PBA Galleries

133 pp.including woodcut frontispiece plus additional wood-engraved plate. (12mo) 14.3x8.3 cm (5¾x3¼”), modern quarter red leather over red cloth boards, gilt spine titles.

Holden's account of his and Benjamin Nute's two-year captivity by the inhabitants of Lord North's island (Pelew Islands) after the wreck of their whaling ship, Mentor.  Most of the narrative describes the suffering that the two sailors endured at the hands of the natives, and the frontispiece shows one of the captives being tattooed, obviously under protest.

The appendix contains a vocabulary of the islanders' language, "a new and hitherto unknown dialect of the Polynesian family of languages."  "Holden, who became an early settler in Oregon and died there in 1904, wrote one of the better shipwreck narratives in this account.  Herman Melville probably used this narrative in his description of native tattooing in Typee" - Huntress.