Ep. 928: The Wreck of the Mentor

Steven Rinella talks with author Eric Jay Dolin about the Wreck of the Mentor: whalers, shipwrecks, and strandings. Find Eric’s work at: https://www.ericjaydolin.com/books Connect with Steve https://www.themeateater.com/authors/steven-rinella and The MeatEater Podcast Network https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork Steve on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/stevenrinella and Twitter https://twitter.com/stevenrinella?lang=en MeatEater on Instagram https://www.instagram.com/meateater, Facebook https://www.facebook.com/StevenRinellaMeatEater/, Twitter https://twitter.com/MeatEaterTV?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Eauthor, and YouTube https://www.youtube.com/@MeatEaterPodcastNetwork See omnystudio.com/listener https://omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

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• 1:57Steven Rinella?

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• 2:19Steven Rinella?

  Holy smokes, we got a writer for you today. Joined today by Eric J. Dolan. Eric J. Dolan is a maritime and environmental historian, author of 17 books. You could read this guy's books for the next five years, and that's all, you could just read nothing but his books for five years, and you wouldn't get through them. And you'd learn a lot. You'd dominate, you would dominate Meat Eater trivia if you read all of this guy's work. Among many other cool things, besides being a writer, he served as a fisheries policy analyst at the National Marine Fisheries Service and an environmental consultant. His books, now check this out. Leviathan, The History of Whaling in America. These are all books that I just, that I know about, own a bunch of them.

• 3:02Steven Rinella?

  So Leviathan, The History of Whaling in America. Fur Fortune and Empire, The Epic History of the Fur Trade in America. Black Flags, Blue Waters, which is about pirates and privateers too, right?

• 3:16Speaker 06

  Mainly about pirates, but I did talk about privateers, yeah.

• 3:20Steven Rinella?

  Snakehead, The Fish Out of Water. That's a good fish fried up.

• 3:23Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:24Steven Rinella?

  Did you eat many of those fried up?

• 3:25Speaker 06

  I, I didn't, but I heard they're wonderful.

• 3:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, no, it was good. Snakehead, The Fish Out of Water. But we're here to talk about his newest book, The Wreck of the Mentor. Came out this year, hit the New York Times Bestseller List. Welcome to the show, man.

• 3:41Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me, appreciate it.

• 3:42Steven Rinella?

  This is the first time we've ever had on a writer, or anyone, to tell a story that involved a dude being forcefully tattooed head to toe. You just don't think of this as a thing.

• 3:59Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 3:59Steven Rinella?

  Out there on the planet.

• 4:01Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 4:01Steven Rinella?

  Is that someone would forcibly tattoo you head to toe?

• 4:04Speaker 06

  I don't think it happens too often. It did happen.

• 4:06Steven Rinella?

  I've never heard of it. What, like, we're gonna work backward for a minute, we're gonna get to where it is, but like, that just struck me. What was that? I was trying to find images of him.

• 4:15Speaker 06

  Well, the only images come out of one of the books that was written by one of the guys in The Mentor that survived, a whale ship out in New Bedford. And the story of the tattooing is when they landed on the second island in the Palau Archipelago, the Tobians, the people on the island of Toby, they're tattooed from head to foot. And after the Americans had been there for over a year as captives, pretty much, the Tobians decided, well, you might as well look like us. So they started tattooing them on their arms and chests. Incredibly painful process. They take a sharpened fish bone or a bird bone. First they, first they outline the image in tarot ink on the person's body.

• 4:58Speaker 06

  Then they take this bone, they dip it into tarot ink, which is sort of a little bit bluish, purplish. And then they use a two-pound piece of ironwood to pound the bone into the skin over the design, often going deep enough to hit the bone. And during this time, the American whalers, of course, were screaming, but the Tobians viewed this as something that's absolutely wonderful, because you're becoming part of our community. And there was a, there was a spiritual component to getting tattooed. They're singing all the time. And this guy, Horace Holden, a Green Hand, a guy who'd never been on a whale boat before from New Hampshire, when he later wrote about it, he said, "I don't know if they were singing

• 5:42Speaker 06

  to drown out my screams, or because they were so happy about this." But then, once the tattoo was, was done, it would be a festering open sore for weeks. But what was really interesting to me is the Tobians wanted to tattoo their faces. And at this point, the American whalers said, "Absolutely not. We would rather die than have our faces tattooed." And then they pulled the God card, because they had been there for over a year, and they had learned the Tobian language. And they had learned that the Tobians believed in a God. They didn't believe in the Western God, the one that the whalers believed in, but they believed in a God.

• 6:22Speaker 06

  So one of the whalers said, "If you tattoo our faces, our God is gonna come down and wreak vengeance upon you." And the Tobians decided they didn't wanna risk it, so they didn't tattoo their face. And it's sort of a funny story about this. After the book came out, I had an excerpt from the book on my Facebook page. And a number of people from Palau had sort of found my Facebook page because of this book coming out. And I had this excerpt where I said, "The Americans, one of the Americans had a volcanic eruption upon being told that his face was gonna be tattooed."

• 7:02Speaker 06

  And this guy from Palau said in the comments, "You are a liar. There is, there are no volcanoes on Toby. You write fiction." So I wrote back to him, I hopefully he read it. I said, "I didn't say there was a volcano on Toby. It's actually the remains of a coral reef, but I just said they had a volcanic eruption." So it shows how the, you know, words can be misconstrued.

• 7:27Steven Rinella?

  A literal reader out there.

• 7:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 7:31Steven Rinella?

  Let's work, uh, let's go back to the beginning on this.

• 7:34Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 7:34Steven Rinella?

  So tell us about, like, what is the, when are we talking about? Like, set the scene for us. Like, when are we talking about? We're talking about, we're gonna talk about a ship called The Mentor.

• 7:45Speaker 06

  Right.

• 7:45Steven Rinella?

  What is this ship engaged in?

• 7:49Steven Rinella?

  What is its business?

• 7:50Speaker 06

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

• 8:23Steven Rinella?

  Oh, did they really?

• 8:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. Yeah, drift whaling went on for.

• 8:26Steven Rinella?

  Drift whaling?

• 8:27Speaker 06

  It's called drift oil, yeah. Just when a, when a, there were a lot more whales back then, and when one would die, they would drift ashore on Cape Cod, and they'd take advantage of it. They'd render the oil out of the blubber.

• 8:38Steven Rinella?

  Smelly businessman, because you're rendering like, probably some, some oil with a little rot to it.

• 8:43Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah, yeah, absolutely. They had their iron tripots and their sheds where they had the fires underneath the iron tripots, render the oil. They also took advantage of the baleen that was in the mouths of like, right whales to use in hoop skirts or other, other forms. They didn't use it as much then as they did in the 1800s. But then you fast forward a little bit, and the number of whales that drifted ashore was not always predictable. Not as many as they wanted as the industry expanded, so they slowly got into small boats, whale boats, about 24, 25 feet long with six men on board, many of them Indians at the time, which there were many in New England. They later got sort of extirpated due to disease and other factors.

• 9:26Speaker 06

  But they would go out and they'd do shore whaling, which is going within a couple of miles ashore, killing a whale, dragging it back to shore, and then.

• 9:34Steven Rinella?

  Killing it how? Just getting a harpoon into it?

• 9:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, getting a harpoon in it, and then having.

• 9:37Steven Rinella?

  And just wearing it out.

• 9:38Speaker 06

  Wearing it out. They tie off the rope to the boat, and the boat would be pulled, hopefully not pulled down under the water, but pulled for some distance. And once the whale tired out, they would row it back to shore, and it would be processed in the regular way.

• 9:54Steven Rinella?

  Well, what kind of money was that?

• 9:56Speaker 06

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

• 10:14Steven Rinella?

  So that wasn't primarily, like, if you go to the pilgrim times?

• 10:17Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 10:18Steven Rinella?

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

• 10:20Speaker 06

  They were doing drift whaling.

• 10:21Steven Rinella?

  Or like, near shore, intentional whaling?

• 10:23Speaker 06

  Right.

• 10:25Steven Rinella?

  They were producing a domestic product.

• 10:27Speaker 06

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

• 10:29Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 10:29Speaker 06

  But it really got bigger later, around the late 1600s, the early 1700s, they started to get farther and farther away from shore. And then in 1712, this event took place on Nantucket, which was the leading whaling place in the colonies. At the time, this guy named Christopher Hussey and his men went out in a couple of small whale boats, meaning to hunt within a few miles of Nantucket. This sand spit out in the middle of the ocean while a storm rolled in. They got blown way out offshore and they fell in with a bunch of sperm whales.

• 11:04Steven Rinella?

  Oh.

• 11:05Speaker 06

  No Americans colonists had killed a sperm whale before. They killed one, they rode it back to Nantucket. And the sperm whale is the most valuable whale of all because it's whale oil, both that which comes from its blubber and also that which they scoop out of the spermiceti organ, which is in that big bulbous head of a sperm whale is the brightest burning, cleanest burning whale oil of all. So in 1712, once they killed a sperm whale, all of a sudden, the American colonists got into bigger and bigger boats and went offshore out to the Grand Banks, other places. And they were in pursuit of sperm whales. And this industry got huge on the eve of the American Revolution.

• 11:48Speaker 06

  There were 350 whale ships, some of them traveling as much as a thousand miles over maybe up to six months or more, hunting whales up and down the Atlantic Ocean. And then, of course, the American Revolution, the whaling fleet is totally decimated. Nantucket, which had most of those whaling ships, after the revolution, there were only about 12.

• 12:13Steven Rinella?

  Cause they were, they were, uh, I'm gonna turn to our military expert over here. They were in script, is that the word? In scripted?

• 12:21Speaker 06

  Oh, oh, they, they were taken into the military? No, actually, actually, actually.

• 12:24Steven Rinella?

  What happened to the whale ships?

• 12:25Speaker 06

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

• 12:35Steven Rinella?

  Because of embargoes and stuff?

• 12:36Speaker 06

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

• 13:19Speaker 06

  So, so, so some of the whaling fleet in Nantucket went to England and they whaled from there. Some tried to go to the Falkland Islands.

• 13:29Steven Rinella?

  Traders, man.

• 13:30Speaker 06

  Yeah, it wa- it wasn't very successful. And then after the war, the American whale fleet was decimated. But we had the greatest whalemen and we rapidly came back. And by the end of the 1700s, we were going into the Pacific Ocean, which was the, you know, the holy grail for whalemen because that's where there were literally millions of sperm whales, the most valuable whale of all. So all of a sudden, the industry started taking off. Well, what happened? The War of 1812. The industry was knocked back on its heels again. And here we have Nantucket, right before the Treaty of Ghent, Nantucket actually voted to secede from the United States in order to gain the protection of the British Navy so they can continue whaling. But then the Treaty of Ghent.

• 14:15Steven Rinella?

  Them boys is some serious whalers, man.

• 14:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah. And then the Treaty of Ghent came in and the war was over. And that's when the Golden Age of Whaling really began. Nantucket was still the biggest port.

• 14:27Steven Rinella?

  What date are we at? When you say the Golden Age of Whaling was won?

• 14:30Speaker 06

  It really started about 1816, 1817, 1819, 1820s, it really took off.

• 14:36Steven Rinella?

  When do you feel on that Golden Age, just to bracket it? When did the Golden Age collapse?

• 14:41Speaker 06

  About 1859, the discovery of oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania. Cause when they discovered oil in Titusville, Pennsylvania, then there was suddenly an enormous source of cheap fuel to illuminate people's lives, which was kerosene. So basically the whale oil industry died in 1859, but American whaling went on until just after World War One. Uh, but it wasn't, it wasn't, it was never as big as it was before. But going back to the beginning of the Golden Age, this is a, this is a time that Herman Melville wrote about in Moby Dick, even though his book was basically in the 1840s, about a decade beyond the Sailing of the Mentor.

• 15:23Speaker 06

  But by the 1820s, New Bedford was already becoming the number one whaling port in the country because, I don't know how familiar you are with Nantucket, but their main harbor, there's a big bar across the main harbor. So as whaling ships got larger and larger, they couldn't make it over the bar. They started to create these things called camels, which were basically floating dry docks, which would grasp the whale ship, then they'd pump out all the water. It would elevate the whale ship to get over the bar.

• 15:54Steven Rinella?

  Just to get it into harbor?

• 15:55Speaker 06

  Just to get into the harbor. But that got really expensive. And then they started offloading whale oil and baleen on Martha's Vineyard and transporting it in smaller vessels over to Nantucket. But all of this was really expensive. So New Bedford, which was on the mainland and was attached to the growing network of railroads, they basically took over and they were started by a bunch of Nantucket whalemen that left Nantucket and went to New Bedford, like the Roach family. So by 1832, when the Mentor was getting ready to sail, and it was actually owned by a Roach, it was the, New Bedford was the largest port in the United States.

• 16:36Speaker 06

  There were hundreds of whale ships leaving from New Bedford and hundreds of voyages every year. So the Mentor, which had already been out as a whale ship before and had some success, its owner and the men on board, the 22 men on board, captained by a guy named Edward Barnard, who, he was only 31.

• 16:56Steven Rinella?

  That's all, yeah.

• 16:57Speaker 06

  He was 31 and they called him the old man.

• 16:59Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I was gonna bring that up, that, um, I was gonna ask you about that. That, uh, he's 31, but presumably, he must've started as an early, he must've started as young teens.

• 17:11Speaker 06

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

• 17:20Steven Rinella?

  He had to, man, to be running that ship at 31. Um, you know, you know, we jumped ahead for the dude tattooed?

• 17:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 17:27Steven Rinella?

  I wanna make sure to get to, uh, that guy died in the Great Lakes.

• 17:30Speaker 06

  Yes, he did.

• 17:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 17:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, he died, he died 1844. He was, uh, the captain of a schooner, the Pennsylvania on Lake Erie. And what people often don't realize is that the Great Lakes are like oceans. And they have horrific, uh, waves. And I know you did a, a session with the gales of John Bacon, the gales of November. So something similar happened to the, the Pennsylvania. A storm rolled in, rolled the boat over. Everybody on board died, including Captain Edward Barnard. And he was, uh, 44 years old.

• 18:07Steven Rinella?

  Never found that dude's body either.

• 18:09Speaker 06

  Never found his body.

• 18:10Steven Rinella?

  Okay. So the Mentor, it's like, so we're at, it's the height of whaling.

• 18:16Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 18:17Steven Rinella?

  And they're after right whales. Is it true that, that the term right whale means that just, that's the right whale? Like that's the one you want?

• 18:26Speaker 06

  Well, first, first, they were actually mainly after sperm whales, but there's still right whales out there.

• 18:30Steven Rinella?

  I'm sorry, yeah.

• 18:31Speaker 06

  No, no, but going back to your question, uh, yeah, a lot of people say it's because it's the right whale to hunt. There's some evidence of that, but really, if you look at the history, deep into the history, the reason it was called the right whale is maybe because it was the, the true whale or the only whale that they really hunted, not because it was the easiest to kill and tended to float right after being killed. So it was easier to pull into port or pull back to the mothership. But there still is a debate going on as to why it was called the right whale. But even if it wasn't the right whale, because it was the right whale to hunt, it really was the right whale to hunt, especially early on.

• 19:12Speaker 06

  I mean, today we only have 300 to 400 maybe right whales in the North Atlantic. And I think actually the South Atlantic. So they're in, I don't know if they're still on the endangered species list, but back then, there were probably tens of thousands. In fact, when the pilgrims arrived in Provincetown, uh, they, they meant to go to, uh, New York, but they got blown off course. When they arrived in Provincetown, the Mayflower was immediately surrounded by a huge number of whales. Somebody writing a few years later, in the 1820s, 1830s, said there were so many whales

• 19:52Speaker 06

  that you could walk across their backs from Provincetown all the way to Plymouth. So it was a real different time.

• 20:00Steven Rinella?

  God, it's hard to picture now, man.

• 20:01Speaker 06

  Yeah, no, yeah.

• 20:02Steven Rinella?

  So I, I messed that up, but so these guys, when they went out, the preferred whale was a sperm whale.

• 20:09Speaker 06

  Yeah, by the 1830s.

• 20:10Steven Rinella?

  Would they opportunistically get after other whales? Or was it so good that you just stuck with those?

• 20:15Speaker 06

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

• 20:57Speaker 06

  And they were hoping that most of those whales would be sperm whales.

• 21:01Steven Rinella?

  And they, and, and they take off from New Bedford, so they take off on the Atlantic coast.

• 21:06Speaker 06

  Right.

• 21:08Steven Rinella?

  And their aim. Is to go all the way down around the southern tip of Patagonia. And then start heading up north.

• 21:18Speaker 06

  No, not quite. That's where a lot of, a lot of whale ships at the time, that's the route they would take.

• 21:23Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 21:23Speaker 06

  The Mentor, when it's left, their sailing directions instructed them, they were going out for a relatively short voyage, maybe a year, a year and a half. And they hoped to stay in the Atlantic Ocean, the North and South Atlantic. But they went out beyond the Grand Banks. They weren't seeing many whales. They went across to the Azores, picked up some supplies, some water. Then they went down the western coast of Africa. They killed only two whales. So Barnard had to make a decision. He was, as a captain, given permission to change his voyage if he thought it was best for making money. So he decided, well, I've been in the Indian Ocean before. Let's go around the Cape of Good Hope,

• 22:07Speaker 06

  southern tip of Africa, go into the Indian Ocean around Mozambique and try to find more whales. They found two more whales, which is good, but four whales after being out almost a year is not particularly good. So he really decided to do the ultimate gambit. He knew that the Pacific Ocean is where most of the sperm whales were. So he set a course to go east all the way to the Pacific Ocean. And that's when the trouble began. When he left the Spice Islands, he was going north, sort of north east to Guam. But a storm rolled in.

• 22:45Steven Rinella?

  Let me, let me, I want to ask a question about this. You go out and you say to your guys, how many guys are on this boat?

• 22:53Speaker 06

  Twenty-two total.

• 22:54Steven Rinella?

  Okay. You say to your guys, let's just go a little dab north and check Nova Scotia.

• 23:00Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 23:01Steven Rinella?

  So in their mind, there's a possibility.

• 23:04Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 23:04Steven Rinella?

  Is it like, is it a possibility that you'll just go right up there?

• 23:09Speaker 06

  Hmm.

• 23:10Steven Rinella?

  Kill all the whales you need and come home. Or there's a possibility that you're going to wind up off the coast of Africa, in the Indian Ocean, in the Pacific Ocean. Like you have no concept of when you're coming home.

• 23:23Speaker 06

  True. I mean, during the Golden Age, the average whaling voyage, and this is mainly towards the 1840s and 50s, lasted for four years. So you knew you were going to be away a long time. The Mentor originally wasn't going to be away that long, but yes, they were opportunistic. Could they have gone to Nova Scotia in the North Atlantic, killed 20 whales, gone back home triumphant? Yes. Is it likely that that would have been the case? No.

• 23:50Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 23:51Speaker 06

  Especially as more and more whale ships were out there, it was getting harder to find the whales. And some of the whales were getting more skittish. So they knew that they were out for a while, at least a year perhaps. But they certainly, none of the men who got on the Mentor in July of 1831, thought that they were going to end up in the Pacific Ocean. And certainly none of them.

• 24:13Steven Rinella?

  So you think that in their mind, that was out of the question?

• 24:16Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 24:16Steven Rinella?

  That would have been hard to imagine.

• 24:17Speaker 06

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

• 24:38Steven Rinella?

  What's a lot of money for these guys? Um, is it life-changing money or is it that you went and you pulled a good salary and you were happy?

• 24:45Speaker 06

  Yeah. If you were a captain of a ship and the first mate or second mate or a doctor, sometimes they had doctors on board. And you were on a voyage that was really greasy, that brought back thousands and thousands of barrels of sperm whale oil. It probably wouldn't set you up for life, but you'd probably make the equivalent of what a average captain of a merchant ship might make in 10 years. So, and you'd get a short lay. If you're the captain, if you're higher up on a boat, you might get one tenth, one twentieth of the profits of the whaling voyage. But if you were a man before the mast, the guys that did the, as you know, Jimmy Stewart in It's a Wonderful Life,

• 25:26Speaker 06

  or, or, you know, the guys that did the living and dying in the, in the world. Uh, and you were before the mast and you were the ones that got into the whale boats, chased the whales, harpooned them, brought them back to the mother ship. Your lay might be one 125th, one 150th.

• 25:44Steven Rinella?

  They have these, just run like the crew guys.

• 25:47Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 25:48Steven Rinella?

  The crew guys, they are not motivated by, I can go away for four years and I might come back and never work again. That's like not, that's not.

• 25:57Speaker 06

  No, but they are, they are motivated for something short of that. I can go away for four years. I can come back and I could have enough money to maybe buy a house and live for certainly a number of years without having another job. So if you were on a really greasy voyage, even if you were earning such a small percentage of the overall profits, you still, it was a good career move. But the problem was a lot of whaling voyages came back. And not only did the men on board earn very little, sometimes they ended up being in debt, sort of like going to grad school. Basically, there's a lot of upfront costs when you went onto a whaling voyage. You had to buy your outfit from people they used to call outfitters, but they also called them land sharks

• 26:40Speaker 06

  because they would fleece the men for all the clothes and other items that they needed on their voyage. And if they didn't earn much money while they're out, they still owed that money. So it was, it was kind of a dicey proposition. And what was happening during the Golden Age in the 1830s, 40s and 50s is as the fleet expanded, because keep in mind, by 1846, there were 900 whale ships worldwide. 750 of them were American. To man, 750 whale ships going out on these voyages, you need a very large labor force. So they started to take the dregs of society on board. There were felons. There were people that were running away from debts that they had on, on land.

• 27:25Speaker 06

  There were also people they picked up in the Azores and Hawaii, any place, any ports they went to. And there were an awful lot of greenhands. Whereas if you were a whalerman on Nantucket in the 1750s, most of the other men on board your ship had whaled before. They were seasoned mariners. If you were on a whaling ship in the 1830s or 40s, it's likely that a good number of the men on board had never whaled before, much less been on a ship before. And the Mentor of the 22 men, I think it's four or five of them, had never been on a ship before. They were farmers. They just were having a tough time on land.

• 28:05Steven Rinella?

  You probably couldn't even swim.

• 28:06Speaker 06

  Yeah. Oh, oh, well, that, that was, even if you were a good whalerman, you probably couldn't swim in the 1830s. Cause people don't realize, you know, now we swim a lot. We go to the ocean. You know, it wasn't until the late 1800s that swimming really started to be a thing in the West, certainly in the United States. In the 1830s, most of the men on board these whale ships, if they were in a whale boat that got destroyed by a sperm whale, which is a very possible thing. They used to call the flukes of the sperm whale, the hand of God. Because if it came down on your whale boat, you were going to meet your maker. And then of course, there was the chomping, you know, the teeth of the sperm whale, which could destroy a whale boat.

• 28:49Speaker 06

  And there is a picture in my book Leviathan of a whale boat that's being destroyed by a sperm whale. And what's interesting about that, of the six or seven men that are dumped into the water, I can guarantee most, if not all of them, did not know how to swim. So if they couldn't grab onto something that was floating, like a piece of the remains of the boat, they would like, they would drown. And it's just, you just think about that. These guys are at the middle of the ocean, surrounded by water, no GPS, no cell phone, no nothing. And if they fall in the water, which happens.

• 29:24Steven Rinella?

  Their first swim.

• 29:25Speaker 06

  Yeah, it's first swim. Can you imagine that?

• 29:29Speaker 07

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• 30:59Steven Rinella?

  One thing I see about when I'm reading about these trips, even if things go smooth, it seems like there's always fatalities.

• 31:09Speaker 06

  Yes. Yeah, there are.

• 31:11Steven Rinella?

  So like when you go out 22 guys go out, it's almost like it seems maybe you'll know better than me. This is more a question than a statement, but it seems to me if they go out on a whaling trip and 22 guys go on a whaling trip and you look around, it's like someone's not coming back. Just statistically, someone's not coming back.

• 31:26Speaker 06

  Probably, yeah. I mean, there were a number of men who would fall from a mast during or spar during bad weather, trying to unfurl a reef, the sails. There were men who died when their whale boats got clobbered by whales. There were occasions, didn't happen very often, when a sperm whale was harpooned and the goal was to harpoon twice if you could. And the thing that you know very well is that whale blubber is not like our blubber. We're soft and budgy. Whale blubber is thick and fibrous. So if you're coming up to a big old bull sperm whale, it's got blubber that may be

• 32:07Speaker 06

  14 to 16 inches thick and it's got a thick layer of leathery skin over that. So you can't pitch a harpoon, which is fairly heavy, 30 or 40 feet and expect it to do anything. It'd be like lobbing a cannonball at old iron sides. It would just pop off. So what they had to do is get wood to black skin, which means the whale had to be right next to your whale boat, which is very dangerous potentially. They'd launch one harpoon and then if they could, they'd launch a second. And then they were off on what was called the Nantucket sleigh ride. They're probably among the fastest humans on earth. They were being pulled along maybe 20 to 25 miles per hour. And there was always a man at the front of the whale boat with a hatchet raised aloft,

• 32:52Speaker 06

  ready to cut that line if the whale sounded, if the whale went down, which they did because the whale boat would just pulled under the waves immediately. But if they were pulled along far enough, the whale would tire out, then they'd pull closer to the whale. And this is a really dangerous time because the whale would start spinning around and it was very close to the boat. Then they'd take a huge spade or a lance about 15 feet long and they'd plunge it into the side of the whale, looking for the life of the whale, which would be the lungs or a knot of blood vessels near the lungs. And then they knew they had success when they'd shout out chimneys of fire or tapping

• 33:32Speaker 06

  the claret, which meant that the blood was issuing from the blow hole and probably getting all over them. And then the whale would go into its final flurry. Yeah, then you knew you got them. And then you would tone back to the mothership and the processing would begin. And this is a dangerous time because you pull the whale up to the side of the, the whale, the whaling vessel. You'd put down a cutting stage, which was sort of lowered over the side and the men would stand on wood planks with long spades. And as the whale was rolled in the water, they would strip the blubber from the whale, sort of like stripping an orange in one continuous slice or an apple.

• 34:15Speaker 06

  And they'd raise the blubber up above the main deck and then they'd take a boarding knife, they'd cut transversely. This enormous, probably one ton, maybe two ton slab of blubber would come flying onto the main deck. And then they'd lower it onto the main deck and then they'd have to cut it up into these Bible pieces and they'd flay it some more. And then they'd pitch it into the tripots, which had iron, which had fires beneath.

• 34:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, what were they fueling those with?

• 34:44Speaker 06

  Well, they, they brought wood on board when they went to different ports. They had wood that they would use to.

• 34:52Steven Rinella?

  No kidding.

• 34:53Speaker 06

  But.

• 34:54Steven Rinella?

  So you're hauling enough firewood around to render all that oil.

• 34:57Speaker 06

  No, they, they, they get other, they get other fire. They could also use, I think some use coal, but what they would also use is the whale itself. Because what you did is when you pitched, when you pitched the blubber into the iron tripots, where they were, the oil was rendered out, it was siphoned out with a hose, it was put into caskets. Well, there was a lot of skin, integument, meat that was in those tripots and it would boil up and they used to call it cracklins. It was sort of like a modern, like modern pork rinds. It was very similar to that. And the men would eat that. They'd also cook donuts in, in the whale oil occasionally. But they'd, they'd scoop out the cracklins and they'd feed it to the fire below to help

• 35:42Speaker 06

  keep it going. But a lot of whale ships had to make a lot of ports of call, had to stop at a lot of islands to get supplies, water, food, wood, other things. So it was amazing, but what I wanted to talk about, you talking about people's not being able to swim. When they were on the cutting spades, cutting into the whale, there would be a huge number of sharks, sea wolves.

• 36:05Steven Rinella?

  Oh, you kidding me?

• 36:06Speaker 06

  Taking, taking their bit of the blubber. Well, you know, sharks are not interested in human beings. If sharks are really interested in us, we couldn't go swimming off the east coast or the west coast because there are plenty of them and we're easy pickings. But every once in a while, a whaleman who was cutting on these planks, which got greasy because they're cutting blubber, would slip and fall in. Occasionally they'd be bitten by a shark, but it was just by mistake. But more often than not, the unfortunate man who fell into the water, he might be crushed to death because the whale is right next to the hull of the boat and we're in the ocean. So it's going back and forth. So whaling was a really dangerous profession, sort of like lumberjacking today or being a fisherman today.

• 36:50Steven Rinella?

  That, uh, just as there were so many whales back then, there had been so many great whites back then.

• 36:57Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Oh, many more, many more sharks.

• 37:00Steven Rinella?

  So I got a buddy, he, uh, I've done it with them, but these guys, they'll jump in behind, when shrimp boats are sorting all the bycatch, they'll jump in and spearfish behind shrimp boats.

• 37:11Speaker 06

  Really?

• 37:12Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. I've, I've done it with them. It's unbelievable. I mean, the layers of sharks is unbelievable.

• 37:17Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 37:18Steven Rinella?

  Anyways, one of my buddies, he jumps in one time behind a shrimp boat. You don't even ask, he's jumping, you know? And the guy yelled to him, if you'd seen what I'd seen behind this boat, you would not do that.

• 37:32Speaker 06

  Well, it's very similar even during whaling days. Sharks would trail whale ships on occasion and the men would fish. They'd pull up sharks and they'd eat them.

• 37:45Steven Rinella?

  Oh, really?

• 37:46Speaker 06

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

• 38:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, see, I'm sitting here, I'm sitting here thinking that I wouldn't mind jumping in on one of these trips, man.

• 38:29Speaker 06

  Yeah, okay. Maybe horrible is wrong. Contextual because it's, you know, back then there were a lot of industries, as we know, the fur trade was very dangerous. Whaling was dangerous. Just fishing back then for cod and striped bass and other fish off the east coast on the Grand Banks. I come from Marblehead, Massachusetts in 1846. Marblehead was one of the leading fishing ports in the United States. And they went out during the summer of 1846 onto the Grand Banks and a hurricane essentially rolled in and more than 200 men and boats were, were killed.

• 39:10Speaker 06

  There were hundreds of widows in Marblehead, many fatherless children because of that. And that is the point at which Marblehead ceased to be a major fishing port. And if you go to Marblehead.

• 39:23Steven Rinella?

  They just lost like a generation of fishermen.

• 39:25Speaker 06

  They lost a generation of fishermen and it wasn't a very large town at the time. So they lost a significant portion of their town. Marblehead, I'm going to give a shout out to Marblehead because Marblehead was really big in the American revolution with General John Glover and rowing, you know, Washington across the Delaware and helping the Americans escape from the battle of New York before they were going to be clobbered by the British. So Marblehead is a very, Marblehead has a very proud maritime tradition. And if you ever visit Marblehead, there's a wonderful old burial ground from the late 1620s. And in it is a huge obelisk that is a memorial to all the men who died on the Grand Banks in 19, in 1846.

• 40:09Steven Rinella?

  No kidding.

• 40:10Speaker 06

  And I live, I live in an old house, 1753. And one of the guys who lived in that house during much of the 1800s was a shipping captain, a guy named Deveraux, John Deveraux. So I feel a little bit of a connection to that.

• 40:25Steven Rinella?

  Let's get to, let's get to the Mentor's troubles.

• 40:28Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 40:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, so we were in at this time, position us in the Pacific.

• 40:33Speaker 06

  Right, they're, they were leaving the Spice Islands, which is a little south of the Philippines. They were heading towards Guam and all of a sudden the storm rolls in. They no longer can rely on celestial navigation. So they're using their compass, they're using a form of dead reckoning. And Charles and Edward Barnard, Charles Barnard, I remember he was in my last book, Left for Dead. It was very confusing, these Barnard guys. But Edward Barnard was a seasoned captain. He thought, and he wrote later, that he was about 150 miles away from any land. So he thought he had plenty of sea room because most good mariners are not too concerned when there's

• 41:16Speaker 06

  bad weather, as long as they're not going to knock into a hidden reef or land. Because they can manage, you can do a lot of things to the sails, take all the sails down. And if you're a good sailor, you can handle it unless it's a full blown hurricane. We don't know exactly the intensity of this storm, but it was bad. And then on the evening, right, right after midnight on May 21st of 1832, remember they left in July of 1831, on the evening of May 21st of 1832, they ram into a reef. Giant hole in the hull. All the men on board knew that the Mentor was done for. The only real question is what should I do?

• 41:59Speaker 06

  And once a ship crashes, the captain loses ultimate authority. So people were free to do-

• 42:06Steven Rinella?

  Formally lose it?

• 42:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, it's just the custom of the, well, custom to see is cannibalism. But yeah, back then it was sort of the rules of the road. Once you crashed, the captain was no longer the leader. Now, they, they liked Captain Barnard, but the first mate decided his best bet was to take one of the whaleboats, lower it into the water in the midst of the storm and light out for land. Because just before the Mentor crashed, one of the men said he thought he saw land vaguely in the distance. So the first mate, 10, nine other men decide to get in the whaleboat with him. He's lowered into the water, they go off into the gloom, they're never seen again.

• 42:52Speaker 06

  They all died.

• 42:53Steven Rinella?

  No kidding?

• 42:53Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 42:54Steven Rinella?

  Just gone?

• 42:54Speaker 06

  Just gone. Well, they found the whaleboat later, sort of wrapped up on a reef. So I think the men got pitched out of the boat and they all drowned. So then Captain Barnard-

• 43:05Steven Rinella?

  So there's 22 guys-

• 43:06Speaker 06

  22 guys, now 10 are gone.

• 43:07Steven Rinella?

  10 die in that boat?

• 43:09Speaker 06

  Within an hour, within an hour of crashing probably.

• 43:10Steven Rinella?

  Oh, they die in the storm?

• 43:13Speaker 06

  No, no, no, they die after lowering the whale. Yeah, the storm is still going. They die after lowering the whaleboat. So Captain Barnard decides his best bet is to leave on a whaleboat too. Three other men decide to go with them. But Barnard wants a life insurance policy. So he ties a rope around his waist, the other end of which, this is the rope you use to attach a harpoon to. He ties a rope around his waist, the other end of it is on the Mentor. So he says, well, if this whaleboat overturns when we get in the water, they can reel me back in like a fish. Well, he gets into the whaleboat, three other men get into the whaleboat. As they're lowering it from the davits, which are the curved wooden arms on the side of

• 43:58Speaker 06

  a whaleboat, a wave smashes the whaleboat against the Mentor, destroys it, pitches all four men into the gloom, into the ocean. One of them dies immediately, he drowns. Two of them, amazingly enough, were swimmers at this time. They were able to swim back to the Mentor. They pulled themselves up onto the main deck, using the rigging, much of which was over the side of the ship, because the ship was cantered over a bit. It was almost, almost on its beam ends. And then Captain Barnard, well, he's pretty smart for putting a rope around his waist, because he was pulled about 100 yards away from the boat before the men on board started pulling him back in.

• 44:41Speaker 06

  And the bottom of his feet, because he was barefoot, were cut up, but he made it back to the Mentor.

• 44:46Steven Rinella?

  From the reef?

• 44:47Speaker 06

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

• 45:07Steven Rinella?

  Huh. At this, all, all money is gone. I mean, this is just like, it's done.

• 45:13Speaker 06

  Done, yeah. This, they're, they're just thinking of survival. And keep in mind, they don't know exactly where they are. They only find out they're in the Palauan archipelago a couple of days later. So they don't know quite where they are. They know their voyage is over, they know there's no money involved whatsoever. In fact, most of them are thinking, we may never make it back home again, because they're very familiar with the tales of whale ships and merchant ships that have crashed in the Pacific. Some have been killed by local locals, natives that were on those islands. Others were just, they starved because nobody was there to come pick them up. So the next morning, they do see land off in the distance. It's a very small island.

• 45:53Speaker 06

  They get into the last whaleboat on the Mentor, which is the one that they had in reserve because it had gaps in some of the planks. It wasn't seaworthy as the other ones. But they get into it and they start rowing and sailing for this Cay, this small island. It's only about 250 feet long and 50 feet wide. They eat some food, they catch some mollusks, some seashells, some crabs. They cook them on fire, they feel a little bit better. And then the next morning, well, actually that day, roughly that day, Captain Barnard uses his sextant to find out sort of where they are. And he discovers, oh, we're in Palau.

• 46:39Speaker 06

  Well, the next day-

• 46:41Steven Rinella?

  And he, he knows what that means.

• 46:43Speaker 06

  Yeah, he knows that Palau was an archipelago that not many people went by, but it was on all the maps of the day. Because it wasn't really part of the normal merchant trade route. But a whaleman definitely knew what Palau, Palau was. So he's in Palau and they're there the next day. And then what happens? A canoe comes up with about 20 warriors on board. Well, they row the canoe up to the beach, pull it onto the sand, step boldly onto the ground, and these guys are a sight to see. They have long greased black hair, they're tattooed from head to foot, they're completely

• 47:25Speaker 06

  naked, they look particularly angry, and worse than that, they're carrying spears, knives, and clubs. And the men of the Mentor have no idea whether they've come for good or ill. And they soon found out because the, the natives, the Palauans, sort of beckoned the whalemen to follow them, to get in their whaleboat. Now Barnard and the men thought they were being led to a local village. So they get into their whaleboat, they follow the canoe, and no sooner did they get on the water, than some of the natives jump into the whaleboat and start stealing items that are on the whaleboat, like clothes and canisters, and they try to steal a gun.

• 48:10Speaker 06

  And the Americans don't very much like this, so they fight back. The Palauans don't like that, so they start chucking spears and coconuts at the whalemen. Now Barnard's in a really difficult position. What does he do? How does he get away from a canoe that's much faster than a whaleboat, especially a whaleboat that's not in great shape? So he knows that islanders in the Pacific are really fond of Western objects, especially iron and mirrors, things like that, but also Western clothes. So there's a lot of clothes at the bottom of the whaleboat. So he tells his men to take individual pieces of clothes, wad them up, throw them as far away from the whaleboat as they can.

• 48:52Speaker 06

  And each time they do that, the canoe races over to pick up the piece of clothes- And the whaleboat gets a little bit farther away. And finally, they get so far away from the island of Chiangle, which is where these warriors are from, that they decide to turn about and leave the whalemen alone. Now, this-

• 49:12Steven Rinella?

  But these guys, th, th, these Palauans-

• 49:15Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 49:16Steven Rinella?

  They know exactly what's going on. I mean, they know that there's whalers.

• 49:20Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 49:21Steven Rinella?

  They know that these islands are scattered at times with castaways. Like, this is a thing they've been through before.

• 49:26Speaker 06

  Right. They've experienced Westerners before.

• 49:28Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:28Speaker 06

  There's probably a story that'll come up a little bit later about a ship called the Antelope, a British ship that crashed in Palau in seventeen eighty-three. So, yes, they're, they're, they know that there's a wider world out there.

• 49:39Steven Rinella?

  This is a thing that happens.

• 49:40Speaker 06

  They know about guns already. They know about clothes. They know about iron.

• 49:44Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 49:44Speaker 06

  Um, so the men of the mentor in the whaleboat, broiling sun in the middle of the ocean, and they start rowing for what they, what comes up next. They don't know. They find another island. They get off. This is a bigger island. They're there for a day. The next morning, what happens? Another canoe comes, approaches the island, but this one only had an old man and a boy in it.

• 50:08Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 50:09Speaker 06

  And they beckoned for the whalemen to follow them. So the whalemen, once again, get in their whaleboat, start following the canoe. The canoe races around a promontory and is soon out of sight. And just as the whaleboat reaches that promontory, what happens? An armada of canoes, twenty or more, filled with natives, whooping and hollering, comes down upon the whaleboat.

• 50:33Steven Rinella?

  They let them into a little ambush, or?

• 50:35Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, no, but this time they didn't attack.

• 50:37Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 50:37Speaker 06

  They didn't attack. They basically led the whalemen, uh, into the village of Ingarshalan, which is where these warriors came from. Now, we have an interesting situation. The American whaleman, who could speak English, step foot in Ingarshalan, a Palauan village, where they just speak Palauan.

• 50:57Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 50:57Speaker 06

  They can't communicate with one another. But using signs and gestures, the Palauan chief makes it clear that he wants to know if these Americans are British. Now, why the heck does he want to know if they're British? And it's all because of the wreck of the Antelope in seventeen eighty-three, a British, uh, Amer- East, uh, British East India ship that crashed into the island of Koror, off the island of Koror, in the Palauan archipelago. I need to step back for a second and tell you, the Palauan archipelago is three hundred and forty different islands, about five hundred miles to the east of the southern tip of the Philippines.

• 51:38Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 51:39Speaker 06

  At this time, there are numerous villages in Palau. They each have their own sphere of influence and power center.

• 51:47Steven Rinella?

  Mm-hmm.

• 51:47Speaker 06

  So, the Americans crashed up here, and they're in the, they're in the, uh, village of Ingarshalan. The Antelope in seventeen eighty-three crashed maybe eighty miles further south, off of Koror, another village. And the Korore's chief agreed to allow the British to build a new boat, salvage it from the Antelope, that they could use to get back to, you know, Macau or Canton or the Spice Islands, and then get back to London. But in exchange for this hospitality, the Korore's required the British to engage in four inter-village wars with the Korore's, and to give them guns and ammunition.

• 52:33Speaker 06

  Guns and ammunition are a huge thing in the Pacific at this time, because a lot of islanders never saw them before.

• 52:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 52:38Speaker 06

  And you realize, once you have guns and ammunition, you have a lot more power than somebody who has a spear.

• 52:43Steven Rinella?

  Kick some ass, so they got some guns of their own, yeah.

• 52:45Speaker 06

  They got guns and ammunition. The, uh, the British helped them in four battles. They routed their enemies. Four years later, another British East India ship came by to give them more guns and ammunition as a thank you for helping the men of the Antelope escape. And they ultimately did make it back to London. So what's one of the villages that Koror vanquished during their killing spree? Ingarshalan, where the American whalemen landed up, ended up. So, of course, the Ingarshalanese hate the British, because the British are the ones that allowed their enemies to become so powerful.

• 53:22Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 53:22Speaker 06

  So, the Americans, Captain Barnard, using signs and signals, is able, once again, somehow to communicate that he's not British. He's American. Well, the Ingarshalanese have no idea what an American is, but they're just happy that they're not British.

• 53:40Steven Rinella?

  Sure.

• 53:40Speaker 06

  So the priestess says, let's welcome these guys in as honored guests. They start to have a feast. Just as the feast begins, coming down the pathway is what appears to be a white man, sixty years old, long gray hair, not a tooth in his mouth, and he's tattooed from head to foot. But better yet, he speaks English. It turns out, he's a beachcomber named Charlie, who jumped ship from a British ship in the early eighteen hundreds and decided to quote-unquote, "go native", which is, and they used to call them beachcombers in the early eighteen hundreds. Uh, actually, Richard Henry Dana, two years before the Mass, coined that term.

• 54:22Speaker 06

  And then Herman Melville was a beachcomber, who jumped ship from a whale ship, the Akushnet, and he landed on the Merkazas for a couple of years, and actually used that experience to write two of his most famous novels, Ummu and Typee. So, anyway, backtracking, so the, so the, uh, Charlie comes walking up. He's English. He suddenly can act as a translator.

• 54:44Steven Rinella?

  Now, why aren't they pissed at that Englishman?

• 54:46Speaker 06

  Oh, no, well, well.

• 54:47Steven Rinella?

  Because he was a defector?

• 54:48Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was a defector. It was just him alone. He was defenseless.

• 54:51Steven Rinella?

  God.

• 54:51Speaker 06

  And he offered them information about the West.

• 54:53Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 54:54Speaker 06

  And, uh, maybe he was a nice guy.

• 54:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 54:56Speaker 06

  You know, and he had to tell good jokes. I don't know. But he actually ended up marrying a, uh, Ingarshalanese woman.

• 55:03Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 55:04Speaker 06

  And he rose to the rank of a minor chief in the village. But the reason it's so important for this story is that he acted as a translator between the Americans and the Ingarshalanese. So now, all of a sudden, they could communicate freely. And the Ingarshalanese decided, they said, "Okay, we'll help you build a ship", not out of the remains of a mentor, but from wood on the island, breadfruit or coconut or whatever. "We'll help you build a ship, but we're not doing this just because we're nice guys. Uh, we're doing this because when you go back home to the United States, we want you to come back with two hundred guns and gunpowder and balls and flints, so that we can become powerful and we can go kick the Korore's butts."

• 55:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 55:50Speaker 06

  So, they, you know, guns plays a big role in this story. Well, the Americans agree to this deal, even though they have no faith that the United States government is gonna live up to it.

• 56:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 56:02Speaker 06

  And the Ingar-

• 56:02Steven Rinella?

  They're prob- I mean, they gotta be thinking, once we're out of here, we're gonna forget about this whole deal.

• 56:06Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 56:07Steven Rinella?

  Like, I'm not coming back.

• 56:10Speaker 01

  Nine-one-one, what's your emergency?

• 56:13Speaker 07

  We help us. They're everywhere. We think they're murder hornets.

• 56:18Speaker 02

  Nine-one-one Nashville returns.

• 56:20Speaker 06

  There's a homicide detective down here. Three bodies on the ground.

• 56:24Speaker 02

  With emergencies of biblical proportions.

• 56:26Speaker 04

  Oh, sense swarms upon you and upon your people.

• 56:29Speaker 06

  That's one of the plagues of the Bible.

• 56:30Speaker 04

  And somebody's unleashing them on Nashville.

• 56:33Speaker 02

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• 57:41Speaker 06

  So the Ingarshalanese say, "Okay, uh, we're gonna help you build a boat." They try to start building a boat. They have nails from the ship. Uh, every time they put a nail through one of the planks of a breadfruit tree, it splits. It's not as strong as an oak or live oak or anything like that, or pine. So, uh, the Ingarshalanese are getting very frustrated. The Americans are getting very frustrated. So finally, the Ingarshalanese says, "Okay, we know what we're gonna do. We're gonna cut down the largest breadfruit tree on the island. We're gonna carve you a mighty canoe, and you're gonna use this canoe, along with your whaleboat, to get to the Spice Islands, where you can get a ship back to the United States." So the Americans say, "Fine." So it takes months to build this canoe.

• 58:26Speaker 06

  And finally, six months after the Americans arrived in Ingarshalan, the canoe is ready to go. And it's an outrigger canoe. It's got two outriggers for balance. It's pretty big. Uh, they load it up with a lot of food and water. They load food and water into the whaleboat. But this is, it's got a string attached to it. The Ingarshalanese are no rubes. They're not, they're not dumb. They said, "How are we gonna guarantee these Americans come back?" So they require Barnard to leave three of his men as hostages behind in Ingarshalan. So the Americans sail off, and they take three Ingarshalanese with them to see the wider world and come back home at a later date

• 59:10Speaker 06

  and tell all their peers about what's out there in this world that we don't-

• 59:14Steven Rinella?

  You see this, this type of exchange?

• 59:17Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 59:18Steven Rinella?

  All through history.

• 59:19Speaker 06

  Yes, oh, absolutely.

• 59:20Steven Rinella?

  It's like when the, when the colonial superpowers were in South America, like when the French, when the French came up to Saint Lawrence, this like-

• 59:26Speaker 06

  Yeah, Indians.

• 59:27Steven Rinella?

  This taking and leaving of people, and this exchange, and sort of almost like a whole collateral.

• 59:33Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 59:33Steven Rinella?

  You know, holding your people's collateral.

• 59:35Speaker 06

  Exactly. Well, in seventeen eighty-three, I mentioned the Antelope, the British ship. When they left, they took Lebu, a prince, the son of the king of Koror, back to London. Huge stir. Books written about it. Unfortunately, he died of smallpox a couple of months after he arrived, but it was a really big news of the day. And I have to tell a little funny, a funny story. I sent a copy of my book to the president of Palau.

• 1:00:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:00:03Speaker 06

  And about a month ago, I got an email back from him. And he said he really liked the book. He hoped it would be made into a movie. I said, "Oh, that'd be lovely." And he said, "You know, I was just in England, and I was discussing this book and the story of Lebu, the Palauan prince who got taken to London with King Charles." So I thought that was, that was kinda cool.

• 1:00:22Steven Rinella?

  Oh, that's crazy.

• 1:00:23Speaker 06

  I have no idea if King Charles bought a copy, but-

• 1:00:25Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. There, there's a, uh, Cartier, the, the-

• 1:00:28Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:28Steven Rinella?

  French explorer.

• 1:00:29Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:00:30Steven Rinella?

  At one point in time, he takes a bunch of Native Americans back. They all die very quickly

• 1:00:36Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:00:37Steven Rinella?

  from disease. And when he comes back, when he returns, the peoples that he took them from are like, hey, what happened to everybody you took? Oh, man, they uh, they became lords and they married local French women.

• 1:00:54Speaker 06

  Really?

• 1:00:55Steven Rinella?

  And they just decided to stay.

• 1:00:57Speaker 06

  Oh, that's a good cover story.

• 1:01:00Speaker 06

  Better than we killed them.

• 1:01:02Steven Rinella?

  They all kind of died right away, you know, he just, he just, he just flat out tells them something. And they're like, oh, that sounds great.

• 1:01:08Speaker 06

  Wow. No, I didn't know that story. That's a great story. Yeah, the, it is amazing how many, you're right. In so many instances in history, people either voluntarily or by theft would take the indigenous people they knocked into to bring them back as showpieces or just curiosity.

• 1:01:26Steven Rinella?

  So how did he pick the three that got to stay? Did he get to pick or did they pick?

• 1:01:32Speaker 06

  Exactly how they did it, I don't know. They didn't talk about it in the books they wrote later.

• 1:01:35Steven Rinella?

  And what was the envious position? You could, you could see that staying.

• 1:01:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:01:41Steven Rinella?

  Cause she's like, oh, man, you guys are gonna die in this canoe.

• 1:01:43Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:01:44Steven Rinella?

  I'm gonna stay and maybe I'll get a better opportunity to jump on a ship down the road. Or you could be like, man, I'm like, I stay here. These people are gonna turn on me or something's gonna happen.

• 1:01:55Speaker 06

  Well, you have the benefit of hindsight, going back to that era and what they were dealing with in the moment. I might've chosen to stay because they had been there for six months. They were treated very well by the Ingarshalongis.

• 1:02:09Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:02:10Speaker 06

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

• 1:02:47Steven Rinella?

  So how, so we're dealing with 11 guys now or 12 guys?

• 1:02:52Speaker 06

  Well, their total, there were a total of 11 guys left after the shipwreck.

• 1:02:58Steven Rinella?

  10 died in one shipwreck, one drowned.

• 1:03:00Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:03:01Steven Rinella?

  And no one's died since then.

• 1:03:02Speaker 06

  Right, no one's died.

• 1:03:03Steven Rinella?

  So now three stay.

• 1:03:04Speaker 06

  Three stay behind.

• 1:03:05Steven Rinella?

  And eight.

• 1:03:06Speaker 06

  Eight leave.

• 1:03:07Steven Rinella?

  And they're gonna boogie for somewhere else.

• 1:03:09Speaker 06

  They, they were hopefully gonna go to the Spice Islands, which is 800 miles to the southwest.

• 1:03:14Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:03:15Speaker 06

  That was their hope. And they had a rudimentary compass. Actually, they had the compass that was left behind by the antelope in 1783 to use as a guide along with celestial navigation. So they decide, they, they left. Unfortunately, even though the Palauans are well-known for being excellent craftsmen, having four types of canoes that are very seaworthy, this did not burnish their reputation. Because as Horace Holden said, this canoe, you sort of floated in the water like a bobbing trunk of a tree. And not long after they left, it swamped.

• 1:04:00Speaker 06

  And what was worse is half of their food floated away into the Pacific Ocean. They tried to bail the canoe, but they couldn't. So they ultimately had to leave it behind. So everybody, 11 men, had to climb into a 25-foot-long whaleboat and continue, hopefully, onto the Spice Islands. For 14 days, they sailed under the broiling sun. They started to run out of food and water. And what was worse is the water was held in these bamboo canteens. You know, a large bamboo, they have these septums that separate different parts. Well, they basically would cut it off above the septum, below a septum, then they put a little hole in it

• 1:04:44Speaker 06

  and they cork it with some resin. And that was their, their canteen. Well, after drinking from this canteen for days on end, the bacteria from their mouths and the sap from the bamboo mixed to make this fetid water mix.

• 1:05:02Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:05:03Speaker 06

  You know, to, you think that castorium with alcohol is bad enough. It was, and they, they could barely drink this without retching. So after about 14 days, all of a sudden, Barnard, who was the only one that was sitting upright in the whaleboat, sees land in the distance. He knows it's not the Spice Islands. Spice Islands are big, a bunch of islands, but some of them are huge. Well, the island that he sees in the distance is about a mile long and a half mile wide. But if they stayed on the open ocean any longer, they would start dying.

• 1:05:35Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:05:35Speaker 06

  So they decided, okay, we're gonna go for that island. And he told his men, uh, as soon as he saw, what does he see? Coming from the island? A bunch of canoes racing towards them. And he said, you know, we can't do anything but submit. And they submit. And this was a much rougher reception because these canoes surrounded the whaleboat. They pitched all of the men into the water. They destroyed the whaleboat down to the waterline because they wanted the iron nails and the wood. And then finally, after the men in the water were begging for some time, they pulled them from the ocean

• 1:06:13Speaker 06

  into the canoes, stripped them of all their clothes, and then landed them on the beach on this island of Toby. Now, it's important to understand that at this time, the island of Toby, it's a mile long, half mile wide. 400 people are living on this island. It is not part of Palau at the time. It's part of Palau today, but back then it was not part of Palau. And in fact, the Tobians spoke an entirely different language than the Palauans that the whalemen had recently left. And Toby's about 800 miles south, a little southwest of Ingarshalong where they left from.

• 1:06:53Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:06:54Speaker 06

  So they're pulled onto this island.

• 1:06:55Steven Rinella?

  But they got, but they got Palauans in the boat.

• 1:06:58Speaker 06

  They got Palauans, but the Palauans can't communicate with the Tobians.

• 1:07:00Steven Rinella?

  Tobians recognize them as enemies or not?

• 1:07:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, they recognize them as other islanders because they're tattooed like they are.

• 1:07:07Steven Rinella?

  Got it.

• 1:07:07Speaker 06

  One big difference is in Palau, it was common to blacken your teeth or lacquer your teeth. And some people later would call it Japaning your teeth.

• 1:07:17Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:07:18Speaker 06

  And they did that probably to reduce rot. It's actually proven that it, it helps the teeth stand up over time. But it makes for a funny looking smile because your teeth are totally black. And then their saliva was red because Palauans chewed on beetles nuts.

• 1:07:32Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:07:32Speaker 06

  All day, mild narcotic. So it's kind of horrifying visage that greeted these American whalemen.

• 1:07:39Steven Rinella?

  Guys that had all those red teeth and that stuff, yeah.

• 1:07:42Speaker 06

  Yeah. So, uh, but the, the Tobians did not blacken their teeth. So they had, they had white teeth. So they looked different. And whether they knew that the, they probably didn't even know what Palau was. Maybe they did. The Tobians were really off the beaten track.

• 1:07:57Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:07:57Speaker 06

  Only one or two Western ships had ever even come by there in hundreds of years. And they didn't have much interaction with, uh, other islands in the area because they were in the middle, in Micronesia, but they were very far away from other islands. So anyway, these, so now the Americans and the three Ingarshalongis are on Toby. It was clear immediately they were gonna be treated as captives. Each one of them was given to a different family. And they were forced to work harvesting coconuts, fishing on occasion. But mainly what they did is tended to the taro pits, which is sort of like a potato, but thicker and richer and they make poi out of it.

• 1:08:42Speaker 06

  And, um, so they tended to the taro pits, which were these muddy slurries in the middle of the island from morning to night. And they had no idea how or if they were ever gonna be able to leave the island. But after two months, what happens? A Western ship, the Sabina, which was heading to Macau, a Spanish ship, comes by. The natives, the Tobians are,

• 1:09:08Speaker 06

  they know enough about Westerners that Westerners have iron. They haven't gotten guns from Westerners, but they have iron. So they take their canoes out to the Sabina. Well, the American whalemen and the Ingarshalongis wanted to get on the canoes because they viewed the Sabina off in the distance as their ticket to going home.

• 1:09:27Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:27Speaker 06

  Well, the Tobians had no interest in any of them getting into any of the canoes. But Captain Barnard and one other guy, a guy named Bartlett Rollins, was able to fight their way onto two separate canoes. So the canoes go out to the Sabina. Captain Soames is on the main deck. He's surrounded by a bunch of canoes full of warriors. And Captain Barnard yells out in English. Well, Captain Soames is pretty surprised.

• 1:09:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:09:56Speaker 06

  So he sends one of his boats out. Finally, Captain Barnard and Whaleman Rollins are taken on board the Sabina. And Barnard immediately pleads with Soames to go to Toby and get the rest of the Americans and the Ingarshalongis. But picture this, the Sabina has maybe 13 men on board. They have limited arms. They're surrounded by very angry looking natives.

• 1:10:23Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:10:24Speaker 06

  And to make matters worse, Captain Barnard, the first thing he told Captain Soames when he got on board the ship was how they arrived there. And when they arrived, their whaleboat was destroyed and they were beaten essentially and taken to the beach. So Soames is thinking, well, this is not, I don't want to go to the island and try to extract more people. So he gives them some iron in exchange for letting these two people go. The iron gets back to the island of Toby. The Sabina takes off.

• 1:10:57Steven Rinella?

  Uh.

• 1:10:57Speaker 06

  And on the island of Toby.

• 1:11:01Speaker 06

  Barnard, keep in mind, he wrote about this later. He thought that he had convinced Soames to give enough iron to make the Tobians happy with the exchange. Well, they weren't happy. They thought that the amount of iron that they'd been given was woefully inadequate.

• 1:11:15Steven Rinella?

  Wasn't enough to buy two slaves.

• 1:11:17Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah, yeah.

• 1:11:17Steven Rinella?

  You know, just a comment about that is a thing that's frustrating is um the, the modern American comprehension of slavery.

• 1:11:27Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:11:28Steven Rinella?

  Like, the way it's taught, people don't realize how global it was.

• 1:11:32Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah. Oh, goes back thousands and thousands of years.

• 1:11:34Steven Rinella?

  It's sort of like in people's heads now, there's like this American invention or something.

• 1:11:37Speaker 06

  No, no.

• 1:11:37Steven Rinella?

  Not realizing just like slavery at this time, slavery was everywhere.

• 1:11:42Speaker 06

  Yes. And oh, absolutely. Slavery is as old as humankind.

• 1:11:47Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's unbelievable the way that it's been sort of like taught and misunderstood to be that it was this kind of like invention or something, you know?

• 1:11:56Speaker 06

  So, so they're there. The Tobians come back. They're pissed off. Who do they take out their anger on? The whalemen?

• 1:12:04Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:12:04Speaker 06

  And the Ingharshalongis who are left behind. So this begins a prolonged period of suffering for them. And then a typhoon comes along, which is a hurricane by another name. I wrote a book called A Furious Sky about hurricanes. Great fun writing. A lot of people die in the book. But anyway, typhoons are just hurricanes by another name. So this typhoon almost destroys Toby. Knocks down a lot of their best producing coconut trees.

• 1:12:33Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:12:33Speaker 06

  Swamps their taro patches with sand and salt water. So the Americans and the Ingharshalongis are required to rebuild the taro pits. And part of that involves taking very jagged coral stones from the periphery of the island to the center to make walls around the taro pits.

• 1:12:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:12:57Speaker 06

  So they're doing this, they're emaciated because the Americans and the Ingharshalongis are the bottom of the food chain, so to speak, on Toby. And they're going through a period of sort of limited resources.

• 1:13:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:13:10Speaker 06

  So they look like walking skeletons. In fact, at one point, Horace Holden described his skin as looking more like that of our anosaurus than a human being. But they're forced to work on meager rations. Right after the tattoo is when we get to the part of the story which we started out today on, the tattooing, the forced tattooing. And then about a year, a little more than a year after they were there, uh, the, um, it was more a year and a half, no, it was a couple of years, a couple of years after they were there, what happens? Another ship comes by, but before.

• 1:13:46Steven Rinella?

  But what the, is Barnard hatch in a plan to go get him or is he just out?

• 1:13:51Speaker 06

  No, oh yeah. Barnard ultimately makes it back to the United States. Uh, he makes it back to New York and New Bedford years after they left on the original ship. One of the first things he does is he writes a letter to Levi Woodbury, the Secretary of the Navy, telling him what happened in Palau, what happened to the Mentor, and pleading with him to send a naval rescue mission to get the rest of the whalemen. And also, he mentions, get the Ingharshalongis back to their home village. But then what is, what is Barnard doing? I mean, this, this, this concept blows a lot of people away, but whalemen back then, they were more married to the ocean than they were to their wives.

• 1:14:34Speaker 06

  When Barnard got back, he met a daughter he had never seen before. He was bereft of, not bereft, he had no money. In fact, he was in debt. So what does he do? He immediately goes back on a whale ship soon after penning this letter and he goes on a couple more whaling voyages.

• 1:14:50Steven Rinella?

  Cause he doesn't have the financial means to go get the people.

• 1:14:53Speaker 06

  Oh, no, he couldn't. No, he couldn't. He couldn't mount a rescue operation. He's just a captain of a whale ship. He's not a wealthy man.

• 1:14:58Steven Rinella?

  Why does he get all the way back to America before he starts dealing with this problem? I mean, he must've made a dozen stops on his way back to America.

• 1:15:04Speaker 06

  No, he did. He stopped in Batavia, which was Dutch at the time, and he knocked into a US naval ship, the USS Boxer.

• 1:15:12Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:15:12Speaker 06

  And he told the captain the same story and he said, go get them.

• 1:15:16Steven Rinella?

  And what did the captain do with that?

• 1:15:17Speaker 06

  Oh, nothing essentially. He can't do anything without orders from the Secretary of the Navy, I think at that point. He didn't, the, the captain of the Boxer did not go to Palau. He probably had orders, I don't know what the rest of his voyage was supposed to be.

• 1:15:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:15:30Speaker 06

  Something else. So, um, so Barnard did his best, or at least what he thought was his best. And there were a lot of articles in American newspapers when he and Rollins returned. And so a lot of people knew what had happened in the Mentor, including the family members of the people who were still missing. And they started lobbying for the US Navy to send a rescue mission, which ultimately happened later, but later in the story. But back on Toby, we've got Horace Holden and the rest of them in absolutely miserable shape. So they're so ill, they're so skinny that they finally beg their Tobian masters or overseers to be released from work. And at this point, they'd been there more than a year. So they spoke Tobian.

• 1:16:15Speaker 06

  So they could speak directly to the people that were holding them. So, uh, at first the Tobians didn't want to release them, but then they said, okay, if you don't work, you don't get any food. And the Americans and the Ingharshalongis said, okay. And at this time, it was fewer of them. Because over the span of a year, a year and a half, three Americans died of starvation.

• 1:16:39Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:16:39Speaker 06

  One was killed when he was accused of stealing something. And then two of the Ingharshalongis were, died of starvation. So now, a couple of years after arriving in Toby, you have three men left. You have Horace Holden, Benjamin Newt, another whaleman, and a guy named Kobak, who was a Ingharshalongis prince or chief.

• 1:17:02Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:03Speaker 06

  And they're the only ones left. So they begged not to be, they begged to be released from work. They know that that means they won't get food. They accept that as a deal they're willing to make. And from that point forward, they spend a lot of time crawling around the island, eating bugs, leaves, and also the entrails, which was particularly, a lot of the Tobians, after they finished their main meal, sometimes they would feel sorry for these men and they'd give them the entrails to eat. So they were nothing but skin and, and bones.

• 1:17:37Steven Rinella?

  You mean like fish guts and stuff?

• 1:17:39Speaker 06

  Yeah, fish guts. Yeah, intestines, stuff like that. So they were in really bad shape. And then what, what happened? Oh, the other thing. Uh, Horace Holden tells his overseer, who'd seemed to be a nice guy, and Horace Holden's given name while he was on Toby was Temit, T E M I T.

• 1:17:59Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:17:59Speaker 06

  And he talks to his overseer and he said, you know, if there's another Western ship that comes by and you put me on board that ship, I am going to reward you with a lot of iron. So what happens? A couple of years after they've been there, a Western ship comes by. It's a British ship. It's called the, uh, the Britannia.

• 1:18:20Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:18:21Speaker 06

  And it's captained by a guy named Henry Short. The same play unfolds. The warriors and the men in the canoes go out to the ship hoping to trade for iron. This time, realizing that Holden had made this pledge, they let Holden and Newt get onto a couple of canoes.

• 1:18:42Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:18:42Speaker 06

  They go out to the Britannia. Holden yells across the water in English, telling him who he is. Captain Short is dumbfounded and he goes, he sends his men off in the longboat. They go to within about a hundred feet of the canoes, because they were told to stay farther away because these warriors had weapons.

• 1:19:03Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:04Speaker 06

  Holden tells them more of his story. The men on board the longboat tell Holden to jump into the water and swim to the longboat. Well, Holden is, you know, partially starved, weak, but he summons up his strength. He dives into the water, claws his way forward, and then, right when he's at next to the longboat, the men, a couple of the British guys, pull him onto the boat. One of them exclaims, we have just saved him now. And he wasn't referring to the simple act of plucking Holden out of the water, but rather to the fate that he had just avoided. Because there, next to the longboat, was a huge shark.

• 1:19:48Steven Rinella?

  Hmm.

• 1:19:48Speaker 06

  Rolling on its side, mouth open, ready to make Holden its next meal.

• 1:19:55Steven Rinella?

  Huh.

• 1:19:55Speaker 06

  So they saved him. He got on board. Newt, who was almost dead, got on board the Britannia. And they begged Captain Short, just like the other people had begged Soames, to go to the island of Toby.

• 1:20:09Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:09Speaker 06

  To rescue Kobak. Cause this is a fascinating part of the story to me. When the Americans arrived in Palau, even after they got along with the Palauans, their initial attitude towards the Palauans was that they were nothing but savages, barbarians, and brutes. And that was a common attitude of Westerners at the time. But once they got to know the Palauans and Ingharshalong, they had a much more favorable opinion. And once they spent years on Toby with Kobak, they thought, they viewed him as a brother.

• 1:20:38Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:20:38Speaker 06

  And they wanted to save him.

• 1:20:39Steven Rinella?

  It's, it's always that way. It's like.

• 1:20:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:41Steven Rinella?

  You trivialize their economy, you trivialize their religion, you trivialize their social structure, you disparage it, and then oftentimes, over time, some percentage of the people that experience it like prefer it.

• 1:20:55Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:20:56Steven Rinella?

  Prefer, prefer the cultures.

• 1:20:57Speaker 06

  Or just accept their humanity.

• 1:20:59Steven Rinella?

  Accept it or, or absorb into it.

• 1:21:01Speaker 06

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

• 1:21:31Steven Rinella?

  And they don't have enough loot on these boats? They don't have enough stuff on these boats, extra stuff to go to like buy the guy?

• 1:21:38Speaker 06

  No, well, that, that did not come up in the, in the discussion, whether they tried it or not.

• 1:21:43Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:43Speaker 06

  Uh, it didn't come up, but I, I don't think they would have because.

• 1:21:46Steven Rinella?

  You see like rope and chain and stuff, you could come up with a human price.

• 1:21:49Speaker 06

  Well, I think the Tobians, that, that you're right. But I think the Tobians viewed Kobak differently. He was a fellow Pacific native islander than the Americans. So there might've been some differential treatment because of that. He also had a wife on Toby. He took a wife.

• 1:22:03Steven Rinella?

  Oh, he did? Okay. So he was doing better.

• 1:22:05Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:22:05Steven Rinella?

  He was doing better, no Horace.

• 1:22:07Speaker 06

  Yeah, he was doing, he was doing better.

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• 1:23:41Speaker 06

  So, the Britannia sails off, goes to Canton, goes to Macau, and Holden and Newt finally make it back to the United States. And Holden writes a book about his experience that came out in 1836. But they make it back to the United States almost five years after they left.

• 1:23:59Steven Rinella?

  God, man. You know what I was asked about that guy? I wasn't putting the timeline right. What I was talking about was trying to find, I had him lined up with the advent of photography.

• 1:24:09Speaker 06

  No, daguerreotypes, a little bit.

• 1:24:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, but no one would, he wouldn't have lived long enough to ever have his tattoos photographed.

• 1:24:15Speaker 06

  No, no, no. He, he lived until the early 1900s.

• 1:24:18Steven Rinella?

  He did.

• 1:24:19Speaker 06

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

• 1:24:49Steven Rinella?

  I thought he went to Barnum or something.

• 1:24:50Speaker 06

  No, no, that's another guy.

• 1:24:52Steven Rinella?

  That's a different guy that did that.

• 1:24:53Speaker 06

  That's another guy, a guy that came back about seven months after, after Holden. He had been on the island of Pon Pei, which is about 1,600 miles to the east of Palau for almost a decade. He actually married, married a chief's daughter. He was tattooed from head to foot, much more heavily than Holden. He finally got on a ship going back to Salem, Massachusetts. When he got back to the United States, this guy O'Brien, which they later called the Tattooed Irishman, he was a born salesman. He decided to capitalize on his tattoos. And even though they didn't use the term at the time, he sort of became part of a freak show. P.T.

• 1:25:35Speaker 06

  Barnum hired him as part of the American Museum, and people paid to see this guy. And he was the first Westerner who was tattooed that was seen in the United States.

• 1:25:44Steven Rinella?

  Was that right?

• 1:25:45Speaker 06

  There had been other, other islanders and other people who had been seen, and some Chinese. But he was the first American that had tattoos that was seen widely in the United States.

• 1:25:55Steven Rinella?

  Is there any idea what came of, what was the Palauan's name?

• 1:26:00Speaker 06

  Kobak?

• 1:26:01Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Is there any idea what came?

• 1:26:03Speaker 06

  You know, he made it back to Ingarshalong. Well, what happened is Holden got back, he wrote a book. He wrote a book for two reasons. One is he wanted to make some money. I could have told him, what a fool you are, writing to make money. But the other thing that he wanted to do was to incite action. He wanted to encourage the US Navy to send a rescue mission. But unbeknownst to him, a rescue mission had already been sent. The USS Vincennes was heading to Palau to recover whatever whalermen were there and to reunite the Ingarshalongis with their home village. And so they ultimately did that. So Kobak was ultimately picked up after they discovered, after the Vincennes discovered there are no more Americans there. Kobak was picked up, he was reunited with his brothers in Ingarshalong.

• 1:26:48Speaker 06

  They rubbed noses to say hello. And the remaining Americans, there were only two Americans left. Because one of them, one of them in Ingarshalong had escaped on a passing ship. The other two were still there. And an interesting code to this story is that one of them, James Mater, I got in touch with his ancestors because he apparently got married and had children while he was in Ingarshalong. Because there to this day is a Midar clan, which claims to go way back to when a white man from the ocean married a local woman.

• 1:27:23Steven Rinella?

  But when he got picked up, he ditched his family.

• 1:27:25Speaker 06

  Yes, he ditched his family. So did Kobak. When Kobak got picked up by the Vincennes, the Tobians pleaded with him to come back. And one of the, one of the angles of attack that they used is to say, you know, Kobak, you're leaving your wife behind, don't you want to come back? And Kobak reportedly said, screw my Tobian wife, I want to go back to my Ingarshalongis wife. So he left, he left happily as well.

• 1:27:49Steven Rinella?

  It's amazing that like, I mean, I know, you think about those first 10 dudes that got wiped out, but it's amazing that so many of these guys made it.

• 1:27:57Speaker 06

  Seven, seven out of 22 made it back. And you mentioned Horace Holden. He lived to the age of 94. He died in Oregon. And he played a minor role in other interesting stories in American history. He went to Hawaii very early on. He helped introduce sericulture or silk culture to Hawaii. Then he was one of the first people in the 1840s to go to the Oregon Territory to help populate the Oregon Territory so the United States could have a better claim on taking it later in negotiations with Canada. And he had a cattle farm. He was a farmer, died when he was 94. And I, I am so upset with one of his granddaughters.

• 1:28:39Speaker 06

  Because after he died, a reporter in Oregon went to his daughter, trying to find out more information. He wanted to write a history of Oregon settlement, but also write about Horace Holden's life. So Horace Holden's daughter told him, oh, there's a sea chest that we have that has a lot of dad's stuff in it. It's with my daughter. Here, I'm going to write you a letter of introduction. Go talk to my daughter. So this journalist is all excited, he thinks there's going to be a trove of materials. He goes to the daughter, hands over the note. The daughter essentially says, oh, my mother must think that I'm a horrible housekeeper.

• 1:29:20Speaker 06

  The first thing I did when I got that chest is I threw everything in it out, and I now use it for my linens. So whatever, whatever information he had in there, logbooks, I mean, other, I'm sure he wrote more about it to himself, or diaries, gone.

• 1:29:35Steven Rinella?

  Got it. Yeah, that's incredible. So you mentioned, just kind of as a following these people through, we talked about Horace, oddly became to be out in Oregon cattle ranching. His, his belongings are gone.

• 1:29:50Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:29:51Steven Rinella?

  Um, it was Bedford, right?

• 1:29:54Speaker 06

  New Bedford.

• 1:29:55Steven Rinella?

  No, no, sorry, no, the name of the captain.

• 1:29:57Speaker 06

  Oh, no, Barnard.

• 1:29:58Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, Barnard.

• 1:29:59Speaker 06

  Edward Barnard.

• 1:30:00Steven Rinella?

  He did some more whaling.

• 1:30:01Speaker 06

  Yes.

• 1:30:02Steven Rinella?

  Did he wind up back out in the Pacific? Or did he, where did he wind up when he got, when he later? Because I mean, he dies in Erie.

• 1:30:08Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:30:09Steven Rinella?

  But, but does his whaling trips bring him back through these places?

• 1:30:13Speaker 06

  You know, you asked me a question that's really good. I, I know that he took two more voyages, but I'm pretty sure they were in the Atlantic and the Indian Ocean. I don't think he made it to the Pacific, but he might very well have had. But he wasn't a sentimental guy. I don't think he would have thought twice about that. He needed to go out and make money. He had two greasy trips, so they made some money. They came back with 1,800, 2,000 barrels. But then he decided to go into the freshwater ocean. And he was, you know, the captain of the schooner Pennsylvania, and it sank, and all men on board died, and he was never seen. Yeah, but the thing is.

• 1:30:50Steven Rinella?

  And he's dead in his 40s.

• 1:30:51Speaker 06

  Yeah, dead in his 40s. But that was, that wasn't that young back then. You made it to your late 40s, you were doing pretty well, especially if you were a fisherman or a whalerman or a laborer. You know, the life expectancy was much, much less back then. But it was, it's a fascinating story. And luckily for me, because that is an historian, you want to have as many firsthand primary materials as possible. He wrote. A essentially a book like manuscript about the voyage of the mentor and the crashing in Palau. And it was among his effects when he died. He maybe was gonna publish it, or maybe he was

• 1:31:29Steven Rinella?

  Never got around to it.

• 1:31:30Speaker 06

  Maybe he was dissuaded from publishing it because Holden published his first. I don't know. He never got around to it, but his daughter kept it and it was handed down through the family. And ultimately, in sometime in the mid 1900s, it was given to the Kendall Whaling Museum,

• 1:31:45Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:31:45Speaker 06

  which is the precursor of the new Bedford Whaling Museum. And then in the 1970s, a curator was rooting around downstairs in the archives and he came across this handwritten manuscript by Edward Barnard and they published it.

• 1:32:01Steven Rinella?

  The whole story.

• 1:32:02Speaker 06

  Yeah, they published the thing, they transcribed it, they published it. And that's one of the first ways I found out about the story is, is reading that account and, and reading Horace Holden's account.

• 1:32:12Steven Rinella?

  You know, it seems to be absent from this story that's usually a part of every whaling story is no one ever eats anybody.

• 1:32:18Speaker 06

  No, wait a second. I had to set the record straight. Very few whaling stories have cannibalism. Yeah. In the Heart of the Sea, Philbrick's story about the, you know, that whale ship.

• 1:32:29Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's like Arctic exploration.

• 1:32:31Speaker 06

  Definitely. The Essex, not to be confused.

• 1:32:33Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's like when people start eating each other, that's when things go downhill.

• 1:32:36Speaker 06

  There were, there were a couple of whaling ships where that happened. More common with Arctic and Antarctic. Well, Arctic exploration. I don't think it was very common with Antarctic. I don't recall any stories of Antarctic exploration where they ended up.

• 1:32:49Steven Rinella?

  Resorted to that.

• 1:32:50Speaker 06

  Cannibalism. But definitely, you know, John Franklin and trying to find the Northwest Passage is just littered with apparently tasty dead bodies. I don't know.

• 1:32:59Steven Rinella?

  Sure, yeah. What are you gonna work on now? You gonna, you gonna do, you starting another one yet?

• 1:33:03Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, this is strange. For the last nine books, I've always had another book I'm working on when my next book comes out, but this has been a, I've taken a little break. Part of it is because we bought that house, that old house in Marblehead, I've been working on that. Uh, I've gone through about four or five ideas and I've shot all of them down.

• 1:33:22Steven Rinella?

  How long do you spend on an idea before you shoot it down? Like, what do you give yourself?

• 1:33:27Speaker 06

  Certainly weeks, if not a month or two. I keep trying to convince myself. I have an idea right now. I, I wrote a proposal. My agent loves it. I like it. I think it could be a great book, but I'm not a hundred percent convinced. And in fact, uh, after I go back east, um, I'm going out to Michigan to give a talk and then once they go back east, I'm gonna really sit down and focus on it. And

• 1:33:51Steven Rinella?

  This involves salty water?

• 1:33:52Speaker 06

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

• 1:34:11Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, you gotta have a dragon to slay, man.

• 1:34:13Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:13Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Gives like, gives, shapes life, you know?

• 1:34:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:34:18Steven Rinella?

  So salty water, dead people.

• 1:34:20Speaker 06

  Dead people.

• 1:34:20Steven Rinella?

  What else? What else can you give me?

• 1:34:23Speaker 06

  Uh, it involves, uh, it's in the early 1800s.

• 1:34:26Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Dead whales in it?

• 1:34:28Speaker 06

  No, no, no whales. Uh, it might involve a little bit of piracy.

• 1:34:36Steven Rinella?

  Sounds good.

• 1:34:37Speaker 06

  I don't wanna, I don't wanna give anymore because I might not even end up writing it.

• 1:34:39Steven Rinella?

  Do you know, years ago, man, it's funny. Years ago, there was this, uh,

• 1:34:45Steven Rinella?

  this writer, can't remember who it was. It was Ben, I don't think it was Ben Metcalfe. Some writer wrote a thing about, there was kind of like a little southern literature craze.

• 1:34:56Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:34:56Steven Rinella?

  Okay.

• 1:34:57Speaker 06

  Oh, Confederates in the Attic and stuff like that. Yeah.

• 1:34:59Steven Rinella?

  So this writer wrote this piece of like, the, the, from a scholarly perspective, all these scholars at the time were trying to like, you know, Cormac McCarthy and, and, and, um, and, uh, Faulkner, you know, right? And people were like wrestling with this southern literature.

• 1:35:16Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:35:16Steven Rinella?

  And this scholar wrote a piece where he's like, well, how do you define southern literature? You know, same way I saw somebody in my mind, like exploration books tend to have people eating people in them.

• 1:35:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:35:27Steven Rinella?

  He, he wrote, it'd be like, here's the way you can tell. He's like, is there a dead mule in it?

• 1:35:34Steven Rinella?

  If there's a dead mule in it, and he does like a check, he goes through all Faulkner's work and all these. So he's like, you will find in that work a dead mule. If there's no dead mule, it's not southern literature.

• 1:35:45Steven Rinella?

  So you gotta ask yourself, like of all your books, you gotta be like, like a, a Dolan book has to have.

• 1:35:54Speaker 06

  The main thing for, the main thing for me that, uh, my books have to have is I have to be interested. I, we didn't go over my educational background. I won't go, uh, just other than I say, I have an undergraduate masters and a PhD, not in history, in biology and environmental policy and conservation. So every book I write is like getting a mini master's degree.

• 1:36:15Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:36:16Speaker 06

  Cause I didn't learn about it in school and most of the books that I read are out of print or article, you know, I, I don't read a lot of modern literature, unfortunately. Cause I'm focusing on, on a, on a book, uh, and, and a topic. So

• 1:36:29Steven Rinella?

  You know, you might find is a natural resource theme.

• 1:36:32Speaker 06

  Yeah, there's a lot of natural, yeah, a lot of my, a lot of my books basically look at the development. The way I look at a lot of my books, not so much, not the mentor, but Leviathan, the history of whaling, fur, fortune, empire, when America first met China, A Furious Sky, my lighthouse book, Brilliant Beacons. All of them use a specific subject, whales, lighthouses, hurricanes, to form the narrative arc or backbone for a larger story about the evolution of the United States. That's what gets me interested. You know, just telling a story about a lighthouse is not interesting, but telling a story about a lighthouse that played an important role in the American Revolution or the Civil War,

• 1:37:11Speaker 06

  or helped the country develop as a maritime nation and then the leading maritime nation in the world, that's exciting. Uh, whaling was such a huge topic. The fur trade, which is very huge out here. I loved writing that book. I knew very little about the fur trade before I started it, but man, the fur trade is a major, major force in the evolution and development of the colonies and then the United States. You cannot understand American history, certainly westward expansion, without understanding intimately the, the fur trade. So that's what got me interested.

• 1:37:48Steven Rinella?

  I'm working on a project right now and, and it, trying to make the point that like,

• 1:37:55Steven Rinella?

  the, there's, there's this point where reality kicks in, in the colonization of North America, in the north.

• 1:38:02Speaker 06

  North, okay.

• 1:38:03Steven Rinella?

  Like, like, if you look at like in South America, Mesoamerica,

• 1:38:08Steven Rinella?

  you have legitimately, like, they're legitimately finding cities of gold.

• 1:38:12Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:38:13Steven Rinella?

  I mean, they're finding like extraordinary wealth.

• 1:38:16Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:38:17Steven Rinella?

  But then you get up into the areas we've been touching on.

• 1:38:20Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:38:20Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like what is present day norther, northeastern US, um, southeastern Canada.

• 1:38:28Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:38:28Steven Rinella?

  When people arrive there, they're holding out that there's gonna be

• 1:38:32Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:38:32Steven Rinella?

  like that you'll go up the river and there will be China.

• 1:38:35Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:38:35Steven Rinella?

  Or you go up the river and there will be white people and they have all kinds of gold. There, there's all these fantastical ideas.

• 1:38:42Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:38:43Steven Rinella?

  But then there's like a thing clicks, you know, and it click, like in the late 1600s, whatever, somewhere in there.

• 1:38:50Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:38:51Steven Rinella?

  It clicks and it's like, you know what, man? Really? It's like fur.

• 1:38:56Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:38:57Steven Rinella?

  Fish.

• 1:38:57Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:38:58Steven Rinella?

  Whales.

• 1:38:58Speaker 06

  Absolutely.

• 1:38:59Steven Rinella?

  And then they dig in though. They dig in, but like the previous, like a click back.

• 1:39:05Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:39:05Steven Rinella?

  Is like China, gold, spices, you know?

• 1:39:09Speaker 06

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:39:10Steven Rinella?

  Silver. And there's kind of like this, ah, man, it's just fur dude. Let's get it all.

• 1:39:16Speaker 06

  Yeah, well, they call beaver pelts, as you know, soft gold.

• 1:39:19Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:19Speaker 06

  And otter pelts.

• 1:39:20Steven Rinella?

  But it's like a let, it's like a, there's a little bit of a letdown.

• 1:39:23Speaker 06

  Yeah, but then they get pretty excited once they start making money.

• 1:39:26Steven Rinella?

  Dig in, but they're like, you know, like it's, it sort of becomes it's, it's just gonna be work.

• 1:39:31Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:39:31Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's just gonna be work. We're not gonna be like the Spanish.

• 1:39:34Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:39:34Steven Rinella?

  Literally driving ships of gold home, you know? It's gonna be work.

• 1:39:39Speaker 06

  You're absolutely, and that's, that's an excellent point. I mean, El Dorado, the search for El Dorado, or, um, Henry Hudson, thinking that he was gonna find, and Columbus, thinking they would go find China.

• 1:39:49Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:39:49Speaker 06

  And then all of a sudden you're left with natural resources, but the history, this would be too big of a book, but it'd be the kind of book I'd like to write, uh, but I'm not sure many people read it too broad. But basically, history of the United States just told, told through natural resources.

• 1:40:05Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:40:06Speaker 06

  But without, I mean, that's the reason we've become such an amazing, powerful country. It's because of our natural resource base. No doubt about it.

• 1:40:14Steven Rinella?

  There's a, there, there's a rapids, sort of the first big rapids on the St. Lawrence. It, it, La Sheen Rapids.

• 1:40:22Speaker 06

  Sheen, yeah.

• 1:40:23Steven Rinella?

  You know, uh, cause it was like China, China rapids.

• 1:40:28Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:40:28Steven Rinella?

  Because that was preventing you from getting to China.

• 1:40:30Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:40:31Steven Rinella?

  It's like, damn it. If I could only get over this rapids, I'd be in China, you know, and it carries that name, right? China Rapids.

• 1:40:38Speaker 06

  It is amazing with the search for the Northwest Passage and China, how many centuries that spans and how many lives were lost.

• 1:40:46Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:47Speaker 06

  You know, just amazing. And it's kind of ironic that now when we know how to get to China multiple ways because of a warming world.

• 1:40:55Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:40:56Speaker 06

  We're getting pathways through the Arctic and the Northwest Passage is gonna be a real reality more and more.

• 1:41:02Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, it's happening all over again without the loss of life.

• 1:41:04Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:41:05Steven Rinella?

  And then now like all these, you know, the, these geopolitical conflicts and all these nations looking, looking to the Arctic, all this talk of Greenland and all, you know, it's like, it's like the shipping, this sort of shipping dream that motivated the French and the Dutch and the English and all these other places. It's like shipping dream.

• 1:41:26Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:41:27Steven Rinella?

  Is, is, and just totally other circumstances is becoming reality.

• 1:41:31Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:41:31Steven Rinella?

  You know, like, like a, like safe, fairly reliable Arctic transport.

• 1:41:35Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:41:36Steven Rinella?

  As a result of just, as a result of changing climate, you know?

• 1:41:40Speaker 06

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

• 1:42:00Steven Rinella?

  Do you ever think about, this is my last question for you as a writer?

• 1:42:04Steven Rinella?

  Well, I'll start by saying this. I was talking to Ken, the documentarian, Ken Burns.

• 1:42:08Speaker 06

  Yep.

• 1:42:09Steven Rinella?

  I bring this up all the time. So saying to him, I was saying to him, like, why not just do Afghanistan now? Like, do Afghanistan.

• 1:42:20Speaker 06

  Oh, documentary.

• 1:42:21Steven Rinella?

  Do the war in Afghanistan.

• 1:42:22Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:42:22Steven Rinella?

  Okay. He finished Vietnam.

• 1:42:25Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:42:25Steven Rinella?

  He did the American Revolution.

• 1:42:27Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:42:28Steven Rinella?

  Like, do Afghanistan. Everyone's alive?

• 1:42:31Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:42:32Steven Rinella?

  No Amer- like, very few Americans understand that conflict now. Like, imagine the footage. It'd be your first pro- the first project he could do with tons of cellphone footage.

• 1:42:46Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:42:46Steven Rinella?

  He wouldn't need to film old timey maps, you know, and stuff like that, and paintings. It'd be, it'd be just, go talk to everybody. They're all still alive.

• 1:42:55Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:42:56Steven Rinella?

  But he had some answer. I can't remember the details, but he's like, it hasn't been interpreted and reinterpreted enough.

• 1:43:01Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:43:02Steven Rinella?

  He said, it took, it took the war in Afghanistan to understand the war in Vietnam.

• 1:43:08Speaker 06

  No, the other way around.

• 1:43:10Steven Rinella?

  No. When he did Vietnam, when Ken Burns did the Vietnam, his Vietnam project, okay? He said, it took.

• 1:43:19Speaker 06

  Oh, I get, I get it.

• 1:43:20Steven Rinella?

  The American experience in Afghanistan.

• 1:43:23Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:43:23Steven Rinella?

  To, to, to like, come to this, the, the understanding of, that I would bring to the Vietnam War.

• 1:43:30Speaker 06

  Right, okay.

• 1:43:31Steven Rinella?

  And he's like, we need to, we'll need to reinterpret the war in Afghanistan and reinterpret it again.

• 1:43:37Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:43:38Steven Rinella?

  I'm paraphrasing, but roughly he said this, and then it'll be time.

• 1:43:43Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:43:43Steven Rinella?

  For, for the, the, you know, 12 hour, 20 hour documentary about what really happened in Afghanistan.

• 1:43:53Speaker 06

  Right.

• 1:43:53Steven Rinella?

  Right? Like, he's not gonna do it yet. That's a long-winded way of asking, do you, if, if, would you do a book? Would you do a story from 2010?

• 1:44:05Speaker 06

  No. But I have a very different, I think what Ken said and what you paraphrased, I absolutely agree with 100%. Time and distance gives you different perspective. And there's a saying in the world of history that every 20 or so years, every generation, the new generation reinterprets the past, or they have different lenses to look at the past.

• 1:44:24Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:25Speaker 06

  But my, sort of, this is sort of a joke, but it's actually real. The part of the reason I write books that go back a long ways is I don't want to get into writing books about people who are still alive, because I don't want to get in arguments with them about interpretations.

• 1:44:41Steven Rinella?

  Write their own book, man. That's what, that's what the author Chris Offit said. They can write their own book.

• 1:44:45Speaker 06

  Yeah, they, they can.

• 1:44:46Steven Rinella?

  They're still around.

• 1:44:47Speaker 06

  But, no, but there are plenty of modern topics that interest me.

• 1:44:51Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:44:52Speaker 06

  But I tend to like, there's something I like about the 18th, the 19th century, the 18th century.

• 1:44:58Steven Rinella?

  I'm drawn to that stuff too, man.

• 1:44:59Speaker 06

  It's, it's, it's fun. And part of the value of waiting a long time to write a book like that is you have more sources. Not only the primary sources that continue to be found, but the secondary sources of other people that have come before you. So, you know, I know, I noticed that in your, um, one of your last podcasts, you had a guy that wrote A Vast Wilderness. I can't remember his name. Burnt, Burnt, about Lewis and Clark.

• 1:45:27Steven Rinella?

  Oh, yeah, yeah.

• 1:45:28Speaker 06

  Well, Stephen Ambrose wrote a book about Lewis and Clark. There are tons of books about Lewis and Clark, but every generation can either dig deeper, have a slightly different angle, and that's, that's valuable. And I like, I prefer having more information to draw upon than less.

• 1:45:45Steven Rinella?

  Yeah.

• 1:45:45Speaker 06

  But I do have a little bit of a journalism background. I worked for the UPI for a while, and I worked at Business Week for a while. I had a fellowship there. But I just don't think I'd be as good writing a book, a modern book, about people who are still alive. It's just a very different feel to it.

• 1:46:03Steven Rinella?

  Well, it's good, yeah, it's good of you to recognize that. My plea, this is my plea to like, all the crack commando documentarians that are out there. Like, the really good document, documentarians is like,

• 1:46:17Steven Rinella?

  five, it's like, five hours from the Soviet invasion to 9/11, and then it's an hour per year.

• 1:46:25Speaker 06

  Wow.

• 1:46:26Steven Rinella?

  I will watch, like, I pledged you, if you make this movie, I will watch it.

• 1:46:30Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:46:30Steven Rinella?

  I promise. An hour per year.

• 1:46:33Speaker 06

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

• 1:46:49Steven Rinella?

  That's a great line.

• 1:46:49Speaker 06

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

• 1:47:33Speaker 06

  there was nastiness in politics going back to as long as there have been humans.

• 1:47:38Steven Rinella?

  Dude, they were, people that talk about how divisive politics is now.

• 1:47:41Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:41Steven Rinella?

  They used to line up and have duels.

• 1:47:43Speaker 06

  Yes, absolutely. So, I, but I think.

• 1:47:45Steven Rinella?

  After the election, they would duel.

• 1:47:47Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:47:48Steven Rinella?

  They're literally shooting each other, and people want to talk about how politics is nasty now. This is a great frustration that I have, having kids. I love my kids to death. They're getting old enough now to have all these opinions.

• 1:47:59Speaker 06

  Okay.

• 1:48:00Steven Rinella?

  They come home from school, tell me all about whatever, you know?

• 1:48:03Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:48:04Steven Rinella?

  And, um, and you know that thing, like, you have to understand the past to understand the present? I mean, God bless them. They don't understand the past yet.

• 1:48:12Speaker 06

  The past is 10 years ago.

• 1:48:13Steven Rinella?

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

• 1:48:25Speaker 06

  Right, right.

• 1:48:27Steven Rinella?

  There's a lot you're missing.

• 1:48:28Speaker 06

  Yeah. That's, that's good. It's, it's gonna be up to them to make their own world, and hopefully they'll do it right.

• 1:48:35Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, I think so. Well, Eric J. Dolan, thanks for coming on, man.

• 1:48:39Speaker 06

  Thanks for having me. It was great.

• 1:48:41Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. And again, if you listeners that want to dig into this man's, what's that word for your work? Your, your, your body of work?

• 1:48:47Speaker 06

  Corpus, my body.

• 1:48:48Steven Rinella?

  Yeah, his corpus, his body of work. They're, tighten your boots up, because this is, uh, it's a big task. A lot of fantastic books.

• 1:48:57Speaker 06

  Can I make one quick plug?

• 1:48:58Steven Rinella?

  Please, please.

• 1:48:58Speaker 06

  No, no, because I have, I have a website. Notice I'm mentioning it. It's my name.

• 1:49:02Steven Rinella?

  Plug whatever you want.

• 1:49:02Speaker 06

  Eric J. Dolan, E R I C J A Y D O L I N dot com. The only reason I'm plugging it is because, one, you can see all the books I've written, but I've put the introduction to every single book of mine on the website. So if a topic interests you, you can read the introduction to see if this is going in a direction.

• 1:49:22Steven Rinella?

  See which one's right for you.

• 1:49:23Speaker 06

  That you might like. And also it lists my speaking engagements. So if I'm in your neighborhood and you're around, you know, come and say hello.

• 1:49:30Steven Rinella?

  Yeah. Keep your eyes peeled for dudes in camo hats and ask them.

• 1:49:34Speaker 06

  Yeah.

• 1:49:36Steven Rinella?

  Ask them who sent you. All right, man. Thanks so much for coming on.

• 1:49:39Speaker 06

  Okay, thank you.

• 1:49:40Steven Rinella?

  Appreciate it.

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