Save Our Souls

November 1, 2024
Pearl (The Taking of Jemima Boone, 2021) presents the first book-length history of the Walker family, who, along with their ship's crew, spent 14 months marooned on Midway Atoll in 1888-89. Their experience inspired Robert Louis Stevenson's novel The Wrecker, which was very loosely based on the treachery of both nature and their fellow castaways. Pearl draws many literary tropes from Stevenson and others to support the real-life descriptions of deprivation, desperation, hardship, and disease faced by Frederick Walker, his wife Elizabeth, their three sons, and the crew. Life at sea has always been dangerous, but Pearl illustrates just how common shipwrecks and other marine calamities really were. The Walkers discovered another castaway already living on the island, Hans, who had a secret past and joined forces with First Mate John Cameron to terrorize and abandon their fellow sufferers. This dramatic story of good and evil pits the power of teamwork and family against ruthless ambition and selfishness. An illuminating chronicle of perseverance and survival on a barren island, Save Our Souls brings history to life.

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November 11, 2024
In this rousing history, novelist Pearl (The Taking of Jemima Boone) recounts a 19th-century family’s shipwreck on a tiny Pacific Island. In 1887, Irish ship captain Frederick Walker set sail from Hong Kong with his wife and their three teenage sons on board a schooner fishing for sharks in the Pacific. The ship left the mainland in October of that year, but in February 1888, it crashed into a reef during a series of powerful storms. In lifeboats, the crew reached nearby Sand Island—a small, barren patch of land—kicking off a year of harrowing struggle. Shortly after the wreck, the Walkers and their shipmates discovered a hut on the island inhabited by Danish castaway Hans Jorgensen. While Jorgensen and his wilderness expertise were initially welcomed, a series of “rage-filled outbursts” quickly made the Walkers wary. Gradually, they learned that Jorgensen was intentionally marooned by another ship after committing murder. Pearl paces the account like a thriller as he details Jorgensen’s multiple crimes and how the Walkers managed to cohabitate with him until, in 1889, a passing ship rescued them. This real-life Swiss Family Robinson will keep readers up all night. Agent: Suzanne Gluck, WME.

December 1, 2024
A genuineSwiss Family Robinson adventure, but darker. Pearl, author ofThe 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 novelThe Wrecker. A realistic castaway account.

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