Meet Eric Jay Dolin, Author of The Wreck of the Mentor
Category: Event Calendar
Date and Time
- Saturday, May 30, 2026 1pm - 2:30pm
Location
Composition Shop
356 Main Street
Details
If you enjoy a good shipwreck story, you won't want to miss this opportunity to meet Eric Jay Dolin and learn about his new book The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail!
From the best–selling author of Black Flags, Blue Waters comes the story of the American whaleship Mentor, wrecked in 1832 on a remote reef in the western Pacific. With supplies dwindling, the eleven surviving crewmen face not only the miseries of shipwreck in unfamiliar territory but also the profound uncertainty of contact with the Indigenous people of the Micronesian archipelago of Palau, who within days approach the deserted men brandishing axes, clubs, and spears. In this gripping saga of cultural collision, tribal wars, and dashed hopes, award–winning historian Eric Jay Dolin vividly reconstructs the Mentor’s doomed voyage, the years of perilous captivity, and the delicate negotiations and fraught naval rescue mission that followed.
Eric Jay Dolin is the best-selling author of numerous works in maritime history, including Left for Dead; Black Flags, Blue Waters; and Leviathan. His books have won many awards including the John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History; Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award; National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Excellence in American History Book Award; and the Samuel Eliot Morison Book Award for Naval Literature; and he was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. He now lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.
