Review by Bill Doughty
It’s called the Great Age of Sailing … and whaling … and shipwrecks.
Two hundred years ago Europeans and Americans were sailing the seas “discovering” the islands of the Pacific, and sometimes encountering indigenous people who often captured and even enslaved shipwrecked sailors.
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| Mentor flounders. |
Eric Jay Dolin does more than imagine the encounters. His “The Wreck of the Mentor: A True Story of Death, Despair, and Deliverance in the Age of Sail” (Limelight Publishing, W.W. Norton, 2026) presents a fulsome history of the Micronesian archipelago of Palau. U.S. Navy sailors will be especially interested in his sweep of history of through the middle and late age of imperialism.
Empires like the Dutch, Portuguese, Spanish, and British all had their encounters with Palau and other parts of Micronesia. The imperial age culminated with the Second World War, when the United States and its Allies successfully confronted Germany, Italy, and –– in the case of the Pacific –– Japan.
But a hundred years prior to WWII, the world was still being explored in wooden ships under sail. It was a time when commerce and international ambitions clashed with environmental and local sovereignty. Using extensive research and over 100 illustrations, Dolin dives into that history and resultant human relations, including attempts at diplomacy and longterm peace.Dolin
Dolin’s saga begins with the foundering of the whaling ship Mentor, shipwrecked on a reef in Palau. Some of Mentor’s sailors, as well as other shipwrecked crew in the South Pacific, were held against their will or chose to be assimilated and remain in the islands as “beachcombers.”
“The Mentor, however, 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, and also one that is unique. It spans multiple years and islands and provides insights into the clash of civilizations and cultures that attended the West's commercial onslaught in the Pacific. The case of the Mentor is a compelling saga full of surprising twists and turns, along with a cast of fascinating characters that are forced by dramatic circumstances into a sometimes deadly and almost always fraught embrace.”
Thankfully, Dolin includes a list of key people in his “cast of characters.”
That cast includes sailors and key personnel associated with the merchant vessel Friendship and USS Vincennes. These and other large ships represented a turning point in the history of the Age of Sail.
“The USS Vincennes, a 703-ton Boston class sloop, was A fine vessel, measuring 127 feet long and nearly 34 feet wide, with a complement of 190 officers and seamen, and bristling with 20 guns. It was built in 1825, and already had an impressive reputation: just a few years later it became the first navy ship to circumnavigate the globe.
One contemporary chronicler declared that the Vincennes was ‘said to be the most beautiful vessel of her class, and the fastest sailer in our navy.’ It was part of a growing maritime force that was, with each passing year, extending its reach throughout the world and showing other nations that America was willing to protect itself and its citizens wherever they may be.
In March 1834, the Vincennes was tasked with traveling to various South Pacific islands to repatriate Americans who were either there as beachcombers or who were being held against their will. At the top of the Vincennes's to-do list was to bring home the Americans at Palau…”
(Two namesakes of USS Vincennes, CA-44 and CL-64, would go on to fight in World War II. USS Vincennes (CA-44) escorted USS Hornet (CV-8) during the 1942 Doolittle Raid on Tokyo and fought in the Battle of Midway; it was sunk in the Battle of Savo Island in the Solomons. USS Vincennes (CL-64) fought in the Battle of the Philippine Sea, the invasion of the Philippines, the Battle of Okinawa, and raids on the Japanese mainland. Nearly 50 years ago, another USS Vincennes, a Ticonderoga-class guided missile cruiser, mistakenly shot down an Iranian airliner, killing 290 people on board — including 66 children.)
Dolin’s epilogue highlights the role of Palau in World War II as the age of imperialism came to an end.
“By the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Palau was just a shadow of its former self. It had become a pawn in international politics, with no self-determination or say in its fate. The first power to step in was Spain, who in 1885 was given control over Palau as a result of an arbitration determination made by Pope Leo XIII that settled the dispute between Spain and Germany over who had rights to the Caroline Islands, including Palau. Next, Palau was sold to Germany for about $4.5 million in 1899 after Spain's defeat in the Spanish-American War. Then it was seized by Japan in 1914 after the Japanese declared war against the Germans in World War I—a seizure that was given the international seal of approval by the newly created League of Nations in 1920. On the eve of World War II, there were roughly thirty thousand Japanese in Palau, and Japanese military and administrative officials basically ran the place, bolstering the economy and fostering Japanese customs and beliefs while at the same time pushing Palauan ones aside.
Japan militarized Palau during the early years of World War II and maintained control of the islands until late 1944, when American forces defeated them. The most noteworthy clash was the bloody Battle of Peleliu, which a later US general called ‘one of the most vicious and stubbornly defended battles of the war?’ According to Lieutenant General Sadae Inoue, the Japanese general overseeing the defense of Peleliu, the Japanese Prime Minister, General Hideki Tojo, issued the following orders: ‘Your objective is to hold the island as long as possible to deny its use by the enemy to support their future plans, and kill as many Americans as you can before the last Japanese soldier dies at his post.’
The Americans faced off against Japanese soldiers who had spent years building hundreds of defensive fortifications on Peleliu, including bunkers buried deep into hillsides and above-ground pillboxes.
The Japanese also made good use of the island's numerous caves to rain down fire on the advancing American marines and soldiers. In his classic book, With the Old Breed, Marine private and mortarman Eugene Sledge reported his emotions upon hitting the beach on Pele-liu for the first time. ‘The world was a nightmare of flashes, violent explosions, and snapping bullets. Most of what I saw blurred. My mind was benumbed by the shock of it.’ Later in the campaign, he noted that ‘it was like no other battlefield described on earth. It was an alien, unearthly, surrealistic nightmare like the surface of another planet.’”
Dolin’s tale of the Mentor is one of extraordinary tragedy and documented hope –– where power projection, sea control, forward presence, and deterrence combine with maritime security and humanitarian assistance and disaster relief.
Today, Palau is a peaceful, colorful, and welcoming of outsiders.
The Navy’s 2026 Pacific Partnership mission conducted operations and engagements recently in Vietnam, Indonesia, Malaysia, Timor-Leste, Palau, and the Philippines. In Palau, Sailors conducted infrastructure and environmental cleanup projects, including removal of abandoned vessels.
Navy Divers, assigned to Explosive Ordnance Disposal Mobile Unit (EODMU) 9, prepare the abandoned derelict vessel “Justice 1” for removal during a Pacific Partnership 2026 salvage operation in Koror, Palau, Aug 30, 2026. Now in its 22nd iteration, the Pacific Partnership series is the largest annual multinational humanitarian assistance and disaster management preparedness mission conducted in the region. Pacific Partnership works collaboratively with host and partner nations to enhance regional interoperability and disaster response capabilities, increase security in the region, and foster new and enduring friendships in the Indo-Pacific. (U.S. Navy photo by Mass Communication Specialist 2nd Class Moises Sandoval)
