SAVE OUR SOULS

A genuine Swiss Family Robinson adventure, but darker.

Pearl, author of The Taking of Jemima Boone: Colonial Settlers, Tribal Nations, and the Kidnap That Shaped America, introduces readers to the vast Pacific Ocean in the 19th century, dense with seaborne commerce. Mostly small-time operations, the commerce could be legitimate (fishing, trade) or not (kidnapping indigenous islanders for slave labor on plantations). Despite its name, the Pacific is often stormy; there is a large literature on shipwrecks and castaways. Pearl turns up the Walker family: father, mother, three adolescent boys, and a dog engaged in shark fishing around the Hawaiian islands. In 1887, off Midway Atoll, a storm destroyed their ship, leaving them and 24 crew members stranded. To their surprise, they encountered a scrawny young man. He seemed congenial but was probably a psychopath. He had been abandoned months earlier by a crew who suspected he had murdered two of their members. Later, he and another seaman left in a small boat, promising to bring help. They reached an inhabited island but never mentioned the castaways. On a diet of birds, bird eggs, and fish, the Walkers and crew lost weight, many developing scurvy. Maddeningly, several ships approached but passed by, apparently unwilling to test the island’s dangerous reefs. Pearl relies heavily on contemporary journalism and unreliable records, so there is a good deal of speculation, many digressions to the experience of other castaways, and a detour into Robert Louis Stevenson, who used details of the Walker experience in his 1892 novel The Wrecker.

A realistic castaway account.