Maritime historian Eric Jay Dolin recently published The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail (W.W. Norton; June 2, 2026), which tells the remarkable story of an 1831 whaleship that left New Bedford, then the wealthiest whaling port in the world, and ended in disaster in the western Pacific.
After striking a reef near Palau, surviving crew members made it ashore and lived among island communities for months and in some cases years. Some eventually returned home. Others did not. Their story offers a rare window into early encounters between American sailors and Pacific Island societies.
A New York Times selection for “The Nonfiction Everyone Will Be Talking About in 2026,” the book has been praised as one of the most gripping maritime sagas of the nineteenth century.
Dolin is the author of seventeen books on maritime history and a recipient of the John Lyman Award and the Samuel Eliot Morison Book Award.
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