker 1: Whales.

01:32:49
Speaker 2: Absolutely.

01:32:49
Speaker 1: And then they dig in. No, they dig in. But like the previous, like a click back.

01:32:55
Speaker 2: Right.

01:32:56
Speaker 1: Is like China, gold, spices, you know, silver. And there’s kind of like this, ah, man. It’s just fur, dude. Let’s get it all.

01:33:06
Speaker 2: Yeah, well, they call it beaver pelts, as you know, soft gold, otter pelts.

01:33:11
Speaker 1: But it’s like there’s a little bit of a letdown.

01:33:14
Speaker 2: Yeah, but then they get pretty excited once they start making money.

01:33:17
Speaker 1: They dig in, but it sort of becomes it’s just going to be work.

01:33:21
Speaker 2: Right.

01:33:22
Speaker 1: It’s just going to be work. We’re not going to be like the Spanish people. literally driving ships of gold home, you know? It’s going to be work.

01:33:29
Speaker 2: You’re absolutely right. That’s an excellent point. I mean, El Dorado, the search for El Dorado, or Henry Hudson thinking that he was going to go find, and Columbus thinking they were going to go find China. And then all of a sudden, you’re left with natural resources. But the history, this would be too big of a book, but it’d be the kind of book I’d like to write. But I’m not sure many people read it, too broad. But basically, history of the United States just told through natural resources would be huge. But without, I mean, that’s the reason we’ve become such an amazing, powerful country. It’s because of our natural resource base. No doubt about it.

01:34:05
Speaker 1: There’s a Rapids, sort of the first big Rapids on the St.

01:34:10
Speaker 2: Lawrence.

01:34:12
Speaker 1: Lachine Rapids.

01:34:13
Speaker 2: Lachine, yeah.

01:34:14
Speaker 1: Because it was like the China Rapids.

01:34:18
Speaker 2: Right.

01:34:18
Speaker 1: Because that was preventing you from getting to China. Right. It’s like, ah, damn it. If I could only get over this rapids, I’d be in China, you know, and it carries that name, right? China Rapids.

01:34:28
Speaker 2: It is amazing with the search for the Northwest Passage and China, how many centuries that spans and how many lives were lost. You know, just amazing. And it’s kind of ironic that now when we know how to get to China multiple ways because of a warming world, we’re getting pathways through the Arctic. And the Northwest passage is going to be a real reality more and more. Yeah.

01:34:53
Speaker 1: It’s happening all over again without the loss of life. Yeah. And then now like all these, you know, these geopolitical conflicts, all these nations looking, looking to the Arctic, all this talk of Greenland and all, you know, it’s like, it’s like the shipping, the sort of shipping dream that motivated the French and the Dutch and the English and all these other places. It’s like shipping dream. is in just totally other circumstances becoming reality. Like safe, fairly reliable Arctic transport as a result of changing climate.

01:35:31
Speaker 2: You’re right, it’s gonna be the next, if it already is to some extent, battleground. It’s gonna be very important in international relations and hopefully not conflict. I mean, manganese nodules at the bottom of the ocean. There are so many different resources that over time are going to be exploited by one country or another.

01:35:50
Speaker 1: Do you ever think about, this is my last question for you as a writer. Well, I’ll start by saying this. I was talking to Ken, the documentarian, Ken Burns. Yep. I bring this up all the time because I was saying to him, I was saying to him, I’m like, why not just do Afghanistan now? Like, do Afghanistan.

01:36:10
Speaker 2: Oh, documentary.

01:36:11
Speaker 1: Do the war in Afghanistan.

01:36:12
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:36:13
Speaker 1: Okay? He finished Vietnam. He did the American Revolution. Do Afghanistan. Everyone’s alive? Very few Americans understand that conflict now. Imagine the footage. It’d be the first project he could do with tons of cell phone footage. He wouldn’t need to film old-timey maps and stuff like that. And paintings. It’d be just… Go talk to everybody. They’re all still alive. Right. But he had some answers. I can’t remember the details, but he’s like, it hasn’t been interpreted and reinterpreted enough.

01:36:52
Speaker 2: Right.

01:36:52
Speaker 1: He said it took the war in Afghanistan to understand the war in Vietnam. Right.

01:36:59
Speaker 2: No, the other way around. No.

01:37:02
Speaker 1: When he did Vietnam, when Ken Burns did the Vietnam, his Vietnam project. Okay. He said it took.

01:37:10
Speaker 2: Oh, I get it.

01:37:11
Speaker 1: The American experience in Afghanistan.

01:37:13
Speaker 2: Right.

01:37:15
Speaker 1: To, like, come to this, the understanding that I would bring to the Vietnam War. Right, okay. And he’s like, we’ll need to reinterpret the war in Afghanistan and reinterpret it again.

01:37:26
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:37:28
Speaker 1: I’m paraphrasing, but roughly he said this. And then it’ll be time.

01:37:33
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:37:34
Speaker 1: For the, you know, 12-hour, 20-hour… documentary about what really happened in Afghanistan. Right. Right. Like he’s not going to do it yet. That’s a long winded way of asking. Do you, if, if would you do a book, would you do a story from 2010?

01:37:52
Speaker 2: Uh, no, but I have a very different, I think what Ken said and what you paraphrase, I absolutely agree with a hundred percent, uh, time and distance gives you different perspective. And there’s a saying in the world of history that every 20 or so years, every generation, uh, The new generation reinterprets the past or they have different lenses to look at the past. But my sort of, this is sort of a joke, but it’s actually real. Part of the reason I write books that go back a long ways is I don’t want to get into writing books about people who are still alive because I don’t want to get into arguing. with them about interpretations.

01:38:31
Speaker 1: Let them write their own book, man. That’s what the author Chris Offit said. They can write their own book.

01:38:35
Speaker 2: Yeah, they can.

01:38:36
Speaker 1: They’re still around.

01:38:38
Speaker 2: No, but there are plenty of modern topics that interest me, but there’s something I like about The 19th century, the 18th century.

01:38:49
Speaker 1: I’m drawn to that stuff too, man.

01:38:50
Speaker 2: It’s fun. And part of the value of waiting a long time to write a book like that is you have more sources. Not only the primary sources that continue to be found, but the secondary sources of other people that have come before you. So, you know, I noticed that in one of your last podcasts, you had a guy that wrote A Vast Wilderness. I can’t remember his name. burnt burnt about lewis and clark oh yeah well steven ambrose wrote a book about lewis and clark there are tons of books about lewis and clark but every generation can either dig deeper have a slightly different angle and that’s that’s valuable and i like i prefer having more information to draw upon than less you know but i do have a little bit of a journalism background i worked for the uh upi for a while and i worked at business week for a while i had a fellowship there, but I just don’t think I’d be as good writing a book, a modern book about people who are still alive. It’s just a very different feel to it.

01:39:53
Speaker 1: It’s good.

01:39:54
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:39:54
Speaker 1: It’s good. You’d recognize that my plea, this is my plea to like all the crack commando documentary Terrians that are out there. Like the really good document. Yeah. Documentarians is like five. It’s like five hours from the Soviet invasion to nine 11. And then it’s an hour per year.

01:40:15
Speaker 2: Wow.

01:40:16
Speaker 1: I will watch, like I pledged you, if you make this movie, I will watch it.

01:40:20
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:40:21
Speaker 1: I promise. An hour per year.

01:40:23
Speaker 2: It sounds wonderful. And documentaries, I mean, stuff that Ken Burns and other documentarians and writers do is I think a great service to the public because, you know, it’s trite to say that if you don’t understand history, you’re going to repeat it. I’m not so sure that’s always the case. You know, history sort of doesn’t repeat itself. It rhymes a little bit.

01:40:39
Speaker 1: Yeah, that’s a great line.

01:40:40
Speaker 2: But, I really believe that if you don’t understand history, you don’t have a broad enough context for knowing where we are now and where we might be in the future, and also placing the now within a reasonable frame, and not assuming, to use a Western term, that this is our first rodeo. We’ve been through this stuff before, and I think it’s a great value to understand that, to give a modern example, you know, politics can be messy. Politics is dirty. It’s nasty. There’s a lot of lying that goes on in politics. But if you look at the election of Thomas Jefferson, or you go further back even to Greek and Roman times, there was nastiness in politics going back to as long as there have been humans.

01:41:29
Speaker 1: People talk about how divisive politics is now. They used to line up and have duels.

01:41:33
Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely.

01:41:36
Speaker 1: After the election, they would duel.

01:41:37
Speaker 2: Yeah.

01:41:38
Speaker 1: They’re literally shooting each other, and people want to talk about how politics is nasty now. This is a great frustration that I have having kids. I love my kids to death. They’re getting old enough now to have all these opinions. Okay. They come home from school telling me all about whatever, you know? Yeah. And you know that thing like you have to understand the past to understand the present? I mean, God bless them. They don’t understand the past yet.

01:42:03
Speaker 2: The past is 10 years ago.

01:42:05
Speaker 1: They’re picking up on these things and they’ll come in and be like, here’s what I think about whatever, you know? And I’m like, that’s great. That’s cute. But there’s a lot you’re missing here.

01:42:15
Speaker 2: Right, right.

01:42:17
Speaker 1: There’s a lot you’re missing.

01:42:19
Speaker 2: Yeah. It’s good. It’s going to be up to them to make their own world and hopefully they’ll do it right.

01:42:26
Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so. Well, Eric J. Dolan, thanks for coming on, man.

01:42:30
Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.

01:42:30
Speaker 1: It was great. Yeah, and again, if you listeners want to dig into this man’s, what’s that word for your work, your body of work? My corpus, my body of work. Yeah, his corpus, his body of work. Tighten your boots up because it’s a big task, a lot of fantastic books.

01:42:47
Speaker 2: Can I make one quick plug?

01:42:48
Speaker 1: Please, please.

01:42:49
Speaker 2: No, no, because I have a website. Notice I’m mentioning it. It’s my name.

01:42:52
Speaker 1: Plug whatever you want. Eric J.

01:42:53
Speaker 2: Dolan, E-R-I-C-J-A-Y-D-O-L-I-N.com. The only reason I’m plugging it is because one, you can see all the books I’ve written, but I’ve put the introduction to every single book of mine on the website. So if a topic interests you, you can read the introduction to see if this is going in a direction that you might like. And also it lists my speaking engagements. So if I’m in your neighborhood and you’re around, come and say hello.

01:43:21
Speaker 1: Keep your eyes peeled for dudes in camo hats and ask them. Yeah. Ask them who sent you.

01:43:27
Speaker 2: Yeah. All right, man.

01:43:29
Speaker 1: Thanks so much for coming on.

01:43:30
Speaker 2: Okay.

01:43:30
Speaker 1: Thank you.