Latest / The MeatEater Podcast / Ep. 928: The Wreck of the Mentor

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Ep. 928: The Wreck of the Mentor · The MeatEater Podcast

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  Speaker 1: This is the meat-eater podcast coming at you shirtless, severely bug-bitten,
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  Speaker 2: We hunt the meat-eater podcast.
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  Speaker 1: Holy smokes. Do we got a writer for you today?
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  Speaker 1: We're joined today by Eric J. Dolan. Um, Eric J.
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  Speaker 1: Dolan is a maritime and environmental historian, author of 17 books.
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  Speaker 1: You could read this guy's books for the next five years.
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  Speaker 1: And that's all you can just read nothing but his
• 0:56
  Speaker 1: books for five years and you wouldn't get through them.
• 0:58
  Speaker 1: And you'd learn a lot. You dominate, you would dominate
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  Speaker 1: meat eater trivia. If you read all of this guy's work, um,
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  Speaker 1: Among many other cool things, besides being a writer, he
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  Speaker 1: served as a fisheries policy analyst at the national Marine
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  Speaker 1: fisheries service and an environmental consultant, his books. Now check
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  Speaker 1: this out. Leviathan, the history of whaling in America. These
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  Speaker 1: are all books that I just, that I know about
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  Speaker 1: own a bunch of them. So Leviathan, the history of
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  Speaker 1: whaling in America for fortune and empire, the epic history
• 1:31
  Speaker 1: of the fur trade in America. Black Flags, Blue Waters,
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  Speaker 1: which is about pirates and privateers too, right?
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  Speaker 2: Mainly about pirates, but I do talk about privateers, yeah.
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  Speaker 1: Snakehead, The Fish Out of Water. That's a good fish
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  Speaker 1: 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.
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  Speaker 1: But we're here to talk about his newest book, The
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  Speaker 1: Wreck of the Mentor. Came out this year, hit the
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  Speaker 1: New York Times bestseller list. Welcome to the show, man.
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  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me. Appreciate it.
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  Speaker 1: This is the first time we've ever had on a
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  Speaker 1: writer or anyone to tell a story that involved a
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  Speaker 1: dude being forcefully tattooed head to toe. You just don't
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  Speaker 1: think of this as a thing out there on the planet.
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  Speaker 1: 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
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  Speaker 1: for a minute. We're going to get to where it is,
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  Speaker 1: but that just struck me. I was trying to find
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  Speaker 1: images of him.
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  Speaker 2: Well, the only images come out of one of the
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  Speaker 2: books that was written by one of the guys in
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  Speaker 2: The Mentor that survived, a whale ship out in New Bedford.
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  Speaker 2: And the story of the tattooing is when they landed
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  Speaker 2: on the second island in the Palau archipelago, the Tobians,
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  Speaker 2: the people on the island of Tobi, they're tattooed from
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  Speaker 2: head to foot. And after the Americans had been there
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  Speaker 2: for over a year as captives, pretty much, the Tobians decided, well,
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  Speaker 2: you might as well look like us. So they started
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  Speaker 2: tattooing them on their arms and chest. Incredibly painful process.
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  Speaker 2: They take a sharpened fish bone or a bird bone. First,
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  Speaker 2: they outline the image in tarot ink on the person's body.
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  Speaker 2: Then they take this bone, they dip it into taro ink,
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  Speaker 2: which is sort of a little bit bluish, purplish, and
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  Speaker 2: then they use a two-pound piece of ironwood to pound
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  Speaker 2: the bone into the skin over the design, often going
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  Speaker 2: deep enough to hit the bone. And during this time,
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  Speaker 2: the American whalemen, of course, were screaming, but the Tobians
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  Speaker 2: who viewed this as something that's absolutely wonderful because you're
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  Speaker 2: becoming part of our community, and it was a there
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  Speaker 2: was a spiritual component to getting tattooed. They're singing all
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  Speaker 2: the time. And this guy, Horace Holden, a green hand,
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  Speaker 2: a guy who'd never been on a whale boat before
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  Speaker 2: from New Hampshire, when he later wrote about it, he said,
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  Speaker 2: I don't know if they were singing to drown out
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  Speaker 2: my screams or because they were so happy about this.
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  Speaker 2: But then once the tattoo was done, it would be
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  Speaker 2: a festering open sore for weeks. But what was really
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  Speaker 2: interesting to me is the Tobians wanted to tattoo... their faces.
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  Speaker 2: And at this point, the American whalemen said, absolutely not.
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  Speaker 2: We would rather die than have our faces tattooed. And
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  Speaker 2: then they pulled the God card because they had been
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  Speaker 2: there for over a year and they had learned the
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  Speaker 2: Tobian language. And they had learned that the Tobians believed
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  Speaker 2: in a God. They didn't believe in the Western God,
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  Speaker 2: the one that the whalemen believed in, but they believed
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  Speaker 2: in a God. So one of the whalemen said, if
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  Speaker 2: you tattoo our faces, our God is going to come
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  Speaker 2: down and wreak vengeance upon you. And the Tobians decided
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  Speaker 2: they didn't wanna risk it, so they didn't tattoo their face.
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  Speaker 2: And it's sort of a funny story about this. After
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  Speaker 2: the book came out, I had a excerpt from the
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  Speaker 2: book on my Facebook page. And a number of people
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  Speaker 2: from Palau had sort of found my Facebook page because
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  Speaker 2: of this book coming out. And I had this excerpt
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  Speaker 2: where I said the Americans, one of the Americans had
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  Speaker 2: a volcanic eruption upon being told that his face was
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  Speaker 2: going to be tattooed. And this guy from Palau said
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  Speaker 2: in the comments, you are a liar. There are no
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  Speaker 2: volcanoes on Toby. You write fiction. So I wrote back
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  Speaker 2: to him. I hopefully he read it. I said, I
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  Speaker 2: didn't say there was a volcano on Toby. It's actually
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  Speaker 2: the remains of a coral reef. But I just said
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  Speaker 2: they had a volcanic eruption. So it shows how the
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  Speaker 2: you know, words can be misconstrued.
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  Speaker 1: A literal reader out there. Yeah. Uh, let's work, uh,
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  Speaker 1: let's go back to the beginning on this. Okay. So
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  Speaker 1: tell us about like, what is the, when are we
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  Speaker 1: talking about? Like set the scene for us. Like, when
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  Speaker 1: are we talking about, we're talking about, we're going to
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  Speaker 1: talk about a ship called the mentor, right? What is
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  Speaker 1: 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.
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  Speaker 2: The mentor was a whale ship out in New Bedford.
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  Speaker 2: It was a relatively small whale ship. It was about
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  Speaker 2: 84 feet long, 24 feet wide, about 15 feet deep,
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  Speaker 2: 213 tons burdened. But I think to understand the mentor,
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  Speaker 2: you have to go back a little bit to the
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  Speaker 2: importance of whaling in American history. When the Pilgrims got here,
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  Speaker 2: they started whaling. They didn't go out and kill whales,
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  Speaker 2: but they took advantage of whales that washed ashore. and
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  Speaker 2: they rendered their blubber into whale oil.
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  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
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  Speaker 2: one would die, they would drift ashore on Cape Cod,
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  Speaker 2: and they'd take advantage of it. They'd render the oil
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  Speaker 2: out of the blubber.
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  Speaker 1: God, that had to have been a smelly business, man,
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  Speaker 1: because you're rendering probably some oil with a little rot
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  Speaker 1: to it.
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  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. They had their iron tripods in
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  Speaker 2: their sheds where they had the fires underneath the iron tripods.
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  Speaker 2: render the oil. They also took advantage of the baleen
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  Speaker 2: that was in the mouths of, like, right whales to
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  Speaker 2: use in hoop skirts or other forms. They didn't use
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  Speaker 2: it as much then as they did in the 1800s.
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  Speaker 2: But then you fast forward a little bit, and the
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  Speaker 2: number of whales that drifted ashore was not always predictable.
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  Speaker 2: Not as many as they wanted as the industry expanded.
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  Speaker 2: So they slowly got into small boats, whale boats, about 24,
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  Speaker 2: 25 feet long with six men on board. Many of
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  Speaker 2: them Indians at the time, which there were many in
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  Speaker 2: New England. They later got sort of extirpated due to
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  Speaker 2: disease and other factors. But they would go out and
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  Speaker 2: they do shore whaling, which is going within a couple
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  Speaker 2: of miles ashore, killing a whale, dragging it back to shore.
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  Speaker 2: 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
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  Speaker 2: wearing it out. They'd tie off the rope to the
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  Speaker 2: boat and the boat would be pulled, hopefully not pulled
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  Speaker 2: down under the water, but pulled for some distance. And
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  Speaker 2: once the whale tired out, they would row it back
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  Speaker 2: 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
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  Speaker 2: don't have exact numbers of shillings and pounds, but some
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  Speaker 2: people were making decent money killing whales. But more important
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  Speaker 2: than that, they were providing whale oil for the local
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  Speaker 2: economy and they used it as an illuminant. But then
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  Speaker 2: in about 1700... So.
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  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
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  Speaker 1: 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
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  Speaker 1: 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,
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  Speaker 2: the early 1700s, they started to get farther and farther
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  Speaker 2: away from shore. And then in 1712, this event took
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  Speaker 2: place on Nantucket, which was the leading whaling place in
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  Speaker 2: the colonies and At the time, this guy named Christopher
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  Speaker 2: Hussey and his men went out in a couple of
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  Speaker 2: small whale boats, meaning to hunt within a few miles
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  Speaker 2: of Nantucket, this sand spit out in the middle of
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  Speaker 2: the ocean. Well, a storm rolled in, they got blown
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  Speaker 2: way out offshore, and they fell in with a bunch
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  Speaker 2: of sperm whales. No American colonists had killed a sperm
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  Speaker 2: whale before. They killed one, they rode it back to Nantucket,
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  Speaker 2: and the sperm whale's the most valuable whale of all,
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  Speaker 2: because its whale oil, both that which comes from its
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  Speaker 2: blubber and also that which they scoop out of the
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  Speaker 2: spermaceti organ, which is in that big bulbous head of
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  Speaker 2: a sperm whale, is the brightest burning, cleanest burning whale
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  Speaker 2: oil of all. So in 1712, once they killed a
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  Speaker 2: sperm whale, all of a sudden the American colony got
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  Speaker 2: into bigger and bigger boats and went offshore out to
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  Speaker 2: the Grand Banks, other places, and they were in pursuit
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  Speaker 2: of sperm whales. And this industry got huge. On the
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  Speaker 2: eve of the American Revolution, there were 350 whale ships,
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  Speaker 2: some of them traveling as much as 1,000 miles over
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  Speaker 2: maybe up to six months or more hunting whales up
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  Speaker 2: and down the Atlantic Ocean. And then, of course, the
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  Speaker 2: American Revolution, the whaling fleet is totally decimated. Nantucket, which
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  Speaker 2: had most of those whaling ships, after the Revolution, there
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  Speaker 2: were only about 12 hulks left.
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  Speaker 1: I'm going to turn to our military expert over here.
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  Speaker 1: They were in Scripps. Is that the word? Inscripted?
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  Speaker 2: Oh, they were taken into the military. No, actually.
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  Speaker 1: What happened to the whale ships?
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  Speaker 2: Well, what happened is a lot of whalemen continued to
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  Speaker 2: try to go fishing for whales, but they were attacked
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  Speaker 2: 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
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  Speaker 2: whale ships that were in ports because the British Navy
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  Speaker 2: was trying to hobble the Americans. So they went into
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  Speaker 2: various ports, and Nantucket basically had a blockade around it
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  Speaker 2: by the British Navy. So during the war, one of the,
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  Speaker 2: not funny instances, but one of the pieces of history
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  Speaker 2: that's often forgotten is that the Nantucketers were so diswrought
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  Speaker 2: at their whaling fleet, not only being destroyed, but not
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  Speaker 2: being able to have a living, that they were going
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  Speaker 2: to whale in other parts of the world and maybe
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  Speaker 2: even secede from the colonies to get British protection. So
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  Speaker 2: some of the whaling fleet in Nantucket went to England
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  Speaker 2: and they whaled from there. Some tried to go to
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  Speaker 2: the Falkland Islands.
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  Speaker 1: Traders, man.
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  Speaker 2: It wasn't very successful. And then after the war, the
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  Speaker 2: American whale fleet was decimated, but we had the greatest
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  Speaker 2: whalemen and we rapidly came back. And by the end
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  Speaker 2: of the 1700s, we were going into the Pacific Ocean,
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  Speaker 2: which was the holy grail for whalemen, because that's where
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  Speaker 2: there were literally millions of sperm whales, the most valuable
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  Speaker 2: whale of all. So all of a sudden, the industry
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  Speaker 2: started taking off. Well, what happened? The War of 1812.
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  Speaker 2: The industry was knocked back on its heels again, and
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  Speaker 2: here we have Nantucket. Right before the Treaty of Ghent,
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  Speaker 2: Nantucket actually voted to secede from the United States in
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  Speaker 2: order to gain the protection of the British Navy so
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  Speaker 2: they can continue whaling. But then the Treaty of Ghent- Oh,
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  Speaker 2: them boys are some serious whalers, man. Yeah, yeah. And
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  Speaker 2: then the Treaty of Ghent came in and the war
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  Speaker 2: was over. And that's when the golden age of whaling
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  Speaker 2: really began. Nantucket was still the biggest port.
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  Speaker 1: What date are we at when you say the golden
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  Speaker 1: age of whaling?
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  Speaker 2: It really started about 1816, 1817, 1819, 1820s, it really
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  Speaker 2: took off. When do you feel on that golden age,
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  Speaker 2: 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.
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  Speaker 2: Because when they discovered oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, then there
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  Speaker 2: was suddenly an enormous source of cheap fuel to illuminate
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  Speaker 2: people's lives, which was kerosene. So basically the whale oil
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  Speaker 2: industry died in 1859, but American whaling went on until
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  Speaker 2: just after World War I, but it wasn't. It was
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  Speaker 2: never as big as it was before. But going back
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  Speaker 2: to the beginning of the Golden Age, this is a
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  Speaker 2: time that Herman Melville wrote about in Moby Dick, even
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  Speaker 2: though his book was basically in the 1840s, about a
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  Speaker 2: decade beyond the sailing of the Mentor. But by the 1820s,
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  Speaker 2: New Bedford was already becoming the number one whaling port
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  Speaker 2: in the country because, I don't know how familiar you
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  Speaker 2: are with Nantucket, but their main harbor, there's a big
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  Speaker 2: bar across the main harbor. So as Whaling ships got
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  Speaker 2: larger and larger. They couldn't make it over the bar.
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  Speaker 2: They started to create these things called camels, which are
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  Speaker 2: basically floating dry docks, which would grasp the whale ship.
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  Speaker 2: Then they'd pump out all the water. It would elevate
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  Speaker 2: the whale ship to get over the bar.
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  Speaker 1: Just to get it into harbor.
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  Speaker 2: Just to get it into the harbor. But that got
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  Speaker 2: really expensive. And then they started offloading whale oil and
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  Speaker 2: baleen on Martha's Vineyard and transporting it. in smaller vessels
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  Speaker 2: over to Nantucket. But all of this was really expensive.
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  Speaker 2: So New Bedford, which was on the mainland and was
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  Speaker 2: attached to the growing network of railroads, they basically took
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  Speaker 2: over and they were started by a bunch of Nantucket
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  Speaker 2: whalemen that left Nantucket and went to New Bedford like
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  Speaker 2: the Roach family. So by 1832, when the Mentor was
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  Speaker 2: getting ready to sail, and it was actually owned by
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  Speaker 2: a Roach, New Bedford was the largest port in the
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  Speaker 2: United States. There were hundreds of whale ships leaving from
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  Speaker 2: New Bedford and hundreds of voyages every year. So the mentor,
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  Speaker 2: which had already been out as a whale ship before
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  Speaker 2: and had some success, its owner and the men on board,
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  Speaker 2: the 22 men on board, captained by a guy named
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  Speaker 2: Edward Barnard, who he was only 31. He was 31,
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  Speaker 2: and they called him the old man.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah, I was going to bring that up. I was
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  Speaker 1: going to ask you about that. That he's 31, but
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  Speaker 1: presumably he must have started as an early, he must
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  Speaker 1: have started as young teens.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, we don't have a lot of good information about
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  Speaker 2: him when he was very young, but he grew up
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  Speaker 2: in Nantucket. And there's absolutely no doubt that he cut
• 15:40
  Speaker 2: his teeth in the whaling profession very early on.
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  Speaker 1: He had to have managed to be running that ship
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  Speaker 1: at 31. You know, we jumped ahead for the dude tattooed. Yeah.
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  Speaker 1: I want to make sure to get to, that guy
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  Speaker 1: died in the Great Lakes.
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  Speaker 2: Yes, he did.
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  Speaker 1: Yeah.
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  Speaker 2: Yeah, he died 1844. He was the captain of a schooner,
• 16:01
  Speaker 2: the Pennsylvania on Lake Erie. And what people often don't
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  Speaker 2: realize is that the Great Lakes are like oceans, and
• 16:07
  Speaker 2: they have horrific waves. And I know you did a
• 16:11
  Speaker 2: session with the gales of John Bacon, the gales of November.
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  Speaker 2: So something similar happened to the Pennsylvania. A storm rolled in,
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  Speaker 2: rolled the boat over. Everybody on board died. including uh
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  Speaker 2: captain edward barnard and he was uh 44.
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  Speaker 1: Years old never found that dude's body he.
• 16:32
  Speaker 2: Never found his body okay.
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  Speaker 1: So the mentor it's like so we're at it's the
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  Speaker 1: height of whaling yep and they're after right whales is
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  Speaker 1: it true that that the term right whale means that
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  Speaker 1: just that's the right whale Like, that's the one you want?
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  Speaker 2: Well, first, they were actually mainly after sperm whales, but
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  Speaker 2: there were still right whales out there.
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  Speaker 1: Oh, I'm sorry, I'm sorry.
• 16:54
  Speaker 2: No, no, but going back to your question, yeah, a
• 16:56
  Speaker 2: lot of people say it's because it's the right whale
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  Speaker 2: to hunt. There's some evidence of that, but really, if
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  Speaker 2: you look at the history, deep into the history, the
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  Speaker 2: reason it was called the right whale is maybe because
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  Speaker 2: it was the true whale or the only whale that
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  Speaker 2: they really hunted, not because it was the easiest to
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  Speaker 2: kill and tended to float right after being killed, so
• 17:19
  Speaker 2: it was easier to pull into port or pull back
• 17:23
  Speaker 2: to the mother ship. But there still is a debate
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  Speaker 2: going on as to why it was called the right whale.
• 17:29
  Speaker 2: But even if it wasn't the right whale because it
• 17:30
  Speaker 2: was the right whale to hunt, it really was the
• 17:32
  Speaker 2: right whale to hunt, especially early on. I mean, today
• 17:35
  Speaker 2: we only have 300 to 400 maybe right whales in
• 17:40
  Speaker 2: the North Atlantic, and I think actually the South Atlantic.
• 17:44
  Speaker 2: So they're in, I don't know if they're still on
• 17:46
  Speaker 2: the endangered species list, But back then, there were probably
• 17:50
  Speaker 2: tens of thousands. In fact, when the pilgrims arrived in Provincetown,
• 17:54
  Speaker 2: they meant to go to New York, but they got
• 17:58
  Speaker 2: blown off course. When they arrived in Provincetown, the Mayflower
• 18:02
  Speaker 2: was immediately surrounded by a huge number of whales. Somebody
• 18:08
  Speaker 2: writing a few years later in the 1820s and 1830s
• 18:13
  Speaker 2: said there were so many whales that you could walk
• 18:16
  Speaker 2: across their backs from Provincetown all the way to Plymouth.
• 18:21
  Speaker 2: So it was a real different time.
• 18:22
  Speaker 1: God, it's hard to picture now, man.
• 18:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, no.
• 18:25
  Speaker 1: So I messed that up. So these guys, when they
• 18:28
  Speaker 1: went out, the preferred whale was the sperm whale.
• 18:32
  Speaker 2: Yeah, by the 1830s.
• 18:33
  Speaker 1: But would they opportunistically get after other whales, or was
• 18:36
  Speaker 1: it so good that you just stuck with those?
• 18:38
  Speaker 2: Oh, no, you would kill a right whale. Right whales
• 18:40
  Speaker 2: were big. I mean, they were heavy. They produced a
• 18:43
  Speaker 2: lot of good whale oil that could be sold. It
• 18:45
  Speaker 2: wasn't as expensive as sperm whale oil. That was like
• 18:49
  Speaker 2: the holy grail. But they would certainly kill not only
• 18:53
  Speaker 2: a right whale, but also a humpback whale if they
• 18:56
  Speaker 2: saw one. They wouldn't mess with a blue whale or
• 18:59
  Speaker 2: a fin whale or a sai whale. The first two
• 19:02
  Speaker 2: were just too big, and so they didn't mess with them.
• 19:04
  Speaker 2: But yeah, if they came across a right whale, they
• 19:07
  Speaker 2: would definitely kill it. But Edward Barnard and the 21
• 19:11
  Speaker 2: men on board with him, they were really hoping to
• 19:14
  Speaker 2: have a greasy trip which means you kill a lot
• 19:17
  Speaker 2: of whales and put a lot of whale oil in
• 19:19
  Speaker 2: your hold, and they were hoping that most of those
• 19:22
  Speaker 2: whales would be sperm whales.
• 19:24
  Speaker 1: And they take off from New Bedford, so they take
• 19:28
  Speaker 1: off on the Atlantic coast. Right. And their aim is
• 19:33
  Speaker 1: to go all the way down around the southern tip
• 19:36
  Speaker 1: of Patagonia and then start heading up north to.
• 19:41
  Speaker 2: No, not quite. That's where a lot of whale ships
• 19:44
  Speaker 2: at the time, that's the route they would take. The mentor,
• 19:47
  Speaker 2: when it's left, their sailing directions instructed them, they were
• 19:50
  Speaker 2: going out for a relatively short voyage, maybe a year,
• 19:53
  Speaker 2: a year and a half. And they hoped to stay
• 19:57
  Speaker 2: in the Atlantic Ocean for the North and South Atlantic.
• 20:00
  Speaker 2: But they went out beyond the Grand Banks. They weren't
• 20:02
  Speaker 2: seeing many whales. They went across to the Azores, picked
• 20:06
  Speaker 2: up some supplies, some water. Then they went down the
• 20:10
  Speaker 2: western coast of Africa. They killed only two whales. So
• 20:15
  Speaker 2: Barnard had to make a decision. He was, as a captain,
• 20:18
  Speaker 2: given permission to change his voyage if he thought it
• 20:22
  Speaker 2: was best for making money. So he decided, well, I've
• 20:26
  Speaker 2: been in the Indian Ocean before. Let's go around the
• 20:29
  Speaker 2: Cape of Good Hope, southern tip of Africa, go into
• 20:32
  Speaker 2: the Indian Ocean around Mozambique and try to find more whales.
• 20:36
  Speaker 2: They found two more whales, which is good, but four
• 20:39
  Speaker 2: whales after being out almost a year is not particularly good.
• 20:43
  Speaker 2: So he really decided to do the ultimate gambit. He
• 20:47
  Speaker 2: knew that the Pacific Ocean is where most of the
• 20:49
  Speaker 2: sperm whales were. So he set a course to go
• 20:53
  Speaker 2: east all the way to the Pacific ocean. And, uh,
• 20:57
  Speaker 2: that's when the trouble began. When he left the spice islands,
• 21:00
  Speaker 2: he was going north, sort of north, uh, east to Guam,
• 21:06
  Speaker 2: but a storm, a storm rolled in.
• 21:08
  Speaker 1: And let me, let me ask a question about this.
• 21:13
  Speaker 1: You go out and you say to your guys, how
• 21:14
  Speaker 1: many guys are on this boat? 22 total. Okay. You
• 21:18
  Speaker 1: say to your guys, let's just go a little dab
• 21:21
  Speaker 1: north and check Nova Scotia.
• 21:23
  Speaker 2: Yes.
• 21:24
  Speaker 1: So in their mind, there's a possibility. Is it a
• 21:30
  Speaker 1: possibility that you'll just go right up there, kill all
• 21:34
  Speaker 1: the whales you need, and come home? Or is it
• 21:37
  Speaker 1: a possibility that you're going to wind up off the
• 21:39
  Speaker 1: coast of Africa, in the Indian Ocean, in the Pacific Ocean?
• 21:44
  Speaker 1: You have no concept of when you're coming home.
• 21:46
  Speaker 2: True. I mean, during the Golden Age, the average whaling voyage,
• 21:50
  Speaker 2: and this is mainly towards the 1840s and 50s, lasted
• 21:54
  Speaker 2: for four years. So you knew you were going to
• 21:57
  Speaker 2: be away a long time. The mentor originally wasn't going
• 22:00
  Speaker 2: to be away that long, but yes, they were opportunistic.
• 22:03
  Speaker 2: Could they have gone to Nova Scotia in the North Atlantic,
• 22:06
  Speaker 2: killed 20 whales, gone back home triumphant? Yes. Is it
• 22:11
  Speaker 2: likely that that would have been the case? No. Especially
• 22:14
  Speaker 2: as more and more whale ships were out there, it
• 22:16
  Speaker 2: was getting harder to find the whales, and some of
• 22:19
  Speaker 2: the whales were getting more skittish. So they knew that
• 22:22
  Speaker 2: they were out for a while, at least a year perhaps,
• 22:26
  Speaker 2: but they certainly, none of the men who got on
• 22:28
  Speaker 2: the Mentor in July of 1831 thought that they were
• 22:33
  Speaker 2: going to end up in the Pacific Ocean. And certainly
• 22:36
  Speaker 2: none of them.
• 22:37
  Speaker 1: So you think in their mind that was out of
• 22:38
  Speaker 1: the question. Yeah. That would have been hard to imagine.
• 22:40
  Speaker 2: No, they knew that the main, uh, goal, the voyage
• 22:43
  Speaker 2: was go throughout the Atlantic and, uh, and fish there and,
• 22:46
  Speaker 2: you know, whale there. So I think it was a
• 22:49
  Speaker 2: little bit of a surprise, but the captain gets to
• 22:51
  Speaker 2: make the decision. And I don't think any of them
• 22:54
  Speaker 2: grumbled about it. They wanted to have a greasy voyage.
• 22:57
  Speaker 2: They wanted to make a lot of money. And a
• 22:59
  Speaker 2: lot of them didn't have better opportunities back home.
• 23:02
  Speaker 1: What's a lot of money for these guys. Um, Is
• 23:04
  Speaker 1: it life-changing money or is it that you went and
• 23:07
  Speaker 1: you pulled a good salary and you were happy?
• 23:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah. If you were a captain of a ship and
• 23:11
  Speaker 2: the first mate or second mate or a doctor, sometimes
• 23:14
  Speaker 2: they had doctors on board, and you were on a
• 23:16
  Speaker 2: voyage that was really greasy, that brought back thousands and
• 23:19
  Speaker 2: thousands of barrels of sperm whale oil, it probably wouldn't
• 23:24
  Speaker 2: set you up for life, but you'd probably make the
• 23:26
  Speaker 2: equivalent of what an average captain of a merchant ship
• 23:30
  Speaker 2: might make in 10 years. And you'd get a short lay.
• 23:34
  Speaker 2: If you're the captain, if you're higher up on a boat,
• 23:36
  Speaker 2: you might get 1 10th, 1 20th of the profits
• 23:40
  Speaker 2: of the whaling voyage. But if you were a man
• 23:43
  Speaker 2: before the mast, the guys that did the, as Jimmy
• 23:47
  Speaker 2: Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life, or the guys that
• 23:51
  Speaker 2: did the living and dying in the world, and you
• 23:54
  Speaker 2: were before the mast, and you were the ones that
• 23:56
  Speaker 2: got into the whale boats, chase the whales, harpoon them,
• 24:00
  Speaker 2: brought them back to the mother ship, your lay might
• 24:03
  Speaker 2: be one 125th, one 150th.
• 24:05
  Speaker 1: So they have these just run, like the crew guys.
• 24:10
  Speaker 2: Yes, the crew.
• 24:11
  Speaker 1: The crew guys, they're not motivated by, I can go
• 24:16
  Speaker 1: away for four years and I might come back and
• 24:18
  Speaker 1: never work again. That's like not, that's not.
• 24:21
  Speaker 2: No, they are motivated for something short of that. I
• 24:24
  Speaker 2: can go away for four years, I can come back,
• 24:26
  Speaker 2: And I could have enough money to maybe buy a
• 24:28
  Speaker 2: house and live for certainly a number of years without
• 24:31
  Speaker 2: having another job. So if you are on a really
• 24:34
  Speaker 2: greasy voyage, even if you are earning such a small
• 24:37
  Speaker 2: percentage of the overall profits, you still, it was a
• 24:41
  Speaker 2: good career move. But the problem was a lot of
• 24:44
  Speaker 2: whaling voyages came back and not only did the men
• 24:47
  Speaker 2: on board earn very little, sometimes they ended up being
• 24:51
  Speaker 2: in debt, sort of like going to grad school. Basically,
• 24:55
  Speaker 2: there's a lot of upfront costs when you went onto
• 24:57
  Speaker 2: a whaling voyage. You had to buy your outfit from
• 24:59
  Speaker 2: people they used to call outfitters, but they also called
• 25:02
  Speaker 2: them land sharks because they would fleece the men for
• 25:05
  Speaker 2: all the clothes and other items that they needed on
• 25:07
  Speaker 2: their voyage. And if they didn't earn much money while
• 25:10
  Speaker 2: they were out, they still owed that money. So it
• 25:13
  Speaker 2: was kind of a dicey proposition. And what was happening
• 25:16
  Speaker 2: during the golden age in the 1830s, 40s, and 50s
• 25:20
  Speaker 2: is as the fleet expanded, because keep in mind, by 1846,
• 25:23
  Speaker 2: there were 900 whale ships worldwide. 750 of them were American.
• 25:25
  Speaker 2: To man 750 whale ships going out in these voyages,
• 25:27
  Speaker 2: you need a very large labor force. So they started
• 25:40
  Speaker 2: to take the dregs of society on board.
• 25:42
  Speaker 1: There were felons.
• 25:44
  Speaker 2: There were people that were running away from debts that
• 25:46
  Speaker 2: they had on land. There were also people they picked
• 25:49
  Speaker 2: up in the Azores, in Hawaii, any place, any ports
• 25:53
  Speaker 2: they went to. And there were an awful lot of
• 25:55
  Speaker 2: green hands. Whereas if you were a whaleman on Nantucket
• 25:58
  Speaker 2: in the 1750s, most of the other men on board
• 26:01
  Speaker 2: your ship had whaled before. They were seasoned mariners. If
• 26:06
  Speaker 2: you are on a whaling ship in the 1830s or 40s,
• 26:10
  Speaker 2: it's likely that a good number of the men on
• 26:12
  Speaker 2: board had never whaled before, much less been on a
• 26:16
  Speaker 2: ship before. And the mentor of the 22 men, I
• 26:19
  Speaker 2: think it's four or five of them, had never been
• 26:23
  Speaker 2: on a ship before. They were farmers that just were
• 26:26
  Speaker 2: having a tough time on land.
• 26:28
  Speaker 1: They probably couldn't even swim. Yeah.
• 26:29
  Speaker 2: Oh, well, that was, even if you were a good whaleman,
• 26:33
  Speaker 2: you probably couldn't swim in the 1830s because people don't realize,
• 26:36
  Speaker 2: you know, now we swim a lot. We go to
• 26:38
  Speaker 2: the ocean. You know, it wasn't until the late 1800s
• 26:40
  Speaker 2: that swimming really started to be a thing in the West,
• 26:44
  Speaker 2: certainly in the United States. In the 1830s, most of
• 26:47
  Speaker 2: the men on board these whale ships, if they were
• 26:50
  Speaker 2: in a whale boat that got destroyed by a sperm whale,
• 26:53
  Speaker 2: which is a very possible thing, they used to call
• 26:57
  Speaker 2: the flukes of the sperm whale, the hand of God.
• 27:01
  Speaker 2: Because if it came down on your whale boat, you
• 27:04
  Speaker 2: were going to meet your maker. And then of course
• 27:07
  Speaker 2: there was the chomping, you know, the teeth of the
• 27:10
  Speaker 2: sperm whale, which could destroy a whale boat. And there
• 27:13
  Speaker 2: is a picture in my book, Leviathan, of a whale
• 27:16
  Speaker 2: boat that's being destroyed by a sperm whale. And what's
• 27:20
  Speaker 2: interesting about that, of the six or seven men that
• 27:22
  Speaker 2: are dumped into the water, I can guarantee most, if
• 27:25
  Speaker 2: not all of them, did not know how to swim.
• 27:28
  Speaker 2: So if they couldn't grab onto something that was floating,
• 27:32
  Speaker 2: like a piece of the remains of the boat, they
• 27:34
  Speaker 2: would drown. And just think about that. These guys are
• 27:38
  Speaker 2: at the middle of the ocean, surrounded by water. No GPS,
• 27:42
  Speaker 2: no cell phone, no nothing. And if they fall in
• 27:45
  Speaker 2: the water, which happens... It's.
• 27:47
  Speaker 1: Their first swim.
• 27:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah, it's their first swim.
• 27:49
  Speaker 1: Can you imagine that? One thing I see when I'm
• 27:54
  Speaker 1: reading about these trips... Even if things go smooth, it
• 27:59
  Speaker 1: seems like there's always fatalities. Yes.
• 28:02
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there are.
• 28:03
  Speaker 1: So when you go out, 22 guys go out, it's
• 28:05
  Speaker 1: almost like it seems, and maybe you'll know better than me,
• 28:07
  Speaker 1: this is more of a question than a statement, but
• 28:09
  Speaker 1: it seems to me if they go out on a
• 28:10
  Speaker 1: whaling trip and 22 guys go on a whaling trip
• 28:13
  Speaker 1: and you look around, it's like someone's not coming back.
• 28:16
  Speaker 1: Just statistically, someone's not coming back.
• 28:18
  Speaker 2: Probably, yeah. I mean, there were a number of men
• 28:20
  Speaker 2: who would fall from a mast or a spar during
• 28:25
  Speaker 2: bad weather trying to unfurl a reef the sails. There
• 28:29
  Speaker 2: were men who died when their whale boats got clobbered
• 28:32
  Speaker 2: by whales. There were occasions, didn't happen very often, when
• 28:37
  Speaker 2: a sperm whale was harpooned. And the goal was to
• 28:40
  Speaker 2: harpoon twice if you could. And the thing that you
• 28:43
  Speaker 2: know very well is that whale blubber is not like
• 28:48
  Speaker 2: our blubber. We're soft and budgie. Whale blubber is thick
• 28:52
  Speaker 2: and fibrous. So if you're coming up to a big
• 28:55
  Speaker 2: old bull sperm whale, It's got blubber that may be
• 28:59
  Speaker 2: 14 to 16 inches thick, and it's got a thick
• 29:02
  Speaker 2: layer of leathery skin over that. So you can't pitch
• 29:06
  Speaker 2: a harpoon, which is fairly heavy, 30 or 40 feet
• 29:09
  Speaker 2: and expect it to do anything. It'd be like lobbing
• 29:11
  Speaker 2: a cannonball at old Ironsides. It would just pop off.
• 29:15
  Speaker 2: So what they had to do is get wood to
• 29:17
  Speaker 2: black skin, which means the whale had to be right
• 29:20
  Speaker 2: next to your whale boat, which is very dangerous, potentially.
• 29:23
  Speaker 2: They'd launch one harpoon, and then if they could, they'd
• 29:26
  Speaker 2: launch a second. And then they were off on what
• 29:28
  Speaker 2: was called the Nantucket sleigh ride. They were probably among
• 29:31
  Speaker 2: the fastest humans on earth. They were being pulled along
• 29:34
  Speaker 2: maybe 20 to 25 miles per hour. And there was
• 29:38
  Speaker 2: always a man at the front of the whale boat
• 29:41
  Speaker 2: with a hatchet raised aloft, ready to cut that line.
• 29:46
  Speaker 2: If the whale sounded, if the whale went down, which
• 29:49
  Speaker 2: they did because the whale boat, we just pulled under
• 29:51
  Speaker 2: the waves immediately. But if they were pulled along far enough,
• 29:55
  Speaker 2: the whale would tire out. Then they'd pull closer to
• 29:57
  Speaker 2: the whale. And this is a really dangerous time because
• 30:00
  Speaker 2: the whale would start spinning around and it was very
• 30:03
  Speaker 2: close to the boat. Then they'd take a huge spade
• 30:06
  Speaker 2: or a lance about 15 feet long and they'd plunge it.
• 30:10
  Speaker 2: into the side of the whale, looking for the life
• 30:13
  Speaker 2: of the whale, which would be the lungs or a
• 30:15
  Speaker 2: knot of blood vessels near the lungs. And then they
• 30:18
  Speaker 2: knew they had success, when they'd shout out, chimneys afire,
• 30:23
  Speaker 2: or tapping the claret, which meant that the blood was
• 30:27
  Speaker 2: issuing from the blowhole and probably getting all over them.
• 30:31
  Speaker 2: And then the whale would go into its final flurry. Yeah,
• 30:34
  Speaker 2: then you knew you got him. And then you would
• 30:35
  Speaker 2: tow him back to the mother ship and the processing
• 30:40
  Speaker 2: would begin. And this is a dangerous time because you'd
• 30:43
  Speaker 2: pull the whale up to the side of the the
• 30:47
  Speaker 2: whaling vessel, you'd put down a cutting stage, which was
• 30:50
  Speaker 2: sort of lowered over the side, and the men would
• 30:53
  Speaker 2: stand on wood planks with long spades, and as the
• 30:57
  Speaker 2: whale was rolled in the water, they would strip the
• 31:01
  Speaker 2: blubber from the whale, sort of like stripping an orange
• 31:04
  Speaker 2: in one continuous slice or an apple, and they'd raise
• 31:08
  Speaker 2: the blubber up above the main deck, and then they'd
• 31:12
  Speaker 2: take a boarding knife, they'd cut transversely, this enormous, probably one-ton,
• 31:18
  Speaker 2: maybe two-ton slab of blubber would come flying onto the
• 31:22
  Speaker 2: main deck, and then they'd lower it onto the main deck,
• 31:24
  Speaker 2: and then they'd have to cut it up into these
• 31:27
  Speaker 2: Bible pieces, and they'd flay it some more, and then
• 31:30
  Speaker 2: they'd pitch it into the tripods, which had fires beneath.
• 31:35
  Speaker 1: What were they fueling those with?
• 31:36
  Speaker 2: Well, they brought wood on board when they went to
• 31:40
  Speaker 2: different ports. They had wood that they would use to.
• 31:45
  Speaker 1: So you're hauling enough firewood around to render all that oil.
• 31:50
  Speaker 2: No, they'd get other fire. They could also use, I
• 31:53
  Speaker 2: think some use coal, but what they would also use
• 31:55
  Speaker 2: is the whale itself. Because what you did is when
• 31:59
  Speaker 2: you pitched the blubber into the iron tripods where the
• 32:05
  Speaker 2: oil was rendered out, it was siphoned out with a hose,
• 32:08
  Speaker 2: it was put into caskets. Well, there was a lot
• 32:10
  Speaker 2: of skin, integument, meat that was in those tripods, and
• 32:15
  Speaker 2: it would boil up, and they used to call it cracklins.
• 32:19
  Speaker 2: It was sort of like a modern pork rind. It
• 32:22
  Speaker 2: was very similar to that. And the men would eat that.
• 32:24
  Speaker 2: They'd also cook donuts in the whale oil occasionally. But
• 32:28
  Speaker 2: they'd scoop out the cracklins, and they'd feed it to
• 32:32
  Speaker 2: the fire below to help keep it going. But a
• 32:36
  Speaker 2: lot of whale ships had to make a lot of
• 32:37
  Speaker 2: ports of call, had to stop at a lot of
• 32:39
  Speaker 2: islands to get supplies, water, food, wood. other things. So
• 32:45
  Speaker 2: it was amazing. But what I wanted to talk about,
• 32:47
  Speaker 2: you're talking about people not being able to swim. When
• 32:49
  Speaker 2: they were on the cutting spades, cutting into the whale,
• 32:52
  Speaker 2: there would be a huge number of sharks, seawolves, taking
• 32:59
  Speaker 2: their bit of the blubber. Well, you know, sharks are
• 33:01
  Speaker 2: not interested in human beings. If sharks were really interested
• 33:04
  Speaker 2: in us, we couldn't go swimming off the East Coast
• 33:07
  Speaker 2: or the West Coast because there are plenty of them
• 33:10
  Speaker 2: And we're easy pickings. But every once in a while,
• 33:13
  Speaker 2: a whaleman who was cutting on these planks, which got
• 33:17
  Speaker 2: greasy because they're cutting blubber, would slip and fall in. Occasionally,
• 33:22
  Speaker 2: they'd be bitten by a shark, but it was just
• 33:24
  Speaker 2: by mistake. But more often than not, the unfortunate man
• 33:28
  Speaker 2: who fell into the water, he might be crushed to
• 33:31
  Speaker 2: death because the whale is right next to the hull
• 33:33
  Speaker 2: of the boat. And we're in the ocean, so it's
• 33:35
  Speaker 2: going back and forth. So whaling was a really dangerous profession,
• 33:39
  Speaker 2: sort of like lumberjacking today or being a fisherman today.
• 33:45
  Speaker 1: Just as there were so many whales back then, there
• 33:47
  Speaker 1: had to have been so many great whites back then.
• 33:49
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah.
• 33:50
  Speaker 1: You can imagine.
• 33:51
  Speaker 2: Many more sharks.
• 33:52
  Speaker 1: So I got a buddy. I've done it with him,
• 33:56
  Speaker 1: but these guys, they'll jump in behind. When shrimp boats
• 33:59
  Speaker 1: are sorting all the bycatch, they'll jump in and spearfish
• 34:02
  Speaker 1: behind shrimp boats. Really?
• 34:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah. Yeah.
• 34:05
  Speaker 1: I've done it with them.
• 34:05
  Speaker 2: It's unbelievable.
• 34:07
  Speaker 1: I mean, the layers of sharks is unbelievable.
• 34:09
  Speaker 2: Oh yeah.
• 34:09
  Speaker 1: It was one of my buddies. He jumps in one
• 34:11
  Speaker 1: time behind a shrimp boat. You don't even ask. You
• 34:13
  Speaker 1: just jump in, you know? Um, and the guy yelled
• 34:17
  Speaker 1: to him, if you'd seen what I'd seen behind this boat,
• 34:23
  Speaker 1: you would not do that.
• 34:26
  Speaker 2: Well, it's very similar. Even during whaling days, sharks would
• 34:30
  Speaker 2: trail whale ships on occasion. And the men would fish.
• 34:35
  Speaker 2: They'd pull up sharks, and they'd eat them.
• 34:37
  Speaker 1: Oh, really? Yeah.
• 34:39
  Speaker 2: That wasn't their favorite meal, but they would eat sharks
• 34:42
  Speaker 2: once in a while, or they'd just fish for fun.
• 34:44
  Speaker 2: But more often than not, they'd want to get a
• 34:45
  Speaker 2: tuna or a skipjack or something else on board. So
• 34:48
  Speaker 2: there was a lot of downtime on a whale ship.
• 34:51
  Speaker 2: When you have four years at sea, most of that,
• 34:55
  Speaker 2: you're not actively whaling. You're cleaning the ship. You're doing scrimshaw.
• 35:00
  Speaker 2: You know, it's pretty boring. You're drinking if the captain
• 35:04
  Speaker 2: allows you to. If you have shore leave, you're doing that.
• 35:08
  Speaker 2: So it's really, it was a horrible way to earn
• 35:13
  Speaker 2: a living but an understandable way to earn a living.
• 35:17
  Speaker 1: Yeah, see, I'm sitting here thinking that I wouldn't mind
• 35:19
  Speaker 1: jumping in on one of these trips, man.
• 35:21
  Speaker 2: Yeah, okay. Maybe horrible's wrong.
• 35:23
  Speaker 1: See, don't go down.
• 35:24
  Speaker 2: Contextual, because it's, you know, back then there were a
• 35:28
  Speaker 2: lot of industries. We know the fur trade was very dangerous.
• 35:32
  Speaker 2: Whaling was dangerous. Just fishing back then for cod and
• 35:36
  Speaker 2: striped bass and other fish off the East Coast on
• 35:38
  Speaker 2: the Grand Banks. I come from Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1846.
• 35:44
  Speaker 2: Marblehead was one of the leading fishing ports in the
• 35:47
  Speaker 2: United States. And they went out during the summer of
• 35:51
  Speaker 2: 1846 onto the Grand Banks. and a hurricane essentially rolled in,
• 35:58
  Speaker 2: and more than 200 men and boats were killed. There
• 36:02
  Speaker 2: were hundreds of widows in Marblehead, many fatherless children because
• 36:09
  Speaker 2: of that, and that is the point at which Marblehead
• 36:11
  Speaker 2: ceased to be a major fishing port.
• 36:15
  Speaker 1: And if you go to Marblehead- They just lost like
• 36:16
  Speaker 1: a generation of fishermen.
• 36:17
  Speaker 2: They lost a generation of fishermen, and it wasn't a
• 36:19
  Speaker 2: very large town at the time, so they lost a
• 36:22
  Speaker 2: significant portion of their town. Marblehead, I'm going to give
• 36:25
  Speaker 2: a shout out to Marblehead because Marblehead was really big
• 36:27
  Speaker 2: in the American Revolution with General John Glover and rowing
• 36:31
  Speaker 2: Washington across the Delaware and helping the Americans escape from
• 36:36
  Speaker 2: the Battle of New York before they were going to
• 36:38
  Speaker 2: be clobbered by the British. So Marblehead has a very
• 36:42
  Speaker 2: proud maritime tradition. And if you ever visit Marblehead, there's
• 36:47
  Speaker 2: a wonderful old burial ground from the late 1620s And
• 36:52
  Speaker 2: in it is a huge obelisk that is a memorial
• 36:56
  Speaker 2: to all the men who died on the Grand Banks
• 37:00
  Speaker 2: in 1846. No kidding. And I live in an old house, 1753.
• 37:06
  Speaker 2: And one of the guys who lived in that house
• 37:09
  Speaker 2: during much of the 1800s was a shipping captain, a
• 37:12
  Speaker 2: guy named Devereaux, John Devereaux. So I feel a little
• 37:15
  Speaker 2: bit of a connection to that.
• 37:19
  Speaker 1: Let's get to the mentor's troubles. Okay. Yeah. So we
• 37:22
  Speaker 1: were in, at this time, position us in the Pacific. Right.
• 37:26
  Speaker 2: They were leaving the Spice Islands, which is a little
• 37:29
  Speaker 2: south of the Philippines. They were heading towards Guam. And
• 37:34
  Speaker 2: all of a sudden, a storm rolls in. They no
• 37:37
  Speaker 2: longer can rely on celestial navigation. So they're using their compass.
• 37:42
  Speaker 2: They're using a form of dead reckoning. And Charles and
• 37:47
  Speaker 2: Edward Barnard, Charles Barnard, I remember he was in my
• 37:49
  Speaker 2: last book, Left 4 Dead. It was very confusing, these
• 37:51
  Speaker 2: Barnard guys. But Edward Barnard was a seasoned captain. He thought,
• 37:57
  Speaker 2: and he wrote later, that he was about 150 miles
• 38:01
  Speaker 2: away from any land. So he thought he had plenty
• 38:04
  Speaker 2: of sea room. Because most good mariners are not too
• 38:07
  Speaker 2: concerned when there's bad weather, as long as they're not
• 38:10
  Speaker 2: going to knock into a hidden reef or land because
• 38:14
  Speaker 2: they can manage, you can do a lot of things
• 38:15
  Speaker 2: to the sails, take all the sails down. And if
• 38:19
  Speaker 2: you're a good sailor, you can handle it unless it's
• 38:22
  Speaker 2: a full blown hurricane. We don't know exactly the intensity
• 38:25
  Speaker 2: of this storm, but it was bad. And then on
• 38:28
  Speaker 2: the evening, right after midnight on May 21st of 1832,
• 38:31
  Speaker 2: remember they left in July of 1831. on the evening
• 38:39
  Speaker 2: of May 21st of 1832, they ram into a reef,
• 38:43
  Speaker 2: giant hole in the hull. All the men on board
• 38:47
  Speaker 2: knew that the mentor was done for. The only real
• 38:50
  Speaker 2: question is what should I do? And once a ship crashes,
• 38:54
  Speaker 2: the captain loses ultimate authority. So people were free to-
• 38:58
  Speaker 2: Formally lose it? Yeah. Well, it's just the custom of the, well,
• 39:01
  Speaker 2: custom to see is cannibalism. But yeah, back then it
• 39:05
  Speaker 2: was sort of the rules of the road. Once you crashed,
• 39:08
  Speaker 2: the captain was no longer the leader. Now they liked
• 39:11
  Speaker 2: Captain Barnard, but the first mate decided his best bet
• 39:16
  Speaker 2: was to take one of the whale boats, lower it
• 39:18
  Speaker 2: into the water in the midst of the storm and
• 39:23
  Speaker 2: light out for land. Because just before the mentor crashed,
• 39:27
  Speaker 2: one of the men said he thought he saw land
• 39:30
  Speaker 2: vaguely in the distance. So the first mate, nine other
• 39:36
  Speaker 2: men decide to get in the whale boat with him.
• 39:40
  Speaker 2: He's lowered into the water. They go off into the gloom.
• 39:43
  Speaker 2: They're never seen again. They all died.
• 39:45
  Speaker 1: No kidding. Yeah. Just gone.
• 39:46
  Speaker 2: Just gone. Well, they found the whale boat later sort
• 39:50
  Speaker 2: of wrapped up on a reef. So I think the
• 39:52
  Speaker 2: men got pitched out of the boat and they all drowned.
• 39:55
  Speaker 2: So then Captain Barnard.
• 39:57
  Speaker 1: So there's 22 guys.
• 39:58
  Speaker 2: 22 guys. Now 10 are gone.
• 40:00
  Speaker 1: 10 die in that boat. Within an hour.
• 40:01
  Speaker 2: Within an hour of crashing probably. Oh. Then Captain.
• 40:04
  Speaker 1: They die in the storm. No, no, no.
• 40:06
  Speaker 2: They die after lowering the whale. But yeah, the storm
• 40:08
  Speaker 2: is still going. They die after lowering the whale boat.
• 40:10
  Speaker 1: So.
• 40:12
  Speaker 2: Uh, Captain Barnard decides his best bet is to leave
• 40:16
  Speaker 2: on a whale boat too. Three other men decide to
• 40:18
  Speaker 2: go with them, but Barnard wants a life insurance policy.
• 40:23
  Speaker 2: So he ties a rope around his waist, the other
• 40:26
  Speaker 2: end of which is the rope you used to attach
• 40:29
  Speaker 2: our boon to. He ties a rope around his waist.
• 40:32
  Speaker 2: The other end of it is on the mentor. So
• 40:35
  Speaker 2: he says, well, if this whale boat overturns when we
• 40:38
  Speaker 2: get in the water, they can reel me back in
• 40:40
  Speaker 2: like a fish. Well, he gets into the whale boat.
• 40:43
  Speaker 2: Three other men get into the whale boat. As they're
• 40:46
  Speaker 2: lowering it from the davits, which are the curved wooden
• 40:49
  Speaker 2: arms on the side of a whale boat, a wave
• 40:53
  Speaker 2: smashes the whale boat against the mentor, destroys it, pitches
• 40:58
  Speaker 2: all four men into the gloom, into the ocean. One
• 41:01
  Speaker 2: of them dies immediately. He drowns. Two of them, amazingly enough,
• 41:06
  Speaker 2: were swimmers at this time. They were able to swim
• 41:10
  Speaker 2: back to the Mentor. They pulled themselves up onto the
• 41:13
  Speaker 2: main deck using the rigging, much of which was over
• 41:16
  Speaker 2: the side of the ship, because the ship was canted
• 41:19
  Speaker 2: over a bit. It was almost on its beam ends.
• 41:22
  Speaker 2: And then Captain Barnard, well, he's pretty smart for putting
• 41:25
  Speaker 2: a rope around his waist, because he was pulled about
• 41:28
  Speaker 2: 100 yards away from the boat before the men on
• 41:31
  Speaker 2: board started Pulling him back in. And the bottom of
• 41:35
  Speaker 2: his feet, because he was barefoot, were cut up. But
• 41:37
  Speaker 2: he made it back to the mentor.
• 41:39
  Speaker 1: From the reef.
• 41:39
  Speaker 2: From the reef, yeah. So the men on the mentor,
• 41:42
  Speaker 2: they had to wait till the morning light. They would
• 41:46
  Speaker 2: grab onto any part of the ship they could. They'd
• 41:48
  Speaker 2: tie themselves to the rigging because they didn't want to
• 41:51
  Speaker 2: get swept overboard by an errant wave. And then dawn comes,
• 41:57
  Speaker 2: and they have to decide what to do. Huh.
• 42:00
  Speaker 1: At this point... All money is gone. I mean, this
• 42:04
  Speaker 1: is just like it's done. Done.
• 42:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they're just thinking of survival. And keep in mind,
• 42:09
  Speaker 2: they don't know exactly where they are. They only find
• 42:11
  Speaker 2: out they're in the Palawan Archipelago a couple of days later.
• 42:16
  Speaker 2: So they don't know quite where they are. They know
• 42:18
  Speaker 2: their voyage is over. They know there's no money involved whatsoever.
• 42:22
  Speaker 2: In fact, most of them are thinking we may never
• 42:24
  Speaker 2: make it back home again because they're very familiar with
• 42:27
  Speaker 2: the tales of whale ships and merchant ships that have
• 42:30
  Speaker 2: crashed In the Pacific, some have been killed by locals,
• 42:34
  Speaker 2: natives that were on those islands. Others were just, they
• 42:37
  Speaker 2: starved because nobody was there to come pick them up.
• 42:40
  Speaker 2: So the next morning, they do see land off in
• 42:43
  Speaker 2: the distance. It's a very small island. They get into
• 42:46
  Speaker 2: the last whale boat on the Mentor, which is the
• 42:50
  Speaker 2: one that they had in reserve because it had gaps
• 42:53
  Speaker 2: in some of the planks. It wasn't as seaworthy as
• 42:56
  Speaker 2: the other ones, but they get into it. And they
• 42:58
  Speaker 2: start rowing and sailing for this K, this small island.
• 43:02
  Speaker 2: It's only about 250 feet long and 50 feet wide.
• 43:07
  Speaker 2: They eat some food. They catch some mollusks, some seashells,
• 43:11
  Speaker 2: some crabs. They cook them on fire. They feel a
• 43:15
  Speaker 2: little bit better. And then the next morning, well, actually
• 43:22
  Speaker 2: that day, roughly that day, Captain Barnard uses his sextant.
• 43:27
  Speaker 2: to find out sort of where they are. And he discovers, oh,
• 43:30
  Speaker 2: we're in Palau. Well, the next day.
• 43:32
  Speaker 1: And he knows what that means.
• 43:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he knows what that means. Palau was an archipelago
• 43:37
  Speaker 2: that not many people went by, but it was on
• 43:39
  Speaker 2: all the maps of the day. Because it wasn't really
• 43:42
  Speaker 2: part of the normal merchant trade route. But a whaleman
• 43:46
  Speaker 2: definitely knew what Palau was. So he's in Palau, and
• 43:52
  Speaker 2: they're there the next day. And then what happens? A
• 43:55
  Speaker 2: canoe comes up. with about 20 warriors on board. Well,
• 43:59
  Speaker 2: they row the canoe up to the beach, pull it
• 44:02
  Speaker 2: onto the sand, step boldly onto the ground, and these
• 44:07
  Speaker 2: guys are a sight to see. They have long, greased
• 44:12
  Speaker 2: black hair. They're tattooed from head to foot. They're completely naked.
• 44:18
  Speaker 2: They look particularly angry. And worse than that, they're carrying spears, knives,
• 44:25
  Speaker 2: and clubs, and the men of the mentor have no
• 44:28
  Speaker 2: idea whether they've come for good or ill, and they
• 44:33
  Speaker 2: soon found out because the natives, the Palauans, sort of
• 44:38
  Speaker 2: beckoned the whalemen to follow them to get in their
• 44:41
  Speaker 2: whale boat. Now, Barnard and the men thought they were
• 44:43
  Speaker 2: being led to a local village, so they get into
• 44:46
  Speaker 2: their whale boat, they follow the canoe, And no sooner
• 44:50
  Speaker 2: did they get on the water than some of the
• 44:52
  Speaker 2: natives jump into the whale boat and start stealing items
• 44:56
  Speaker 2: that were on the whale boat, like clothes and canisters,
• 45:00
  Speaker 2: and they try to steal a gun. And the Americans
• 45:03
  Speaker 2: don't very much like this, so they fight back. The
• 45:06
  Speaker 2: Palauans don't like that, so they start chucking spears and
• 45:09
  Speaker 2: coconuts at the whalemen. Now, Barnard's in a really difficult position.
• 45:13
  Speaker 2: What does he do? How does he get away from
• 45:15
  Speaker 2: a canoe that's much faster than a whale boat especially
• 45:18
  Speaker 2: a whale boat that's not in great shape. So he
• 45:21
  Speaker 2: knows that islanders in the Pacific are really fond of
• 45:26
  Speaker 2: Western objects, especially iron and mirrors, things like that, but
• 45:30
  Speaker 2: also Western clothes. So there's a lot of clothes at
• 45:33
  Speaker 2: the bottom of the whale boat. So he tells his
• 45:36
  Speaker 2: men to take individual pieces of clothes, wad them up,
• 45:41
  Speaker 2: throw them as far away from the whale boat as
• 45:43
  Speaker 2: they can, and each time they do that, the canoe
• 45:47
  Speaker 2: races over to pick up the piece of clothes, and
• 45:50
  Speaker 2: the whale boat gets a little bit farther away, and finally,
• 45:54
  Speaker 2: they get so far away from the island of Kiangle,
• 45:57
  Speaker 2: which is where these warriors are from, that they decide
• 46:00
  Speaker 2: to turn about and leave the whalemen alone.
• 46:04
  Speaker 1: Now, this- But these guys, these plowans, they know exactly
• 46:09
  Speaker 1: what's going on. I mean, they know that there's whalers,
• 46:13
  Speaker 1: They know that these islands are scattered at times with castaways.
• 46:16
  Speaker 1: Like this is a thing they've been through before.
• 46:18
  Speaker 2: Right. They've experienced Westerners before. There's probably a story that'll
• 46:21
  Speaker 2: come up a little bit later about a ship called
• 46:24
  Speaker 2: the Antelope, a British ship that crashed in Palau in 1783.
• 46:28
  Speaker 2: So yes, they know that there's a wider world out there.
• 46:32
  Speaker 1: This is a thing that happens.
• 46:32
  Speaker 2: They know about guns already. They know about clothes. They
• 46:35
  Speaker 2: know about iron. So the men of the mentor in
• 46:40
  Speaker 2: the whale boat, broiling son, in the middle of the ocean,
• 46:44
  Speaker 2: and they start rowing for what comes up next. They
• 46:47
  Speaker 2: don't know. They find another island. They get off. This
• 46:51
  Speaker 2: is a bigger island. They're there for a day. The
• 46:54
  Speaker 2: next morning, what happens? Another canoe comes, approaches the island.
• 46:58
  Speaker 2: But this one only had an old man and a
• 47:00
  Speaker 2: boy in it. And they beckoned for the whalemen to
• 47:03
  Speaker 2: follow them. So the whalemen once again get in their
• 47:06
  Speaker 2: whale boat, start following the canoe. The canoe races around
• 47:10
  Speaker 2: the promontory. and is soon out of sight. And just
• 47:13
  Speaker 2: as the whale boat reaches that promontory, what happens? An
• 47:17
  Speaker 2: armada of canoes, 20 or more, filled with natives, whooping
• 47:23
  Speaker 2: and hollering, comes down upon the whale boat.
• 47:25
  Speaker 1: They led them into a little ambush or?
• 47:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, no, but this time they didn't attack. They
• 47:30
  Speaker 2: didn't attack. They basically led the whalemen into the village
• 47:34
  Speaker 2: of Engarchalon, which is where these warriors came from. Now
• 47:39
  Speaker 2: we have an interesting situation. the American whaleman who could
• 47:42
  Speaker 2: speak English, stepped foot in Ngarshalong, a Palawan village, where
• 47:47
  Speaker 2: they just speak Palawan. They can't communicate with one another.
• 47:52
  Speaker 2: But using signs and gestures, the Palawan chief makes it
• 47:57
  Speaker 2: clear that he wants to know if these Americans are British. Now,
• 48:02
  Speaker 2: why the heck does he wanna know if they're British?
• 48:04
  Speaker 2: And it's all because of the wreck of the Antelope
• 48:08
  Speaker 2: in 1783, a British East India ship that crashed into
• 48:15
  Speaker 2: the island of Karur, off the island of Karur in
• 48:18
  Speaker 2: the Palauan Archipelago. I need to step back for a
• 48:20
  Speaker 2: second and tell you the Palauan Archipelago is 340 different islands,
• 48:25
  Speaker 2: about 500 miles to the east of the southern tip
• 48:29
  Speaker 2: of the Philippines. At this time, there are numerous villages
• 48:34
  Speaker 2: in Palau They each have their own sphere of influence
• 48:38
  Speaker 2: and power center. So the Americans crashed up here, and
• 48:42
  Speaker 2: they're in the village of Engarchalong. The Antelope in 1783
• 48:48
  Speaker 2: crashed maybe 80 miles further south off of Coror, another village.
• 48:54
  Speaker 2: And the Cororese chief agreed to allow the British to
• 48:59
  Speaker 2: build a new boat, salvage it from the Antelope, that
• 49:03
  Speaker 2: they could use to get back to Macau or Canton
• 49:08
  Speaker 2: or the Spice Islands and then get back to London.
• 49:10
  Speaker 2: But in exchange for this hospitality, the Corarees required the
• 49:16
  Speaker 2: British to engage in four inter-village wars with the Corarees,
• 49:23
  Speaker 2: and to give them guns and ammunition. Guns and ammunition
• 49:26
  Speaker 2: are a huge thing in the Pacific at this time,
• 49:28
  Speaker 2: because a lot of islanders never saw them before. And
• 49:30
  Speaker 2: you realize, once you have guns and ammunition, you have
• 49:33
  Speaker 2: a lot more power than somebody who has a spear.
• 49:34
  Speaker 1: Oh yeah, you could kick some ass, so they got
• 49:36
  Speaker 1: some guns of their own.
• 49:37
  Speaker 2: They got guns and ammunition. The British helped them in
• 49:40
  Speaker 2: four battles. They routed their enemies. Four years later, another
• 49:45
  Speaker 2: British East India ship came by to give them more
• 49:49
  Speaker 2: guns and ammunition as a thank you for helping the
• 49:52
  Speaker 2: men of the Antelope escape, and they ultimately did make
• 49:55
  Speaker 2: it back to London. So what's one of the villages
• 49:58
  Speaker 2: that Karur vanquished during their killing spree in Garshalong, where
• 50:03
  Speaker 2: the American whalemen ended up? So, of course, the Garshalongese
• 50:08
  Speaker 2: hate the British because the British are the ones that
• 50:11
  Speaker 2: allowed their enemies to become so powerful. So the Americans,
• 50:18
  Speaker 2: Captain Barnard, using signs and signals, is able, once again,
• 50:22
  Speaker 2: somehow to communicate that he's not British, he's American. Well,
• 50:27
  Speaker 2: the Ngarchalangese have no idea what an American is, but
• 50:30
  Speaker 2: they're just happy that they're not British. So the priestess says,
• 50:34
  Speaker 2: let's welcome these guys in as honored guests. They start
• 50:37
  Speaker 2: to have a feast. Just as the feast begins, coming
• 50:41
  Speaker 2: down the pathway, is what appears to be a white man,
• 50:45
  Speaker 2: 60 years old, long gray hair, not a tooth in
• 50:50
  Speaker 2: his mouth, and he's tattooed from head to foot. But
• 50:54
  Speaker 2: better yet, he speaks English. It turns out he's a
• 50:57
  Speaker 2: beachcomber named Charlie who jumped ship from a British ship
• 51:02
  Speaker 2: in the early 1800s and decided to, quote unquote, go native.
• 51:07
  Speaker 2: And they used to call them beachcombers in the early 1800s. Actually,
• 51:11
  Speaker 2: Richard Henry Dana two years before the Mast coined that term.
• 51:15
  Speaker 2: And then Herman Melville was a beachcomber who jumped ship
• 51:18
  Speaker 2: from a whale ship, the Akushnet, and he landed on
• 51:21
  Speaker 2: the Marquesas for a couple of years and actually used
• 51:24
  Speaker 2: that experience to write two of his most famous novels,
• 51:27
  Speaker 2: Umu and Taipi. So anyway, backtracking. So Charlie comes walking up.
• 51:33
  Speaker 2: He's English. He suddenly can act as a translator.
• 51:36
  Speaker 1: Now, why aren't they pissed at that Englishman? Because he
• 51:40
  Speaker 1: was a defector?
• 51:40
  Speaker 2: Yeah, he was a defector. It was just him alone.
• 51:42
  Speaker 2: He was defenseless. And he offered them information about the West.
• 51:46
  Speaker 2: And maybe he was a nice guy. And he'd tell
• 51:50
  Speaker 2: good jokes. I don't know. But he actually ended up
• 51:52
  Speaker 2: marrying a Ngar Shalangi's woman. And he rose to the
• 51:57
  Speaker 2: rank of a minor chief in the village. But the
• 52:00
  Speaker 2: reason it's so important for this story is... is that
• 52:02
  Speaker 2: he acted as a translator between the Americans and the
• 52:06
  Speaker 2: Ngar Shalongese. So now all of a sudden, they could
• 52:08
  Speaker 2: communicate freely. And the Ngar Shalongese decided, they said, okay,
• 52:13
  Speaker 2: we'll help you build a ship. Not out of the
• 52:16
  Speaker 2: remains of a mentor, but from wood on the island,
• 52:18
  Speaker 2: breadfruit or coconut or whatever. We'll help you build a ship.
• 52:23
  Speaker 2: But we're not doing this just because we're nice guys.
• 52:27
  Speaker 2: We're doing this because when you go back home to
• 52:29
  Speaker 2: the United States, We want you to come back with
• 52:33
  Speaker 2: 200 guns and gunpowder and balls and flints so that
• 52:38
  Speaker 2: we can become powerful and we can go kick the
• 52:40
  Speaker 2: quarry's butts. So that, you know, guns plays a big
• 52:45
  Speaker 2: role in this story. Well, the Americans agreed to this deal,
• 52:49
  Speaker 2: even though they have no faith that the United States
• 52:51
  Speaker 2: government is going to live up to it. Yeah.
• 52:54
  Speaker 1: And the, I mean, they gotta be thinking once we're
• 52:56
  Speaker 1: out of here, we're going to forget about.
• 52:58
  Speaker 2: This whole deal.
• 52:59
  Speaker 1: I'm not coming back.
• 53:02
  Speaker 2: So the Ngarchalangese say, okay, we're going to help you
• 53:06
  Speaker 2: build a boat. They try to start building a boat.
• 53:08
  Speaker 2: They have nails from the ship. Every time they put
• 53:11
  Speaker 2: a nail through one of the planks of a breadfruit tree,
• 53:14
  Speaker 2: it splits. It's not as strong as an oak or
• 53:16
  Speaker 2: live oak or anything like that or pine. So the
• 53:21
  Speaker 2: Ngarchalangese are getting very frustrated. The Americans are getting very frustrated.
• 53:25
  Speaker 2: So finally, the Ngar Shalongese says, okay, we know what
• 53:28
  Speaker 2: we're going to do. We're going to cut down the
• 53:30
  Speaker 2: largest breadfruit tree in the island. We're going to carve
• 53:33
  Speaker 2: you a mighty canoe, and you're going to use this
• 53:36
  Speaker 2: canoe along with your whale boat to get to the
• 53:38
  Speaker 2: Spice Islands where you can get a ship back to
• 53:41
  Speaker 2: the United States. So the Americans say, fine. So it
• 53:45
  Speaker 2: takes months to build this canoe. And finally, six months
• 53:50
  Speaker 2: after the Americans arrived in Ngar Shalong, The canoe is
• 53:53
  Speaker 2: ready to go. And it's an outrigger canoe. It's got
• 53:57
  Speaker 2: two outriggers for balance. It's pretty big. They load it
• 54:00
  Speaker 2: up with a lot of food and water. They load
• 54:02
  Speaker 2: food and water into the whale boat. But this is,
• 54:06
  Speaker 2: it's got a string attached to it. The Ngar Shalongese
• 54:09
  Speaker 2: are no rubes. They're not dumb. They said, how are
• 54:12
  Speaker 2: we going to guarantee these Americans come back? So they
• 54:15
  Speaker 2: require Barnard to leave three of his men as hostages
• 54:20
  Speaker 2: behind in Ngar Shalong. So the Americans sail off and
• 54:24
  Speaker 2: they take three Ngar Shalangis with them to see the
• 54:28
  Speaker 2: wider world and come back home at a later date
• 54:31
  Speaker 2: and tell all their peers about what's out there in
• 54:34
  Speaker 2: this world.
• 54:35
  Speaker 1: You see this type of exchange all through history. Yes.
• 54:41
  Speaker 2: Oh, absolutely.
• 54:41
  Speaker 1: It's like when the colonial superpowers were in South America,
• 54:45
  Speaker 1: like when the French came up with St. Lawrence, this like... Yeah, Indians.
• 54:48
  Speaker 1: This taking and leaving of people and this exchange and
• 54:52
  Speaker 1: sort of almost like collateral, you know, holding your people's collateral.
• 54:56
  Speaker 2: Exactly. Well, in 1783, I mentioned the Antelope, the British ship.
• 55:01
  Speaker 2: When they left, they took Libu, a prince, the son
• 55:06
  Speaker 2: of the king of Karur, back to London. Huge stir.
• 55:10
  Speaker 2: Books written about it. Unfortunately, he died of smallpox a
• 55:13
  Speaker 2: couple of months after he arrived. But it was a
• 55:16
  Speaker 2: really big news of the day. And I have to
• 55:18
  Speaker 2: tell a little funny story. I sent a copy of
• 55:21
  Speaker 2: my book to the president of Palau. And about a
• 55:25
  Speaker 2: month ago, I got an email back from him. And
• 55:28
  Speaker 2: he said he really liked the book. He hoped it
• 55:30
  Speaker 2: would be made into a movie. I said, oh, that'd
• 55:32
  Speaker 2: be lovely. And he said, you know, I was just
• 55:34
  Speaker 2: in England and I was discussing this book and the
• 55:37
  Speaker 2: story of Li Bu, the Palawan prince who got taken
• 55:40
  Speaker 2: to London with King Charles. So I thought that was
• 55:43
  Speaker 2: kind of cool. I have no idea if King Charles
• 55:45
  Speaker 2: bought a copy.
• 55:46
  Speaker 1: There's a Cartier, the French explorer. At one point in time,
• 55:53
  Speaker 1: he takes a bunch of Native Americans back. They all
• 55:57
  Speaker 1: die very quickly from disease. When he comes back, when
• 56:01
  Speaker 1: he returns, the peoples that he took them from are like, hey,
• 56:06
  Speaker 1: what happened to everybody you took? Oh, man, they became lords,
• 56:13
  Speaker 1: and they married local French women.
• 56:15
  Speaker 2: Really?
• 56:16
  Speaker 1: And they just decided to stay.
• 56:18
  Speaker 2: That's a good cover story. It's better than we killed them.
• 56:24
  Speaker 1: They all kind of died right away. He just flat
• 56:27
  Speaker 1: out tells them something, and they're like, oh, that sounds great.
• 56:29
  Speaker 2: Wow, I didn't know that story. That's a great story. Yeah,
• 56:33
  Speaker 2: it is amazing how many, you're right, in so many
• 56:35
  Speaker 2: instances in history, people either voluntarily or by theft would
• 56:41
  Speaker 2: take the indigenous people they knocked into to bring them
• 56:45
  Speaker 2: back as show pieces or just curiosity.
• 56:48
  Speaker 1: So how did he pick the three that got to stay?
• 56:50
  Speaker 1: Did he get to pick or did they pick?
• 56:53
  Speaker 2: Exactly how they did it, I don't know. They didn't
• 56:55
  Speaker 2: talk about it in the books they wrote later.
• 56:57
  Speaker 1: And what was the envious position? You could see that staying,
• 57:02
  Speaker 1: because you're like, I don't know, man, you guys are
• 57:04
  Speaker 1: going to die in this canoe. I'm going to stay,
• 57:06
  Speaker 1: and maybe I'll get a better opportunity to jump on
• 57:09
  Speaker 1: a ship down the road. Or you could be like, man,
• 57:11
  Speaker 1: I'm not going to stay here. These people are going
• 57:14
  Speaker 1: to turn on me or something's going to happen.
• 57:16
  Speaker 2: Well, you have the benefit of hindsight. Going back to
• 57:19
  Speaker 2: that era and what they were dealing with in the moment,
• 57:23
  Speaker 2: I might have chosen to stay because they had been
• 57:26
  Speaker 2: there for six months. they were treated very well by
• 57:29
  Speaker 2: the Ngar Shalangis.
• 57:31
  Speaker 1: Got it.
• 57:31
  Speaker 2: And they had plenty of food, plenty of water, beautiful surroundings,
• 57:36
  Speaker 2: a happy people. The Ngar Shalangis were very happy people
• 57:40
  Speaker 2: despite their internecine, their warfare with other villages. So, and
• 57:44
  Speaker 2: in hindsight, certainly given what happens later to the whalemen,
• 57:48
  Speaker 2: it would have been better to have stayed on Ngar Shalang,
• 57:51
  Speaker 2: but they didn't know that at the time. And if
• 57:54
  Speaker 2: you were given the option of getting in a boat with,
• 57:56
  Speaker 2: trained mariners and hopefully a good canoe. And it might
• 58:01
  Speaker 2: be very enticing to leave the island and ultimately get
• 58:05
  Speaker 2: back home. But maybe six on one hand, half dozen
• 58:08
  Speaker 2: on another.
• 58:09
  Speaker 1: So we're dealing with 11 guys now or 12 guys?
• 58:13
  Speaker 2: Well, there were a total of 11 guys left after
• 58:19
  Speaker 2: the shipwreck.
• 58:20
  Speaker 1: Ten died in one shipwreck, one drowned.
• 58:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 58:22
  Speaker 1: And no one's died since then.
• 58:24
  Speaker 2: Right, no one's died.
• 58:25
  Speaker 1: So now three stay.
• 58:25
  Speaker 2: Three stay behind. So there's eight. Eight leave.
• 58:28
  Speaker 1: And they're going to boogie for somewhere else.
• 58:31
  Speaker 2: They were hopefully going to go to the Spice Islands,
• 58:33
  Speaker 2: which is 800 miles to the southwest. That was their hope.
• 58:37
  Speaker 2: And they had a rudimentary compass. Actually, they had the
• 58:41
  Speaker 2: compass that was left behind by the antelope in 1783.
• 58:46
  Speaker 2: to use as a guide along with celestial navigation. So
• 58:51
  Speaker 2: they left. Unfortunately, even though the Palauans are well known
• 58:57
  Speaker 2: for being excellent craftsmen, having four types of canoes that
• 59:02
  Speaker 2: are very seaworthy, this did not burnish their reputation because
• 59:09
  Speaker 2: as Horace Holden said, this canoe, you sort of floated
• 59:13
  Speaker 2: in the water like a bobbing trunk of a tree.
• 59:18
  Speaker 2: And not long after they left, it swamped. And what
• 59:23
  Speaker 2: was worse is half of their food floated away into
• 59:26
  Speaker 2: the Pacific Ocean. They tried to bail... canoe but they
• 59:30
  Speaker 2: couldn't so they ultimately had to leave it behind so
• 59:34
  Speaker 2: everybody 11 men had to climb into a 25 foot
• 59:38
  Speaker 2: long whale boat and continue hopefully onto the spice islands
• 59:44
  Speaker 2: for 14 days they sailed under the broiling sun they
• 59:49
  Speaker 2: started to run out of food and water and what
• 59:52
  Speaker 2: was worse is the water was held in these bamboo canteens.
• 59:57
  Speaker 2: You know, a large bamboo, they have these septums that
• 1:00:00
  Speaker 2: separate different parts. Well, they basically would cut it off
• 1:00:03
  Speaker 2: above the septum, below a septum, then they put a
• 1:00:05
  Speaker 2: little hole in it and they'd cork it with some resin.
• 1:00:08
  Speaker 2: And that was their canteen. Well, after drinking from this
• 1:00:12
  Speaker 2: canteen for days on end, the bacteria from their mouths
• 1:00:17
  Speaker 2: and the sap from the bamboo mixed to make this fetid,
• 1:00:22
  Speaker 2: water mix to, you think that castoreum with alcohol is
• 1:00:28
  Speaker 2: bad enough. And they could barely drink this without retching.
• 1:00:32
  Speaker 2: So after about 14 days, all of a sudden, Barnard,
• 1:00:35
  Speaker 2: who was the only one that was sitting upright in
• 1:00:38
  Speaker 2: the whale boat, sees land in the distance. He knows
• 1:00:41
  Speaker 2: it's not the Spice Islands. Spice Islands are big, a
• 1:00:45
  Speaker 2: bunch of islands, but some of them are huge. Well,
• 1:00:47
  Speaker 2: the island that he sees in the distance is about
• 1:00:50
  Speaker 2: a mile long and a half mile wide. But if
• 1:00:53
  Speaker 2: they stayed on the open ocean any longer, they would
• 1:00:55
  Speaker 2: start dying. So they decided, okay, we're gonna go for
• 1:01:00
  Speaker 2: that island. And he told his men, as soon as
• 1:01:03
  Speaker 2: he saw, what does he see coming from the island?
• 1:01:06
  Speaker 2: A bunch of canoes racing towards them. And he said,
• 1:01:09
  Speaker 2: you know, we can't do anything but submit. And they submit.
• 1:01:12
  Speaker 2: And this was a much rougher reception because these canoes
• 1:01:17
  Speaker 2: surrounded the whale boat. They pitched all of the men
• 1:01:20
  Speaker 2: into the water They destroyed the whale boat down to
• 1:01:24
  Speaker 2: the water line because they wanted the iron nails and
• 1:01:27
  Speaker 2: the wood. And then finally, after the men in the
• 1:01:30
  Speaker 2: water were begging for some time, they pulled them from
• 1:01:34
  Speaker 2: the ocean into the canoes, stripped them of all their clothes,
• 1:01:39
  Speaker 2: and then landed them on the beach on this island
• 1:01:42
  Speaker 2: of Toby. Now, it's important to understand that at this time,
• 1:01:46
  Speaker 2: the island of Toby It's a mile long, half mile wide.
• 1:01:50
  Speaker 2: 400 people are living on this island. It is not
• 1:01:54
  Speaker 2: part of Palau at the time. It's part of Palau today,
• 1:01:59
  Speaker 2: but back then it was not part of Palau. And
• 1:02:01
  Speaker 2: in fact, the Tobians spoke an entirely different language than
• 1:02:05
  Speaker 2: the Palauans that the whalemen had recently left. And Toby's
• 1:02:09
  Speaker 2: about 800 miles south, a little southwest. of in Garchelong,
• 1:02:14
  Speaker 2: where they left from. So they're pulled onto this island.
• 1:02:17
  Speaker 1: But they got Palauans in the boat.
• 1:02:19
  Speaker 2: They got Palauans, but the Palauans can't communicate.
• 1:02:21
  Speaker 1: With the Tobians. But the Tobians recognize them as enemies
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 1: or not?
• 1:02:24
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they recognize them as other islanders because they're tattooed
• 1:02:27
  Speaker 2: like they are. One big difference is in Palau, it
• 1:02:31
  Speaker 2: was common to blacken your teeth or lacquer your teeth.
• 1:02:36
  Speaker 2: And some people later We call it Japaning your teeth.
• 1:02:39
  Speaker 2: And they did that probably to reduce rot. It's actually
• 1:02:42
  Speaker 2: proven that it helps the teeth stand up over time.
• 1:02:46
  Speaker 2: but it makes for a funny-looking smile because your teeth
• 1:02:48
  Speaker 2: are totally black. And then their saliva was red because
• 1:02:51
  Speaker 2: Palauans chewed on betel nuts all day as mild narcotic.
• 1:02:56
  Speaker 2: So it's kind of a horrifying visage that greeted these
• 1:03:00
  Speaker 2: American women.
• 1:03:01
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I've hung out with guys that had all those
• 1:03:02
  Speaker 1: red teeth and that stuff.
• 1:03:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah. But the Tobians did not blacken their teeth, so
• 1:03:07
  Speaker 2: they had white teeth, so they looked different. And whether
• 1:03:11
  Speaker 2: they knew that the— they probably didn't even know what Palau was.
• 1:03:14
  Speaker 1: Maybe they did.
• 1:03:15
  Speaker 2: That Tobians were really off the beaten track. Only one
• 1:03:19
  Speaker 2: or two Western ships had ever even come by there
• 1:03:22
  Speaker 2: in hundreds of years, and they didn't have much interaction
• 1:03:26
  Speaker 2: with other islands in the area because they were in
• 1:03:29
  Speaker 2: the middle, in Micronesia, but they were very far away
• 1:03:33
  Speaker 2: from other islands. So anyway, so now the Americans and
• 1:03:37
  Speaker 2: the three Ingar Shalanyis are on Toby. It was clear
• 1:03:41
  Speaker 2: immediately they were going to be treated as captives. each
• 1:03:44
  Speaker 2: one of them was given to a different family. And
• 1:03:48
  Speaker 2: they were forced to work harvesting coconuts, fishing on occasion,
• 1:03:54
  Speaker 2: but mainly what they did is tended to the taro pits,
• 1:03:58
  Speaker 2: which is sort of like a potato, but thicker and richer,
• 1:04:02
  Speaker 2: and they make poi out of it. And so they
• 1:04:06
  Speaker 2: tended to the taro pits, which are these muddy slurries
• 1:04:09
  Speaker 2: in the middle of the island from morning to night.
• 1:04:12
  Speaker 2: And they had no idea how or if they were
• 1:04:14
  Speaker 2: ever going to be able to leave the island. But
• 1:04:16
  Speaker 2: after two months, what happens? A Western ship, the Sabina,
• 1:04:20
  Speaker 2: which was heading to Macau, a Spanish ship, comes by.
• 1:04:24
  Speaker 2: The natives, the Tobians, they know enough about Westerners that
• 1:04:31
  Speaker 2: Westerners have iron. They haven't gotten guns from Westerners, but
• 1:04:35
  Speaker 2: they have iron. So they take their canoes out to
• 1:04:38
  Speaker 2: the Sabina. Well, the American whalemen and the Ingarchalangese wanted
• 1:04:43
  Speaker 2: to get on the canoes because they viewed the Sabina
• 1:04:45
  Speaker 2: off in the distance as their ticket to going home. Well,
• 1:04:49
  Speaker 2: the Tobians had no interest in any of them getting
• 1:04:51
  Speaker 2: into any of the canoes. But Captain Barnard and one
• 1:04:55
  Speaker 2: other guy, a guy named Bartlett Rollins, was able to
• 1:04:58
  Speaker 2: fight their way onto two separate canoes. So the canoes
• 1:05:01
  Speaker 2: go out to the Sabina. Captain Soames is on the
• 1:05:04
  Speaker 2: main deck. He's surrounded by a bunch of Canoes full
• 1:05:09
  Speaker 2: of warriors. And Captain Barnard yells out in English. Well,
• 1:05:15
  Speaker 2: Captain Soames is pretty surprised. Yeah. So he sends one
• 1:05:18
  Speaker 2: of his boats out. Finally, Captain Barnard and Whaleman Rollins
• 1:05:23
  Speaker 2: are taken on board the Sabina. And Barnard immediately pleads
• 1:05:30
  Speaker 2: with Soames to go to Toby and get the rest
• 1:05:34
  Speaker 2: of the Americans and the Ngar Shalangis. But picture this.
• 1:05:38
  Speaker 2: The Sabina has maybe 13 men on board. They have
• 1:05:41
  Speaker 2: limited arms. They're surrounded by very angry-looking natives. And to
• 1:05:46
  Speaker 2: make matters worse, Captain Barnard, the first thing he told
• 1:05:50
  Speaker 2: Captain Soames when he got on board the ship was
• 1:05:53
  Speaker 2: how they arrived there. And when they arrived, their whale
• 1:05:57
  Speaker 2: boat was destroyed and they were... beaten, essentially, and taken
• 1:06:01
  Speaker 2: to the beach. So Soames is thinking, well, this is not...
• 1:06:05
  Speaker 2: I don't want to go to the island and try
• 1:06:07
  Speaker 2: to extract more people. So he gives them some iron
• 1:06:11
  Speaker 2: in exchange for letting these two people go. The iron
• 1:06:14
  Speaker 2: gets back to the island of Toby. The sabina takes off.
• 1:06:19
  Speaker 2: And on the island of Toby... Barnard, keep in mind,
• 1:06:24
  Speaker 2: he wrote about this later, he thought that he had
• 1:06:26
  Speaker 2: convinced Soames to give enough iron to make the Tobians
• 1:06:29
  Speaker 2: happy with the exchange. Well, they weren't happy. They thought
• 1:06:33
  Speaker 2: that the amount of iron that they had been given
• 1:06:35
  Speaker 2: was woefully inadequate.
• 1:06:37
  Speaker 1: Wasn't enough to buy two slaves.
• 1:06:38
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:06:39
  Speaker 1: You know, just a comment about that is a thing
• 1:06:42
  Speaker 1: that's frustrating is the modern American comprehension of slavery.
• 1:06:48
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:06:49
  Speaker 1: Like, The way it's taught, people don't realize how global
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 1: it was.
• 1:06:53
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Oh, it goes back thousands and thousands of years.
• 1:06:55
  Speaker 1: It's sort of like in people's heads now, there's like
• 1:06:57
  Speaker 1: this American invention or something. No, no. Not realizing just
• 1:07:00
  Speaker 1: like slavery at this time, slavery was everywhere. Yes.
• 1:07:04
  Speaker 2: And absolutely, slavery is as old as humankind.
• 1:07:08
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's unbelievable the way that it's been sort of
• 1:07:11
  Speaker 1: like taught and misunderstood to be that it was this
• 1:07:15
  Speaker 1: kind of like invention or something, you know?
• 1:07:18
  Speaker 2: So they're there. The Tobians come back. They're pissed off.
• 1:07:22
  Speaker 2: Who do they take out their anger on? The whalemen
• 1:07:26
  Speaker 2: and the Ngar Shalangis who are left behind. So this
• 1:07:28
  Speaker 2: begins a prolonged period of suffering for them. And then
• 1:07:34
  Speaker 2: a typhoon comes along, which is the hurricane by another name.
• 1:07:38
  Speaker 2: I wrote a book called A Furious Sky About Hurricanes.
• 1:07:41
  Speaker 2: Great fun writing. A lot of people die in the book.
• 1:07:44
  Speaker 2: But anyway, typhoons are just hurricanes by another name. So
• 1:07:48
  Speaker 2: this typhoon almost destroys Toby, knocks down a lot of
• 1:07:53
  Speaker 2: their best-producing coconut trees, swamps their taro patches with sand
• 1:07:59
  Speaker 2: and salt water. So the Americans and the Ngar Shalangese
• 1:08:03
  Speaker 2: are required to rebuild the taro pits. And part of
• 1:08:07
  Speaker 2: that involves taking very jagged coral stones from the periphery
• 1:08:14
  Speaker 2: of the island to the center to make walls around
• 1:08:17
  Speaker 2: the taro pits. So they're doing this. They're emaciated because
• 1:08:20
  Speaker 2: the Americans and the Ngar Shalangis are the bottom of
• 1:08:23
  Speaker 2: the food chain, so to speak, on Toby. And they're
• 1:08:27
  Speaker 2: going through a period of sort of limited resources. So
• 1:08:31
  Speaker 2: they look like walking skeletons. In fact, at one point,
• 1:08:35
  Speaker 2: Horace Holden described his skin as looking more like that
• 1:08:38
  Speaker 2: of a rhinoceros than a human being. But they're forced
• 1:08:42
  Speaker 2: to work on meager rations. Right after the tattoo is
• 1:08:47
  Speaker 2: when we get to the part of the story which
• 1:08:49
  Speaker 2: we started out today on, the tattooing, the forced tattooing.
• 1:08:54
  Speaker 2: And then about a year, a little more than a
• 1:08:57
  Speaker 2: year after they were there, Uh, was a year and
• 1:09:02
  Speaker 2: a half, no, it was a couple of years. A
• 1:09:04
  Speaker 2: couple of years after they were there, what happens? Another
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 2: ship comes by.
• 1:09:07
  Speaker 1: But before- Is Barnard hatching a plan to go get him,
• 1:09:11
  Speaker 1: or is he just out?
• 1:09:13
  Speaker 2: Oh, yeah. Barnard ultimately makes it back to the United States.
• 1:09:16
  Speaker 2: He makes it back to New York and New Bedford
• 1:09:19
  Speaker 2: years after they left on the original ship. One of
• 1:09:22
  Speaker 2: the first things he does is he writes a letter
• 1:09:25
  Speaker 2: to Levi Woodbury, the Secretary of the Navy, telling him
• 1:09:31
  Speaker 2: what happened in Palau, what happened to the mentor, and
• 1:09:35
  Speaker 2: pleading with him to send a naval rescue mission to
• 1:09:38
  Speaker 2: get the rest of the whalemen, and also, he mentions,
• 1:09:41
  Speaker 2: get the Ngar Shalangis back to their home Village. But
• 1:09:46
  Speaker 2: then what is, what does Barnard do? I mean, this, this,
• 1:09:49
  Speaker 2: this concept blows a lot of people away, but Whaleman
• 1:09:52
  Speaker 2: back then, they were more married to the ocean than
• 1:09:55
  Speaker 2: they were to their wives. When Barnard got back, he
• 1:09:57
  Speaker 2: met a daughter he had never seen before. He was
• 1:10:00
  Speaker 2: bereft of, not bereft. He had no money. In fact,
• 1:10:03
  Speaker 2: he was in debt. So what does he do? He
• 1:10:05
  Speaker 2: immediately goes back on a whale ship soon after penning
• 1:10:08
  Speaker 2: this letter. And he goes on a couple more whaling voyages.
• 1:10:11
  Speaker 1: He doesn't have the financial means to go get the people.
• 1:10:14
  Speaker 2: Oh, no, he couldn't. No, he couldn't. He couldn't mount
• 1:10:16
  Speaker 2: a rescue operation. He's the captain of a whale ship.
• 1:10:19
  Speaker 1: He's not a wealthy man. But why does he get
• 1:10:20
  Speaker 1: all the way back to America before he starts dealing
• 1:10:23
  Speaker 1: with this problem? I mean, he must have made a
• 1:10:24
  Speaker 1: dozen stops on his way back to America.
• 1:10:26
  Speaker 2: No, he did. He stopped in Batavia, which was Dutch
• 1:10:28
  Speaker 2: at the time, and he knocked into a U.S. naval ship,
• 1:10:31
  Speaker 2: the USS Boxer, and he told the captain the same story,
• 1:10:36
  Speaker 2: and he said, go get them.
• 1:10:37
  Speaker 1: And what did the captain do with that?
• 1:10:39
  Speaker 2: Oh, nothing, essentially. You can't do anything without orders from
• 1:10:41
  Speaker 2: the Secretary of the Navy. I think at that point,
• 1:10:44
  Speaker 2: the captain of the Boxer did not go to Palau.
• 1:10:47
  Speaker 2: He probably had orders. I don't know what the rest
• 1:10:49
  Speaker 2: of his voyage was supposed to be. Something else. So
• 1:10:53
  Speaker 2: Barnard did his best, or at least what he thought
• 1:10:55
  Speaker 2: was his best. And there were a lot of articles
• 1:10:57
  Speaker 2: in American newspapers when he and Rollins returned. And so
• 1:11:02
  Speaker 2: a lot of people knew what had happened in The Mentor,
• 1:11:05
  Speaker 2: including the family members of the people who were still missing.
• 1:11:08
  Speaker 2: And they started lobbying for the U.S. Navy to send
• 1:11:13
  Speaker 2: a rescue mission, which ultimately happened later, but later in
• 1:11:17
  Speaker 2: the story. But back on Toby, we've got Horace Holden
• 1:11:19
  Speaker 2: and the rest of them in absolutely miserable shape. So
• 1:11:23
  Speaker 2: they're so ill, they're so skinny, that they finally beg
• 1:11:27
  Speaker 2: their Tobian masters or overseers to be released from work.
• 1:11:32
  Speaker 2: And at this point, they'd been there more than a year.
• 1:11:34
  Speaker 2: So they spoke Tobian, so they could speak directly to
• 1:11:38
  Speaker 2: the people that were holding them. So at first, the
• 1:11:42
  Speaker 2: Tobians didn't want to release them, but then they said, okay,
• 1:11:44
  Speaker 2: if you don't work, you don't get any food. And
• 1:11:47
  Speaker 2: the Americans and the Ngar Shalangis said, okay. And this
• 1:11:51
  Speaker 2: time it was fewer of them because over the span
• 1:11:54
  Speaker 2: of a year, year and a half, three Americans died
• 1:11:59
  Speaker 2: of starvation. One was killed when he was accused of
• 1:12:03
  Speaker 2: stealing something. And then two of the Ngar Shalangis were,
• 1:12:08
  Speaker 2: died of starvation. So now, a couple of years after
• 1:12:11
  Speaker 2: arriving in Toby, you have three men left. You have
• 1:12:14
  Speaker 2: Horace Holden, Benjamin Newt, another whaleman, and a guy named Kobach,
• 1:12:20
  Speaker 2: who was a, in Garchalongese, prince or chief. And they're
• 1:12:24
  Speaker 2: the only ones left. So they beg not to be,
• 1:12:27
  Speaker 2: they beg to be released from work. They know that
• 1:12:30
  Speaker 2: that means they won't get food. They accept that as
• 1:12:33
  Speaker 2: a deal they're willing to make. And from that point forward,
• 1:12:38
  Speaker 2: they spent a lot of time crawling around the island,
• 1:12:42
  Speaker 2: eating bugs, leaves, and also the entrails, which was particularly,
• 1:12:46
  Speaker 2: a lot of the Tobians, after they finished their main meal,
• 1:12:49
  Speaker 2: sometimes they would feel sorry for these men, and they'd
• 1:12:53
  Speaker 2: give them the entrails to eat. So they were nothing
• 1:12:57
  Speaker 2: but skin and bones.
• 1:12:59
  Speaker 1: I mean, like fish guts and stuff.
• 1:13:00
  Speaker 2: Yeah, fish guts. Yeah, intestines, stuff like that. So they
• 1:13:04
  Speaker 2: were in really bad shape. And then what happens? Oh,
• 1:13:08
  Speaker 2: the other thing. Horace Holden tells his overseer, who seemed
• 1:13:14
  Speaker 2: to be a nice guy, and Horace Holden's given name
• 1:13:17
  Speaker 2: while he was on Toby was Temit, T-E-M-I-T. And he
• 1:13:21
  Speaker 2: talks to his overseer and he said, you know, if
• 1:13:24
  Speaker 2: there's another Western ship that comes by and you put
• 1:13:28
  Speaker 2: me on board that ship, I am going to reward
• 1:13:31
  Speaker 2: you with a lot of iron. So what happens a
• 1:13:35
  Speaker 2: couple of years after they've been there? A Western ship
• 1:13:38
  Speaker 2: comes by. It's a British ship. It's called the Britannia.
• 1:13:42
  Speaker 2: And it's captained by a guy named Henry Short. The
• 1:13:46
  Speaker 2: same play unfolds. The warriors and the men in the
• 1:13:50
  Speaker 2: canoes go out to the ship hoping to trade for iron.
• 1:13:54
  Speaker 2: This time... Realizing that Holden had made this pledge, they
• 1:13:59
  Speaker 2: let Holden and Newt get onto a couple of canoes.
• 1:14:04
  Speaker 2: They go out to the Britannia. Holden yells across the
• 1:14:08
  Speaker 2: water in English, telling him who he is. Captain Short
• 1:14:12
  Speaker 2: is dumbfounded, and he sends his men off in a longboat.
• 1:14:17
  Speaker 2: They go to within about 100 feet of the canoes,
• 1:14:20
  Speaker 2: because they were told to stay farther away, because these
• 1:14:23
  Speaker 2: warriors had weapons.
• 1:14:24
  Speaker 1: Yeah.
• 1:14:26
  Speaker 2: Holden tells him more of his story. The men on
• 1:14:29
  Speaker 2: board the longboat tell Holden to jump into the water
• 1:14:34
  Speaker 2: and swim to the longboat. But Holden is, you know,
• 1:14:38
  Speaker 2: partially starved, weak, but he summons up his strength. He
• 1:14:41
  Speaker 2: dives into the water, claws his way forward. And then
• 1:14:46
  Speaker 2: right when he's at next to the longboat, the men,
• 1:14:49
  Speaker 2: a couple of the British guys, pull him onto the boat.
• 1:14:53
  Speaker 2: One of them exclaims, we have just saved him now.
• 1:14:57
  Speaker 2: And he wasn't referring to the simple act of plucking
• 1:15:00
  Speaker 2: Holden out of the water, but rather to the fate
• 1:15:04
  Speaker 2: that he had just avoided. Because there, next to the longboat,
• 1:15:08
  Speaker 2: was a huge shark, rolling on its side, mouth open,
• 1:15:13
  Speaker 2: ready to make Holden its next meal. So they saved him.
• 1:15:18
  Speaker 2: He got on board. Newt, who was almost dead, got
• 1:15:21
  Speaker 2: on board the Britannia. And they begged Captain Short, just
• 1:15:26
  Speaker 2: like the other people had begged Soames, to go to
• 1:15:29
  Speaker 2: the island of Toby to rescue Kovac. Because this is
• 1:15:33
  Speaker 2: a fascinating part of the story to me. When the
• 1:15:35
  Speaker 2: Americans arrived in Palau, even after they got along with
• 1:15:38
  Speaker 2: the Palauans, their initial attitude towards the Palauans was that
• 1:15:42
  Speaker 2: they were nothing but savages, barbarians, and brutes. And that
• 1:15:46
  Speaker 2: was a common attitude of Westerners at the time. But
• 1:15:49
  Speaker 2: once they got to know the Palauans and the Garchulong,
• 1:15:51
  Speaker 2: they had a much more favorable opinion. And once they
• 1:15:54
  Speaker 2: spent years on Toby with Kobach, they thought they viewed
• 1:15:58
  Speaker 2: him as a brother and they wanted to save him.
• 1:16:01
  Speaker 1: It's always that way. It's like you trivialize their economy,
• 1:16:04
  Speaker 1: you trivialize their religion, you trivialize their social structure, you
• 1:16:10
  Speaker 1: disparage it. And then oftentimes, over time, some percentage of
• 1:16:14
  Speaker 1: the people that experience it prefer it.
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:16:17
  Speaker 1: Prefer the cultures.
• 1:16:19
  Speaker 2: Or just accept their humanity.
• 1:16:20
  Speaker 1: Accept it or absorb into it.
• 1:16:23
  Speaker 2: Well, just think about a common story. A lot of
• 1:16:25
  Speaker 2: our countries, I mean, I don't want to get into
• 1:16:27
  Speaker 2: modern politics, but a lot of our countries are loggerheads
• 1:16:29
  Speaker 2: right now. Very angry. But if you get individuals from
• 1:16:33
  Speaker 2: different countries together in a bar, they often get along famously,
• 1:16:36
  Speaker 2: person to person. So that's what happened. Captain Short was not.
• 1:16:45
  Speaker 2: He also had only about 12 or 13 men on board.
• 1:16:48
  Speaker 2: There's no way that he is going to go to
• 1:16:51
  Speaker 2: the island of Toby to rescue.
• 1:16:52
  Speaker 1: And they don't have enough loot on these boats. They
• 1:16:55
  Speaker 1: don't have enough stuff on these boats, extra stuff to
• 1:16:57
  Speaker 1: go to buy the guy.
• 1:17:00
  Speaker 2: No, that did not come up in the discussion. Whether
• 1:17:03
  Speaker 2: they tried it or not, it didn't come up. But
• 1:17:06
  Speaker 2: I don't think they would have because.
• 1:17:07
  Speaker 1: You see the rope and chain and stuff. You could
• 1:17:09
  Speaker 1: come up with a human price.
• 1:17:10
  Speaker 2: Well, I think the Tobians... You're right. But I think
• 1:17:13
  Speaker 2: the Tobians viewed Kobach differently. He was a fellow Pacific
• 1:17:17
  Speaker 2: Native Islander than the Americans. So there might have been
• 1:17:20
  Speaker 2: some differential... treatment because of that he also had a
• 1:17:23
  Speaker 2: wife on toby he took a wife.
• 1:17:25
  Speaker 1: Oh he did okay so he was doing better yeah
• 1:17:27
  Speaker 1: he was doing better no.
• 1:17:28
  Speaker 2: Horse yeah he's doing he's doing better so the britannia
• 1:17:34
  Speaker 2: sails off goes to canton goes to macau and uh
• 1:17:38
  Speaker 2: holden and newt finally make it back to the united
• 1:17:41
  Speaker 2: states and holden writes a book about his experience that
• 1:17:45
  Speaker 2: came out in 1836. But they make it back to
• 1:17:47
  Speaker 2: the United States almost five years after they left.
• 1:17:50
  Speaker 1: Oh, man. You know what I was asked about that guy?
• 1:17:53
  Speaker 1: I wasn't putting the timeline right. What I was talking about,
• 1:17:56
  Speaker 1: I was trying to find, I had him lined up
• 1:17:58
  Speaker 1: with the advent of photography. No, daguerreotypes? Yeah, but he
• 1:18:02
  Speaker 1: wouldn't have lived long enough to ever have his tattoos photographed.
• 1:18:05
  Speaker 2: No, no, no. He lived until the early 1900s.
• 1:18:08
  Speaker 1: He did.
• 1:18:09
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but Horace Holden made a conscious decision. When he
• 1:18:14
  Speaker 2: came back, he was interviewed by numerous newspapers and magazines.
• 1:18:19
  Speaker 2: The North American Review, which was a really big magazine
• 1:18:22
  Speaker 2: at the time, did a lengthy article about And the
• 1:18:24
  Speaker 2: journalists got to see his tattoos. He mainly had tattoos
• 1:18:28
  Speaker 2: on his chest and his arms. And they saw them
• 1:18:31
  Speaker 2: and they described them. But Horace Holden decided never to
• 1:18:34
  Speaker 2: show his tattoos publicly, like as a curiosity. He showed
• 1:18:38
  Speaker 2: it to friends and family.
• 1:18:39
  Speaker 1: I thought he went to Barnum or something. No, no.
• 1:18:41
  Speaker 2: That's another guy.
• 1:18:42
  Speaker 1: That's a different guy that did that.
• 1:18:44
  Speaker 2: That's another guy. A guy that came back about seven
• 1:18:46
  Speaker 2: months after... Holden. He had been on the island of Panpei,
• 1:18:54
  Speaker 2: which is about 1,600 miles to the east of Palau.
• 1:18:58
  Speaker 2: for almost a decade. He actually married a chief's daughter.
• 1:19:03
  Speaker 2: He was tattooed from head to foot, much more heavily
• 1:19:06
  Speaker 2: than Holden. He finally got on a ship going back
• 1:19:08
  Speaker 2: to Salem, Massachusetts. When he got back to the United States,
• 1:19:11
  Speaker 2: this guy O'Brien, which they later called the tattooed Irishman,
• 1:19:16
  Speaker 2: he was a born salesman. He decided to capitalize on
• 1:19:19
  Speaker 2: his tattoos and even though they didn't use the term
• 1:19:22
  Speaker 2: at the time, he sort of became part of a
• 1:19:24
  Speaker 2: freak show. P.T. Barnum hired him as part of the
• 1:19:26
  Speaker 2: American Museum and people paid to see this guy. And
• 1:19:30
  Speaker 2: he was the first Westerner who was tattooed that was
• 1:19:33
  Speaker 2: seen in the United States. There had been other Islanders
• 1:19:38
  Speaker 2: and other people who had been seen and some Chinese,
• 1:19:40
  Speaker 2: but he was the first American that had tattoos that
• 1:19:43
  Speaker 2: was seen widely in the United States.
• 1:19:45
  Speaker 1: Is there any idea what came of what was the
• 1:19:49
  Speaker 1: Palauan's name?
• 1:19:50
  Speaker 2: Kobach?
• 1:19:51
  Speaker 1: Yeah. Is there any idea what came to him?
• 1:19:52
  Speaker 2: No, you know, he made it back to Engarshalong. Well,
• 1:19:54
  Speaker 2: what happened is Holden got back. He wrote a book.
• 1:19:57
  Speaker 2: He wrote a book for two reasons. One is he
• 1:20:00
  Speaker 2: wanted to make some money. I could have told him,
• 1:20:02
  Speaker 2: what a fool you are, writing to make money. But
• 1:20:05
  Speaker 2: the other thing that he wanted to do was to
• 1:20:07
  Speaker 2: incite action. He wanted to encourage the U.S. Navy to
• 1:20:10
  Speaker 2: send a rescue mission. But unbeknownst to him, a rescue
• 1:20:14
  Speaker 2: mission had already been sent. The USS Vincennes was heading
• 1:20:18
  Speaker 2: to Palau to recover whatever whalemen were there and to
• 1:20:21
  Speaker 2: reunite the Ngarchalangis with their home village. And so they
• 1:20:25
  Speaker 2: ultimately did that. So Kobach was ultimately picked up after
• 1:20:29
  Speaker 2: they discovered, after the Vincennes discovered there are no more
• 1:20:32
  Speaker 2: Americans there. Kobach was picked up. He was reunited with
• 1:20:36
  Speaker 2: his brothers. In Gar-Shalong, they rub noses to say hello.
• 1:20:41
  Speaker 2: And the remaining Americans, there are only two Americans left.
• 1:20:44
  Speaker 2: Because one of them in Gar-Shalong had escaped on a
• 1:20:48
  Speaker 2: passing ship. The other two were still there. And an
• 1:20:52
  Speaker 2: interesting coda to this story is that one of them,
• 1:20:54
  Speaker 2: James Mader, I got in touch with his ancestors because
• 1:20:59
  Speaker 2: he apparently got married and had children while he was
• 1:21:02
  Speaker 2: in Gar-Shalong. Because there to this day is a Maidar
• 1:21:06
  Speaker 2: clan which claims to go way back to when a
• 1:21:10
  Speaker 2: white man from the ocean married a local woman.
• 1:21:13
  Speaker 1: But when he got picked up, he ditched his family.
• 1:21:15
  Speaker 2: Yes, he ditched his family. So did Kobach. When Kobach
• 1:21:18
  Speaker 2: got picked up by the Vincennes, the Tobians pleaded with
• 1:21:22
  Speaker 2: him to come back. And one of the angles of
• 1:21:24
  Speaker 2: attack that they used is to say, you know, Kobach,
• 1:21:28
  Speaker 2: you're leaving your wife behind. Don't you want to come back?
• 1:21:31
  Speaker 2: And Kobach reportedly said no. screw my tobian wife i
• 1:21:34
  Speaker 2: want to go back to my and garcia langi's wife
• 1:21:37
  Speaker 2: so he left he left happily as well.
• 1:21:41
  Speaker 1: It's amazing that like i know you think about those
• 1:21:43
  Speaker 1: first 10 dudes got wiped out but it's amazing that
• 1:21:46
  Speaker 1: so many of these guys made it.
• 1:21:48
  Speaker 2: Seven seven out of 22 made it back and you
• 1:21:51
  Speaker 2: mentioned horace holden he lived to the age of 94.
• 1:21:53
  Speaker 2: he died in oregon and he played a minor role
• 1:21:58
  Speaker 2: in other interesting stories in american history He went to
• 1:22:01
  Speaker 2: Hawaii very early on. He helped introduce sericulture or silk
• 1:22:06
  Speaker 2: culture to Hawaii. Then he was one of the first
• 1:22:09
  Speaker 2: people in the 1840s to go to the Oregon Territory
• 1:22:12
  Speaker 2: to help populate the Oregon Territory so the United States
• 1:22:15
  Speaker 2: could have a better claim on taking it later in
• 1:22:18
  Speaker 2: negotiations with Canada. And he had a cattle farm. He
• 1:22:21
  Speaker 2: was a farmer. Died when he was 94. And I
• 1:22:24
  Speaker 2: am so upset with one of his granddaughters. Okay. Because
• 1:22:30
  Speaker 2: after he died, a reporter in Oregon went to his
• 1:22:35
  Speaker 2: daughter trying to find out more information. He wanted to
• 1:22:38
  Speaker 2: write a history of Oregon settlement, but also write about
• 1:22:43
  Speaker 2: Horace Holden's life. So Horace Holden's daughter told him, oh,
• 1:22:48
  Speaker 2: there's a sea chest that we have that has a
• 1:22:50
  Speaker 2: lot of dad's stuff in it. It's with my daughter. Here,
• 1:22:54
  Speaker 2: I'm going to write you a letter of introduction. Go
• 1:22:57
  Speaker 2: talk to my daughter. So this journalist is all excited.
• 1:22:59
  Speaker 2: He thinks there's going to be a trove of materials.
• 1:23:02
  Speaker 2: He goes to the daughter, hands over the note. The
• 1:23:05
  Speaker 2: daughter essentially says, oh, my mother must think that I'm
• 1:23:08
  Speaker 2: a horrible housekeeper. The first thing I did when I
• 1:23:12
  Speaker 2: got that chest is I threw everything in it out
• 1:23:15
  Speaker 2: and I now use it for my linens. So whatever
• 1:23:19
  Speaker 2: information he had in there, log books i mean other
• 1:23:22
  Speaker 2: i'm sure he wrote more about it to himself or diaries.
• 1:23:25
  Speaker 1: Gone got it yeah that's incredible so you mentioned just
• 1:23:30
  Speaker 1: kind of as a following these people through we talked
• 1:23:32
  Speaker 1: about horace like oddly he came to be out in
• 1:23:35
  Speaker 1: oregon cattle ranching yeah um his art is his his
• 1:23:39
  Speaker 1: belongings are gone yep um it was bedford right new
• 1:23:45
  Speaker 1: bedford no no sorry no the name of the captain Oh, no, Barnard. Yeah, Barnard. Yeah,
• 1:23:49
  Speaker 1: Edward Barnard. He did some more whaling. Yes. Did he
• 1:23:52
  Speaker 1: wind up back out in the Pacific? Where did he
• 1:23:55
  Speaker 1: wind up when he later? Because, I mean, he dies
• 1:23:58
  Speaker 1: in Erie.
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:23:59
  Speaker 1: But does his whaling trips bring him back through these places?
• 1:24:04
  Speaker 2: You know, you asked me a question that's really good.
• 1:24:08
  Speaker 2: I know that he took two more voyages, but I'm
• 1:24:10
  Speaker 2: pretty sure they were in the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean.
• 1:24:13
  Speaker 2: I don't think he made it to the Pacific.
• 1:24:14
  Speaker 1: Okay.
• 1:24:15
  Speaker 2: But he might very well have had, but he wasn't
• 1:24:16
  Speaker 2: a sentimental guy. I don't think he would have thought
• 1:24:18
  Speaker 2: twice about that. He needed to go out and make money.
• 1:24:21
  Speaker 2: He had two greasy trips, so they made some money.
• 1:24:24
  Speaker 2: They came back with 1,800, 2,000 barrels. But then he
• 1:24:28
  Speaker 2: decided to go into the freshwater ocean, and he was
• 1:24:32
  Speaker 2: the captain of the schooner of Pennsylvania, and it sank,
• 1:24:35
  Speaker 2: and all men on board died and he was never seen.
• 1:24:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, but the thing is- He's dead in his 40s.
• 1:24:41
  Speaker 2: Yeah, dead in his 40s. Well, that wasn't that young
• 1:24:44
  Speaker 2: back then. You made it to your late 40s, you
• 1:24:46
  Speaker 2: were doing pretty well, especially if you were a fisherman
• 1:24:49
  Speaker 2: or a whaleman or a laborer. You know, the life
• 1:24:53
  Speaker 2: expectancy was much, much less back then. But it's a
• 1:24:58
  Speaker 2: fascinating story. And luckily for me, because that isn't a
• 1:25:01
  Speaker 2: story and you want to have as many firsthand experiences
• 1:25:04
  Speaker 2: primary materials as possible. He wrote essentially a book-like manuscript
• 1:25:10
  Speaker 2: about the voyage of the mentor and the crashing in Palau.
• 1:25:15
  Speaker 2: And it was among his effects when he died. He
• 1:25:17
  Speaker 2: maybe was going to publish it, or maybe he was
• 1:25:21
  Speaker 2: dissuaded from publishing it because Holden published his first. I
• 1:25:25
  Speaker 2: don't know. He never got around to it. But his
• 1:25:26
  Speaker 2: daughter kept it, and it was handed down through the family.
• 1:25:29
  Speaker 2: And ultimately, sometime in the mid-1900s, It was given to
• 1:25:34
  Speaker 2: the Kendall Whaling Museum, which is the precursor of the
• 1:25:37
  Speaker 2: New Bedford Whaling Museum. And then in the 1970s, a
• 1:25:41
  Speaker 2: curator was rooting around downstairs in the archives, and he
• 1:25:46
  Speaker 2: came across this handwritten manuscript by Edward Barnard, and they
• 1:25:51
  Speaker 2: published it.
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 1: The whole story.
• 1:25:52
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they published the thing, they transcribed it, they published it.
• 1:25:56
  Speaker 2: And that's one of the first ways I found out
• 1:25:57
  Speaker 2: about the story, is reading that account and reading Horace
• 1:26:02
  Speaker 2: Holden's account.
• 1:26:03
  Speaker 1: You know what seems to be absent from this story
• 1:26:05
  Speaker 1: that's usually a part of every whaling story? Is no
• 1:26:07
  Speaker 1: one ever eats anybody.
• 1:26:10
  Speaker 2: Oh, wait a second. I had to set the record straight.
• 1:26:12
  Speaker 2: Very few whaling stories have cannibalism. Yeah. In the Heart
• 1:26:16
  Speaker 2: of the Sea, Philbrick's story about that whale ship.
• 1:26:19
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like Arctic exploration.
• 1:26:21
  Speaker 2: The Essex, not to be confused.
• 1:26:23
  Speaker 1: Yeah, it's like when people start eating each other, that's
• 1:26:25
  Speaker 1: when things go downhill.
• 1:26:27
  Speaker 2: There were a couple of whaling ships where that happened.
• 1:26:30
  Speaker 2: More common with Arctic and Antarctic. Well, Arctic exploration. I
• 1:26:34
  Speaker 2: don't think it was very common, Antarctic. I don't recall
• 1:26:36
  Speaker 2: any stories of Antarctic exploration where they ended up.
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 1: Resorted to that.
• 1:26:40
  Speaker 2: Cannibalism. But definitely, you know, John Franklin and trying to
• 1:26:44
  Speaker 2: find the Northwest Pass is just littered with apparently tasty
• 1:26:48
  Speaker 2: dead bodies.
• 1:26:49
  Speaker 1: I don't know. Sure, yeah. What are you going to
• 1:26:52
  Speaker 1: work on now? You starting another one yet?
• 1:26:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, this is strange. For the last nine books,
• 1:26:56
  Speaker 2: I've always had another book I'm working on when my
• 1:26:59
  Speaker 2: next book comes out. But this has been a, I've
• 1:27:02
  Speaker 2: taken a little break part of this because we bought
• 1:27:04
  Speaker 2: that house, that old house, and Marvel had been working
• 1:27:07
  Speaker 2: on that. I've gone through about four or five ideas,
• 1:27:11
  Speaker 2: and I've shot all of them down.
• 1:27:13
  Speaker 1: How long do you spend on an idea before you
• 1:27:15
  Speaker 1: shoot it down? What do you give yourself?
• 1:27:17
  Speaker 2: Certainly weeks, if not a month or two. I keep
• 1:27:19
  Speaker 2: trying to convince myself. I have an idea right now.
• 1:27:22
  Speaker 2: I wrote a proposal. My agent loves it. I like it.
• 1:27:27
  Speaker 2: I think it could be a great book, but I'm
• 1:27:29
  Speaker 2: not 100% convinced. In fact, after I go back east,
• 1:27:35
  Speaker 2: I'm going out to Michigan to give a talk, and
• 1:27:37
  Speaker 2: then Once they go back east, I'm gonna really sit
• 1:27:39
  Speaker 2: down and focus on it.
• 1:27:41
  Speaker 1: And- Does it involve salty water?
• 1:27:43
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but it's a maritime story. I'll tell you, yeah.
• 1:27:46
  Speaker 2: And a lot of people die. That's always good. That's
• 1:27:49
  Speaker 2: always good. No cannibalism, but a lot of people die.
• 1:27:52
  Speaker 2: I don't know, but I suspect by the end of
• 1:27:55
  Speaker 2: this year, I will be working on another book because
• 1:27:58
  Speaker 2: I don't like, I'm like a dog without a bone.
• 1:28:00
  Speaker 2: You know, I like having something to do.
• 1:28:02
  Speaker 1: Yeah, you gotta have a dragon to slay, man.
• 1:28:03
  Speaker 2: Yeah, yeah.
• 1:28:04
  Speaker 1: Gives like, gives shaped life, you know? yeah yeah so
• 1:28:09
  Speaker 1: salty water dead people dead people what else what else
• 1:28:11
  Speaker 1: can you give me.
• 1:28:13
  Speaker 2: Uh it involves uh it's in the early 1800s dead
• 1:28:17
  Speaker 2: whales in it no no whales uh it might involve
• 1:28:22
  Speaker 2: a little bit of piracy all right sounds i don't
• 1:28:27
  Speaker 2: want to i don't want to give any more because
• 1:28:28
  Speaker 2: i might not even end up writing.
• 1:28:30
  Speaker 1: It you know years ago man it's funny years ago
• 1:28:33
  Speaker 1: there was this uh This writer, I can't remember who
• 1:28:37
  Speaker 1: it was. It was Ben, I don't think it was Ben.
• 1:28:40
  Speaker 1: it was ben metcalf some writer wrote a thing about
• 1:28:42
  Speaker 1: there was kind of like a southern literature craze yeah
• 1:28:47
  Speaker 1: okay oh confederates in the attic and stuff like that
• 1:28:49
  Speaker 1: yeah so this writer wrote this piece of like the
• 1:28:53
  Speaker 1: from a scholarly perspective all these scholars at the time
• 1:28:57
  Speaker 1: were trying to like you know cormac mccarthy and and
• 1:29:00
  Speaker 1: in um in uh faulkner you know right and people
• 1:29:04
  Speaker 1: are like wrestling with this southern literature right and a
• 1:29:07
  Speaker 1: scholar wrote a piece where he's like well how do
• 1:29:09
  Speaker 1: you define southern literature you know same way i'll sound
• 1:29:13
  Speaker 1: but in my mind like exploration books tend to have
• 1:29:16
  Speaker 1: people eating people in them yeah he wrote it'd be
• 1:29:19
  Speaker 1: like here's the way you can tell he's like is
• 1:29:22
  Speaker 1: there a dead mule in it If there's a dead
• 1:29:25
  Speaker 1: mule in it and he does like a check, he
• 1:29:27
  Speaker 1: goes through all Faulkner's work. He's like, you will find
• 1:29:31
  Speaker 1: in that work a dead mule. If there's no dead mule,
• 1:29:33
  Speaker 1: it's not Southern literature. So you got to ask yourself,
• 1:29:37
  Speaker 1: like of all your books, you got to be like,
• 1:29:40
  Speaker 1: like a Dolan book has to.
• 1:29:45
  Speaker 2: Have. The main thing for me that my books have
• 1:29:49
  Speaker 2: to have is I have to be interested in I mean,
• 1:29:52
  Speaker 2: we didn't go over my educational background. I won't go
• 1:29:54
  Speaker 2: just other than I say, I have an undergraduate master's
• 1:29:57
  Speaker 2: and a PhD, not in history, in biology and environmental
• 1:30:00
  Speaker 2: policy and conservation. So. Every book I write is like
• 1:30:04
  Speaker 2: getting a mini master's degree, because I didn't learn about
• 1:30:07
  Speaker 2: it in school, and most of the books that I
• 1:30:10
  Speaker 2: read are out of print or article. I don't read
• 1:30:13
  Speaker 2: a lot of modern literature, unfortunately, because I'm focusing on
• 1:30:16
  Speaker 2: a book and a topic.
• 1:30:19
  Speaker 1: You know what you might find is a natural resource theme.
• 1:30:22
  Speaker 2: Yeah, there's a lot of natural. Yeah, a lot of
• 1:30:25
  Speaker 2: my books basically look at the development. The way I
• 1:30:27
  Speaker 2: look at a lot of my books, not so much,
• 1:30:29
  Speaker 2: not the mentor, but Leviathan, The History of Whaling, Fur
• 1:30:32
  Speaker 2: Fortune Empire, When America First Met China, A Furious Sky,
• 1:30:36
  Speaker 2: my Lighthouse book, Brilliant Beacons, all of them use a
• 1:30:40
  Speaker 2: specific subject, whales, lighthouses, hurricanes, to form the narrative arc
• 1:30:46
  Speaker 2: or backbone for a larger story about the evolution of
• 1:30:49
  Speaker 2: the United States. That's what gets me interested. Just telling
• 1:30:53
  Speaker 2: a story about a lighthouse is not interesting, but telling
• 1:30:57
  Speaker 2: a story about a lighthouse that played an important role
• 1:30:59
  Speaker 2: in the American Revolution or the Civil War or helped
• 1:31:03
  Speaker 2: the country develop as a maritime nation and then the
• 1:31:06
  Speaker 2: leading maritime nation in the world, that's exciting. Whaling was
• 1:31:11
  Speaker 2: such a huge topic the fur trade which is very
• 1:31:13
  Speaker 2: huge out here. I loved writing that book I knew
• 1:31:16
  Speaker 2: very little about fur trade before I started it but
• 1:31:19
  Speaker 2: man the fur trade is a major major force in
• 1:31:24
  Speaker 2: the evolution and development of the colonies and then the
• 1:31:28
  Speaker 2: United States you cannot understand American history certainly westward expansion
• 1:31:34
  Speaker 2: without understanding intimately The fur trade. So that's what got
• 1:31:38
  Speaker 2: me interested.
• 1:31:39
  Speaker 1: I'm working on a project right now and in it,
• 1:31:42
  Speaker 1: trying to make the point that like, there's this point
• 1:31:48
  Speaker 1: where reality kicks in, in the colonization of North America,
• 1:31:52
  Speaker 1: in the North. Right, okay. Like, if you look at
• 1:31:55
  Speaker 1: like in South America, Mesoamerica, you have legitimately, like they're
• 1:32:00
  Speaker 1: legitimately finding cities of gold.
• 1:32:02
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:32:03
  Speaker 1: I mean, they're finding like extraordinary wealth. Right. But then
• 1:32:08
  Speaker 1: you get up into the areas we've been touching on. Right. Right? Like,
• 1:32:12
  Speaker 1: what is present-day northeastern U.S., southeastern Canada.
• 1:32:18
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:32:19
  Speaker 1: When people arrive there, they're holding out that there's going
• 1:32:22
  Speaker 1: to be, like, that you'll go up the river and
• 1:32:24
  Speaker 1: there will be China.
• 1:32:25
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:32:26
  Speaker 1: Or you'll go up the river and there will be
• 1:32:28
  Speaker 1: white people and they have all kinds of gold.
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:32:30
  Speaker 1: There's all these fantastical ideas.
• 1:32:32
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:32:33
  Speaker 1: But then there's, like, a thing clicks. you know, and
• 1:32:37
  Speaker 1: it clicked like in the late teens, 1600s, whatever, somewhere
• 1:32:40
  Speaker 1: in there. Yeah. It clicks. And it's like, you know what, man, really?
• 1:32:45
  Speaker 1: It's like fur.
• 1:32:47
  Speaker 2: Right. Fish. Yeah.
• 1:32:48
  Speaker 1: Whales.
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 2: Absolutely.
• 1:32:49
  Speaker 1: And then they dig in. No, they dig in. But
• 1:32:52
  Speaker 1: like the previous, like a click back.
• 1:32:55
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:32:56
  Speaker 1: Is like China, gold, spices, you know, silver. And there's
• 1:33:02
  Speaker 1: kind of like this, ah, man. It's just fur, dude.
• 1:33:05
  Speaker 1: Let's get it all.
• 1:33:06
  Speaker 2: Yeah, well, they call it beaver pelts, as you know,
• 1:33:08
  Speaker 2: soft gold, otter pelts.
• 1:33:11
  Speaker 1: But it's like there's a little bit of a letdown.
• 1:33:14
  Speaker 2: Yeah, but then they get pretty excited once they start
• 1:33:16
  Speaker 2: making money.
• 1:33:17
  Speaker 1: They dig in, but it sort of becomes it's just
• 1:33:20
  Speaker 1: going to be work.
• 1:33:21
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:33:22
  Speaker 1: It's just going to be work. We're not going to
• 1:33:23
  Speaker 1: be like the Spanish people. literally driving ships of gold home,
• 1:33:27
  Speaker 1: you know? It's going to be work.
• 1:33:29
  Speaker 2: You're absolutely right. That's an excellent point. I mean, El Dorado,
• 1:33:32
  Speaker 2: the search for El Dorado, or Henry Hudson thinking that
• 1:33:36
  Speaker 2: he was going to go find, and Columbus thinking they
• 1:33:38
  Speaker 2: were going to go find China. And then all of
• 1:33:41
  Speaker 2: a sudden, you're left with natural resources. But the history,
• 1:33:45
  Speaker 2: this would be too big of a book, but it'd
• 1:33:46
  Speaker 2: be the kind of book I'd like to write. But
• 1:33:49
  Speaker 2: I'm not sure many people read it, too broad. But basically,
• 1:33:51
  Speaker 2: history of the United States just told through natural resources
• 1:33:55
  Speaker 2: would be huge. But without, I mean, that's the reason
• 1:33:58
  Speaker 2: we've become such an amazing, powerful country. It's because of
• 1:34:02
  Speaker 2: our natural resource base. No doubt about it.
• 1:34:05
  Speaker 1: There's a Rapids, sort of the first big Rapids on
• 1:34:09
  Speaker 1: the St.
• 1:34:10
  Speaker 2: Lawrence.
• 1:34:12
  Speaker 1: Lachine Rapids.
• 1:34:13
  Speaker 2: Lachine, yeah.
• 1:34:14
  Speaker 1: Because it was like the China Rapids.
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:34:18
  Speaker 1: Because that was preventing you from getting to China. Right.
• 1:34:21
  Speaker 1: It's like, ah, damn it. If I could only get
• 1:34:24
  Speaker 1: over this rapids, I'd be in China, you know, and
• 1:34:26
  Speaker 1: it carries that name, right? China Rapids.
• 1:34:28
  Speaker 2: It is amazing with the search for the Northwest Passage
• 1:34:31
  Speaker 2: and China, how many centuries that spans and how many
• 1:34:35
  Speaker 2: lives were lost. You know, just amazing. And it's kind
• 1:34:39
  Speaker 2: of ironic that now when we know how to get
• 1:34:42
  Speaker 2: to China multiple ways because of a warming world, we're
• 1:34:46
  Speaker 2: getting pathways through the Arctic. And the Northwest passage is
• 1:34:50
  Speaker 2: going to be a real reality more and more. Yeah.
• 1:34:53
  Speaker 1: It's happening all over again without the loss of life. Yeah.
• 1:34:55
  Speaker 1: And then now like all these, you know, these geopolitical conflicts,
• 1:35:00
  Speaker 1: all these nations looking, looking to the Arctic, all this
• 1:35:04
  Speaker 1: talk of Greenland and all, you know, it's like, it's
• 1:35:06
  Speaker 1: like the shipping, the sort of shipping dream that motivated
• 1:35:11
  Speaker 1: the French and the Dutch and the English and all
• 1:35:15
  Speaker 1: these other places. It's like shipping dream. is in just
• 1:35:18
  Speaker 1: totally other circumstances becoming reality. Like safe, fairly reliable Arctic
• 1:35:25
  Speaker 1: transport as a result of changing climate.
• 1:35:31
  Speaker 2: You're right, it's gonna be the next, if it already
• 1:35:33
  Speaker 2: is to some extent, battleground. It's gonna be very important
• 1:35:36
  Speaker 2: in international relations and hopefully not conflict. I mean, manganese
• 1:35:42
  Speaker 2: nodules at the bottom of the ocean. There are so
• 1:35:44
  Speaker 2: many different resources that over time are going to be
• 1:35:47
  Speaker 2: exploited by one country or another.
• 1:35:50
  Speaker 1: Do you ever think about, this is my last question
• 1:35:52
  Speaker 1: for you as a writer. Well, I'll start by saying this.
• 1:35:56
  Speaker 1: I was talking to Ken, the documentarian, Ken Burns. Yep.
• 1:36:00
  Speaker 1: I bring this up all the time because I was
• 1:36:01
  Speaker 1: saying to him, I was saying to him, I'm like,
• 1:36:04
  Speaker 1: why not just do Afghanistan now? Like, do Afghanistan.
• 1:36:10
  Speaker 2: Oh, documentary.
• 1:36:11
  Speaker 1: Do the war in Afghanistan.
• 1:36:12
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 1:36:13
  Speaker 1: Okay? He finished Vietnam. He did the American Revolution. Do Afghanistan.
• 1:36:20
  Speaker 1: Everyone's alive? Very few Americans understand that conflict now. Imagine
• 1:36:30
  Speaker 1: the footage. It'd be the first project he could do
• 1:36:34
  Speaker 1: with tons of cell phone footage. He wouldn't need to
• 1:36:37
  Speaker 1: film old-timey maps and stuff like that. And paintings. It'd
• 1:36:42
  Speaker 1: be just... Go talk to everybody. They're all still alive. Right.
• 1:36:47
  Speaker 1: But he had some answers. I can't remember the details,
• 1:36:48
  Speaker 1: but he's like, it hasn't been interpreted and reinterpreted enough.
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:36:52
  Speaker 1: He said it took the war in Afghanistan to understand
• 1:36:57
  Speaker 1: the war in Vietnam. Right.
• 1:36:59
  Speaker 2: No, the other way around. No.
• 1:37:02
  Speaker 1: When he did Vietnam, when Ken Burns did the Vietnam,
• 1:37:06
  Speaker 1: his Vietnam project. Okay. He said it took.
• 1:37:10
  Speaker 2: Oh, I get it.
• 1:37:11
  Speaker 1: The American experience in Afghanistan.
• 1:37:13
  Speaker 2: Right.
• 1:37:15
  Speaker 1: To, like, come to this, the understanding that I would
• 1:37:20
  Speaker 1: bring to the Vietnam War. Right, okay. And he's like,
• 1:37:22
  Speaker 1: we'll need to reinterpret the war in Afghanistan and reinterpret
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 1: it again.
• 1:37:26
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:37:28
  Speaker 1: I'm paraphrasing, but roughly he said this. And then it'll
• 1:37:32
  Speaker 1: be time.
• 1:37:33
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:37:34
  Speaker 1: For the, you know, 12-hour, 20-hour... documentary about what really
• 1:37:42
  Speaker 1: happened in Afghanistan. Right. Right. Like he's not going to
• 1:37:45
  Speaker 1: do it yet. That's a long winded way of asking.
• 1:37:48
  Speaker 1: Do you, if, if would you do a book, would
• 1:37:51
  Speaker 1: you do a story from 2010?
• 1:37:52
  Speaker 2: Uh, no, but I have a very different, I think
• 1:37:58
  Speaker 2: what Ken said and what you paraphrase, I absolutely agree
• 1:38:01
  Speaker 2: with a hundred percent, uh, time and distance gives you
• 1:38:04
  Speaker 2: different perspective. And there's a saying in the world of
• 1:38:07
  Speaker 2: history that every 20 or so years, every generation, uh,
• 1:38:09
  Speaker 2: The new generation reinterprets the past or they have different
• 1:38:13
  Speaker 2: lenses to look at the past. But my sort of,
• 1:38:17
  Speaker 2: this is sort of a joke, but it's actually real.
• 1:38:20
  Speaker 2: Part of the reason I write books that go back
• 1:38:23
  Speaker 2: a long ways is I don't want to get into
• 1:38:26
  Speaker 2: writing books about people who are still alive because I
• 1:38:29
  Speaker 2: don't want to get into arguing. with them about interpretations.
• 1:38:31
  Speaker 1: Let them write their own book, man. That's what the
• 1:38:33
  Speaker 1: author Chris Offit said. They can write their own book.
• 1:38:35
  Speaker 2: Yeah, they can.
• 1:38:36
  Speaker 1: They're still around.
• 1:38:38
  Speaker 2: No, but there are plenty of modern topics that interest me,
• 1:38:43
  Speaker 2: but there's something I like about The 19th century, the
• 1:38:48
  Speaker 2: 18th century.
• 1:38:49
  Speaker 1: I'm drawn to that stuff too, man.
• 1:38:50
  Speaker 2: It's fun. And part of the value of waiting a
• 1:38:55
  Speaker 2: long time to write a book like that is you
• 1:38:57
  Speaker 2: have more sources. Not only the primary sources that continue
• 1:39:01
  Speaker 2: to be found, but the secondary sources of other people
• 1:39:05
  Speaker 2: that have come before you. So, you know, I noticed
• 1:39:09
  Speaker 2: that in one of your last podcasts, you had a
• 1:39:13
  Speaker 2: guy that wrote A Vast Wilderness. I can't remember his name.
• 1:39:16
  Speaker 2: burnt burnt about lewis and clark oh yeah well steven
• 1:39:19
  Speaker 2: ambrose wrote a book about lewis and clark there are
• 1:39:21
  Speaker 2: tons of books about lewis and clark but every generation
• 1:39:24
  Speaker 2: can either dig deeper have a slightly different angle and
• 1:39:29
  Speaker 2: that's that's valuable and i like i prefer having more
• 1:39:32
  Speaker 2: information to draw upon than less you know but i
• 1:39:36
  Speaker 2: do have a little bit of a journalism background i
• 1:39:38
  Speaker 2: worked for the uh upi for a while and i
• 1:39:41
  Speaker 2: worked at business week for a while i had a
• 1:39:43
  Speaker 2: fellowship there, but I just don't think I'd be as
• 1:39:46
  Speaker 2: good writing a book, a modern book about people who
• 1:39:50
  Speaker 2: are still alive. It's just a very different feel to it.
• 1:39:53
  Speaker 1: It's good.
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:39:54
  Speaker 1: It's good. You'd recognize that my plea, this is my
• 1:39:57
  Speaker 1: plea to like all the crack commando documentary Terrians that
• 1:40:01
  Speaker 1: are out there. Like the really good document. Yeah. Documentarians
• 1:40:05
  Speaker 1: is like five. It's like five hours from the Soviet
• 1:40:11
  Speaker 1: invasion to nine 11. And then it's an hour per year.
• 1:40:15
  Speaker 2: Wow.
• 1:40:16
  Speaker 1: I will watch, like I pledged you, if you make
• 1:40:18
  Speaker 1: this movie, I will watch it.
• 1:40:20
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:40:21
  Speaker 1: I promise. An hour per year.
• 1:40:23
  Speaker 2: It sounds wonderful. And documentaries, I mean, stuff that Ken
• 1:40:27
  Speaker 2: Burns and other documentarians and writers do is I think
• 1:40:29
  Speaker 2: a great service to the public because, you know, it's
• 1:40:32
  Speaker 2: trite to say that if you don't understand history, you're
• 1:40:34
  Speaker 2: going to repeat it. I'm not so sure that's always
• 1:40:36
  Speaker 2: the case. You know, history sort of doesn't repeat itself.
• 1:40:38
  Speaker 2: It rhymes a little bit.
• 1:40:39
  Speaker 1: Yeah, that's a great line.
• 1:40:40
  Speaker 2: But, I really believe that if you don't understand history,
• 1:40:45
  Speaker 2: you don't have a broad enough context for knowing where
• 1:40:49
  Speaker 2: we are now and where we might be in the future,
• 1:40:52
  Speaker 2: and also placing the now within a reasonable frame, and
• 1:40:59
  Speaker 2: not assuming, to use a Western term, that this is
• 1:41:02
  Speaker 2: our first rodeo. We've been through this stuff before, and
• 1:41:06
  Speaker 2: I think it's a great value to understand that, to
• 1:41:10
  Speaker 2: give a modern example, you know, politics can be messy.
• 1:41:14
  Speaker 2: Politics is dirty. It's nasty. There's a lot of lying
• 1:41:16
  Speaker 2: that goes on in politics. But if you look at
• 1:41:19
  Speaker 2: the election of Thomas Jefferson, or you go further back
• 1:41:22
  Speaker 2: even to Greek and Roman times, there was nastiness in
• 1:41:25
  Speaker 2: politics going back to as long as there have been humans.
• 1:41:29
  Speaker 1: People talk about how divisive politics is now. They used
• 1:41:32
  Speaker 1: to line up and have duels.
• 1:41:33
  Speaker 2: Yes, absolutely.
• 1:41:36
  Speaker 1: After the election, they would duel.
• 1:41:37
  Speaker 2: Yeah.
• 1:41:38
  Speaker 1: They're literally shooting each other, and people want to talk
• 1:41:41
  Speaker 1: about how politics is nasty now. This is a great
• 1:41:44
  Speaker 1: frustration that I have having kids. I love my kids
• 1:41:46
  Speaker 1: to death. They're getting old enough now to have all
• 1:41:49
  Speaker 1: these opinions. Okay. They come home from school telling me
• 1:41:52
  Speaker 1: all about whatever, you know? Yeah. And you know that
• 1:41:57
  Speaker 1: thing like you have to understand the past to understand
• 1:42:00
  Speaker 1: the present? I mean, God bless them. They don't understand
• 1:42:02
  Speaker 1: the past yet.
• 1:42:03
  Speaker 2: The past is 10 years ago.
• 1:42:05
  Speaker 1: They're picking up on these things and they'll come in
• 1:42:07
  Speaker 1: and be like, here's what I think about whatever, you know?
• 1:42:09
  Speaker 1: And I'm like, that's great. That's cute. But there's a
• 1:42:14
  Speaker 1: lot you're missing here.
• 1:42:15
  Speaker 2: Right, right.
• 1:42:17
  Speaker 1: There's a lot you're missing.
• 1:42:19
  Speaker 2: Yeah. It's good. It's going to be up to them
• 1:42:22
  Speaker 2: to make their own world and hopefully they'll do it right.
• 1:42:26
  Speaker 1: Yeah, I think so. Well, Eric J. Dolan, thanks for
• 1:42:29
  Speaker 1: coming on, man.
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 2: Thanks for having me.
• 1:42:30
  Speaker 1: It was great. Yeah, and again, if you listeners want
• 1:42:33
  Speaker 1: to dig into this man's, what's that word for your work,
• 1:42:36
  Speaker 1: your body of work? My corpus, my body of work. Yeah,
• 1:42:39
  Speaker 1: his corpus, his body of work. Tighten your boots up
• 1:42:44
  Speaker 1: because it's a big task, a lot of fantastic books.
• 1:42:47
  Speaker 2: Can I make one quick plug?
• 1:42:48
  Speaker 1: Please, please.
• 1:42:49
  Speaker 2: No, no, because I have a website. Notice I'm mentioning it.
• 1:42:51
  Speaker 2: It's my name.
• 1:42:52
  Speaker 1: Plug whatever you want. Eric J.
• 1:42:53
  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,
• 1:43:01
  Speaker 2: you can see all the books I've written, but I've
• 1:43:03
  Speaker 2: put the introduction to every single book of mine on
• 1:43:06
  Speaker 2: the website. So if a topic interests you, you can
• 1:43:10
  Speaker 2: read the introduction to see if this is going in
• 1:43:12
  Speaker 2: a direction that you might like. And also it lists
• 1:43:15
  Speaker 2: my speaking engagements. So if I'm in your neighborhood and
• 1:43:18
  Speaker 2: you're around, come and say hello.
• 1:43:21
  Speaker 1: Keep your eyes peeled for dudes in camo hats and
• 1:43:23
  Speaker 1: ask them. Yeah. Ask them who sent you.
• 1:43:27
  Speaker 2: Yeah. All right, man.
• 1:43:29
  Speaker 1: Thanks so much for coming on.
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 2: Okay.
• 1:43:30
  Speaker 1: Thank you.