Exploring the geopolitics of the Age of Sail

MIT Technology Review · Teresa Elsey · 2026-10-20 21:00 UTC

Through the story of the Mentor, Eric Jay Dolin’s latest book puts a fresh lens on Western exploration in the Pacific.

Through the story of the Mentor, Eric Jay Dolin’s latest book puts a fresh lens on Western exploration in the Pacific.

Twenty-one-year-old Horace Holden had no idea what he was signing up for when he joined a New Bedford whaling crew for his first ocean voyage in 1831. Holden, a “green hand” descended from New Hampshire farmers, was part of the crew whose harrowing adventures the historian Eric Jay Dolin, PhD ’95, relates in his latest book, the New York Times bestseller The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail (Liveright, 2026, $27.99).

The book tells the story of the ill-fated whaling ship Mentor as it navigates what Dolin calls “a four-year saga in which the survivors go to multiple islands; interact with a very different culture; have desperate open ocean voyages; [and] suffer starvation, vicious attacks by the natives, murder, and forced tattooing.”

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