Wrecked on the Feejees

The sole survivor of a Nantucket whaler recounts the most harrowing year of his life in this raw 19th-century account of disaster and survival. In 1825, the Oeno struck a coral reef near the Feejee Islands. Of the entire crew, only William S. Cary lived through the massacre that followed. What unfolds is not merely a tale of physical endurance but of a man utterly alone in a world where he cannot speak the language, cannot understand the customs, and cannot know which gesture might mean hospitality and which might mean death. This is primary document from the age of whaling, a window into a Pacific islands and peoples that Western readers of Cary's time could barely imagine. It is also a psychological portrait of what it costs a man to be the only one who walks away.