When the American shipbuilder Enos Bright constructed the Mentor in 1807 he had no inkling of the tale it would one day tell from its watery grave. Many ships faced harrowing voyages on the high seas, but this one stood out more than others. It was an expedition that turned into a disaster that few could have foreseen.
Eric Jay Dolin brings this long-forgotten story back into the public eye. The author of 17 books that have largely focused on maritime history, he is a talented researcher and natural storyteller. ‘The Mentor,’ he writes, ‘is not just another example of a shipwreck during the Age of Sail. It is one of the most complex and intriguing of such stories ever told.’ It contains many twists and turns, and a ‘cast of fascinating characters that are forced by dramatic circumstances into a sometimes deadly and almost always fraught embrace’.
The Mentor’s crew had hurriedly to prove they weren’t English, or they were done for
Bright’s original vision for the Mentor was of a merchant ship. It was later converted into a whaler, which Dolin describes as a ‘floating killing machine’, used for chasing and harpooning whales. The ship’s owner, William Rotch Rodman, profited handsomely from the sale of whale meat and oil from rendered blubber. Whaling expeditions in a then-unregulated market steadily increased to meet the demands of consumers.
