In 1832, a New Bedford whaleship called the Mentor struck a reef in the remote Pacific archipelago of Palau. The tiny, 100-foot-long ship began sinking immediately, and the 22 men who made up its crew were thrown into one of the most extraordinary survival ordeals in American maritime history. Ten men vanished the night of the wreck and were never seen again. The survivors found themselves stranded among island peoples with their own complex politics, rival confederations, and fifty years of complicated history with Western ships that the castaways knew nothing about. What followed was a story of captivity, starvation, forced tattooing, a rescue that made everything worse, and a years-long scramble across islands and ocean before the last survivors finally made it home.

Today's guest is Eric Jay Dolin, author of "The Wreck of the Mentor." We untangle one of the great forgotten stories of the Age of Sail, and explore how fifty years of British guns and gunboat diplomacy warped Palauan politics long before the Mentor arrived, why the men who attacked the castaways with war clubs also cooked them lavish feasts and wept for their dead, and how crewman Horace Holden kept himself alive on a famine-stricken island when almost everything pointed toward death.