American History Hit - American Castaways: Treachery & Survival in the Falklands

Episode Date: May 16, 2024

Today we dive into the little-known true story of American castaways abandoned on the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812 ― a tale of treachery, shipwreck, isolation and a desperate struggle for survival.In this fascinating episode, best-selling author Eric Jay Dolan joins Don to explore this wild encounter between an American sealing vessel, a shipwrecked British brig and a British warship in the desolate Falklands, all while the two nations remained at war. Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, this bizarre incident left three British sailors and two Americans adrift for eighteen months, and is the subject of Eric's new book Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World.Produced by Sophie Gee. Edited by Aidan Lonergan. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Get a subscription for $1 per month for 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY sign up at https://historyhit.com/subscription/ You can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. Three sailors chat on deck, their vessel pitching and heaving on early evening swells. By the dim light of a lantern, they study a compass, keeping the route due north,

ignoring their exhaustion and insistent pangs of hunger, the cold and the wet beating at their bones. They tend to the sail on this long 1,200-mile journey out of Argentina. Somewhere beyond the horizon is a shipwrecked crew and their passengers. They are determined to locate. Rations are thin. Biscuit for breakfast, fried salt pork on occasion, they skip lunch. Dinner is cabbage soup in rotations with the other men down below in the claustrophobic quarters. So engrossed are these three concentrating on the crossing, the headings and the wind direction. They're startled by the sudden outcry of the American seaman, a man named Ford, as he rests the helm from his crewmate,

bringing the boat hard to port to avoid a pot of whales dead ahead. head. It's 1812. The Falcon Islands have once before claimed their ship and nearly their lives. Yet again, here they are sailing straight to them, here on the unbounded waters, wondering what fate still has in store. Hello, glad to be with you. It's American History Hit, and I'm Don Wildman. Today, we go down to the wharves and straight out to sea. We are in the great age of sail in the earliest decades of the 19th century. The reckoning is soon to come with the advent of Steen, but for now, the ships are still wooden and driven by the wind, with the seas increasingly crowded with commerce and trade. The United States, some 30 years out from its founding,

is finding its new sea legs in the world. Challenged by issues of trade and problematic relations with Great Britain, American shippers are developing new international markets for their goods, and this has American vessels venturing farther and faster than ever to exotic ports of call in the Far East and elsewhere. It is a new and burgeoning world full of industrial promise and ocean-going commerce is the means to keep pace. But shipping is still a trade rife with unpredictability and mortal danger. Might be the weather, might be the wind, might be big rocks in your way. Sailors and captains frequently discovered themselves in remote locations with sketchy knowledge of shorelines and harbors. Such is the case in our yarn today, which takes

place deep in the Southern Hemisphere in the Falkland Islands, where a ship out of New York, named the Nenina, finds itself in very odd straits. It is the subject of a brand new book, Left for Dead, Shipwreck, Trettery, and Survival at the Edge of the World, which releases in early May, and its author Eric J. Dolan is our guest. O'hoi Captain, permission to come aboard. Thanks for having me. I smell this all there. Can you tell? Nothing like a seafaring tale. You've made your career writing about whalers and privateers and lighthouses. So cool. This is an adventure story in that realm, but more of a commercial work-a-day variety. Am I right? Yeah, it definitely is. It's a story about these three. It's basically the way I conceived it. It's a story about three vessels

that end up in the Falkland Islands at roughly the same time in a sequential pattern. And it's a story of discovery and then cooperation, then treachery, and there's a shipwreck involved. It's got all the elements of a great seafaring yarn. And it was a story that I knew absolutely nothing about before I came upon it. And the more I researched it, it just was a great tale to tell with some interesting characters. How did you come about on this? I'll give away trade secrets. There's a book that was published in the 1970s by a professor named Keith Huntress. And it's a chronology of shipwrecks and disasters from the late 1500s to about 1860. And for each shipwreck and disaster, it has a paragraph or two that encapsulates what occurred. And then it lists the primary

sources that were written at the time of the disaster. So I was just looking through this, because finding a topic for a book is very difficult because you've got to interest yourself, you've got to interest your agent, you've got to interest to the publisher. And most of all, you've got to have some sense that people are going to want to read it when you finish it. So I was looking through this book, and I came upon this one paragraph about the sealing captain, Charles Bernard. And basically all it said is that he went down to the Falklands to go on a ceiling adventure with his crew. And they were there for a number of months.

And then they came upon a shipwreck British brig, which crashed on another island in the Falklands. And 54 people were castaways. They agreed to help those people back to civilization in exchange for being able to take all of the cargo that was on board the ship and anything they could salvage from the ship. Because in order to save these people, they had to abort the rest of their sealing adventure and they were foregoing a lot of potential income. Okay. So one of those three ships is the Nenina. That's out of New York, as I said in the opening there. What was that doing in the South Atlantic at the time? Well, right after the American Revolution, the American merchants were free to trade with anybody.

The navigation laws that were imposed by Britain were basically gone. And one of the places that Americans wanted to trade with was China. And finding something that Chinese wanted was always difficult. And one of the main things they wanted was furs. They wanted sea otter furs. And they also wanted seal skins because they would make them into caps, robes and other items. So there had been a long history prior to 1812 of Americans going all throughout the oceans, including to the Falklands, to kill seals, fur seals, and sea lions, strip them of their peltz

and bring them to China to sell them. They also would kill sea elephants and render their blubber into oil that was used as an illuminating source. So the Nenino was going down to the Falklands on a traditional sealing venture to kill fur seals, hair seals, and sea elephants, and then transport the skins and the oil both back to New York and to Canton, China. I read where originally the sea otter furs were so valued in China, but then they sort of ran out of those. And so the seals were the second best. And what were they using seals for?

I'm curious. Well, actually, sea otters were the most valuable. they could sell for up to $100 for a really good pelt because of the most lustrous pelt or fur in the animal kingdom. The sea outer trade was not dead by the War of 1812. It was starting to go on the decline, but seal skins were not as valuable because they weren't as plush. They were used for everything from robes to capes to mittens. And the less valuable sea lion pelts were often used to make boots or other more sturdy garments. But China was the main market for this stuff.

And just to give you an example, a prime seater pelt, maybe you could go for $100, $80, $50. The best fur seal peltz would go for at most, $5 a piece. But you have to balance that against the fact that between the American Revolution and the War of 1812, there would probably been in the order of 2.5 million to 3 million seals that were slaughtered for their skins. So when you multiply it, it is a significant. industry. Yeah. And this is big money. I mean, you made $20,000 off of a voyage. That was like making $2 million, right? Absolutely. These are very valuable voyages, yes. Yeah. Okay. So when they do this, when they go to the Falklands, they're basically anchoring in a harbor and then they have the

smaller boats and they begin hunting for a long period of time. This is how one of those voyages goes. And then that stack of seal skins, they sail straight to China or they go back to New York? How does that work? Well, for the NINA in particular, the idea was to go down there, seal for enough time to fill up the Nannina itself with pelts, then send it back to New York, where the pelts would be sold, and then they'd be trans-ship. Most of them would go to China, where the market was strongest, but some of the less expensive, less desirable pelts would stay in the United States and would also go to England, in particular, and Europe to be made into cheaper. types of garments with the kink here for the nanina is when it left it left when the embargo was put

on place for the war of 1812 the war of 1812 hadn't started yet so once the war of 1812 broke out and they found out about it in january of 1813 they were supposed to go back to the united states but they decided to stay in the falklands continue sealing on the hopes that the war would conclude within a year's time and then they could sail back to the united states free and clear yeah Let's grapple with those political realities. This is a story that takes place in and around 1812, just as that new war is looming with Great Britain. The U.S. has existed, as we all know, officially since 1783. How have relations with England gone in the realm of shipping?

I mean, rough waters, right? Our relations with England were both miserable and good. And the good part of it is we were back to trading with England right after the American Revolution, because we were prior to the American Revolution, we were their main trading partner. And after the Revolution, British merchants in particular wanted to get back to that arrangement. The problem was over the ensuing decades, tensions flared between the two countries. And a lot of people have viewed the War of 1812 as a second iteration of the American Revolution. And the British did think that the Americans were going to fall in their face any time

and that they were going to be able to reabsorb them. But what the British did in particular is during the Napoleonic Wars, they used to restrict American commerce going to ports in particular in Europe. They also engaged in something called impressment, where they would stop American ships and they would strip them of their crew, claiming that those crew were actually British sailors who had jumped ship from British ships. And the fact is, they weren't. Most of them were Americans, but the British Navy was so large and it was continually

shorthanded that they needed to add to their labor force, essentially, by stealing Americans from their ships. And that really got Americans very upset because it was going on over a long period of time. And the third thing is, in line with the British interests in overthrowing this new country that had broken away from them, they were arming and encouraging Indians in the West to attack American outposts. So there were all these different factors that were getting the Americans anger and angrier, and that led up to the outbreak of the war of 1812. Yeah, I mean, very broad strokes. 1812 was really about the Western frontier and about maritime commerce, isn't it?

It's really the emergence of that important shipping industry that we're talking about is really at threat, you know, right off our own coasts. Another interesting consequence of that looming war was the emergence of a new and important port on the Hudson River, a day's sale up from New York. New York. You can go there today. It's near Albany is Hudson, New York, one of the most beautiful little towns. Looks a lot like Nantucket for a good reason, right? Yes, absolutely. During the American Revolution, British ships on the high seas essentially shut down one of the most lucrative American industries, which was whaling. On Nantucket,

they really were desperately trying to continue their livelihood during the American Revolution. some of them went overseas and they actually whaled from France and England. But the main thing is they learned their lesson that they were exposed on this barren sandbank fertilized by whale oil only, Nantucket, this faraway land. They decided towards the end of the American Revolution and certainly right after it that to continue their livelihood, they had to be off of the coast. Now, that's not all of the Nantucket, Whalmen. Some stayed on Nantucket. But they were looking around. for a place that they could relocate where they would have more safety in the event of the outbreak of another hostility with some other country. So Hudson was a perfect place to go because the Hudson River is a broad and fairly deep river and this is almost a hundred miles up river. So it was unlikely to be attacked by enemies, but it did give them a pathway or a conduit to the open ocean, which they absolutely needed. And it also gave them access to farmlands so that so they could supply food for their voyages.

And there were many, many stands of trees in the area that could help with shipbuilding. So a lot of Nantucketers, people from Martha's Vineyard and even other coastal areas, Long Island, relocated to Hudson right after the American Revolution. And that's why if you go to Hudson today, at least the last time I was there, some of their street signs have little whale symbols on them because they were sort of a second Nantucket, so to speak. Yeah, very confusing to be the first time I went there, but it really really satisfying when you learn it. And this is where the Nannina hails from, captained by a man named Charles Barnard. And their trade is in this very specific product, as we said, Sealskin.

Explain the Nenna for me. I mean, the ship itself. What kind of ship is this? How big are we talking about? Nenna was a brig. It was about, I can't remember the exact length. I should read my book again. But I think it was about 75, 80 feet, 70 feet.

Yeah. And it basically had a upper deck, a lower deck, and then it had to be. a hold area. And on the way down, they needed a lot of not only food and water, but they also brought along 10,000 wooden pegs eventually. They whittled a lot of them on the way down to the Falklands. And those pegs were used to stake out the seal skins and let them dry. They also had on board the broken down shallop, which they dubbed the young Ninina, which is essentially probably about a 25-foot boat. It was weighed 20 tons. It was much larger than a whale boat, but but it was much smaller than the Nina.

And the idea was once I got down to the Falklands, the carpenter on board, with the help of the other crewmen, would assemble this young Nina, and they could use that as a way to ferry them to different islands throughout the Falklands to kill the seals and the sea elephants. They also had on board all the implements they would need to go sealing, which involved clubs, lances, beaming knives, knives, rope,

everything they would need. And also they had little, not tripods. It wasn't like a whaling vessel, but they did have iron pots that they could take the sea elephant blubber, throw it into those pots, and melt it down and render out the oil and then store it in casks. So sealing had been going on for a couple of decades, and there were a number of sealing voyages from the Hudson area. But I do want to point out that Hudson had way more whaling voyages during this time than sealing voyages. And sometimes they were dual-use operations. There were whaling voyages where when they had the opportunity, and they landed on an island that happened to have whales swimming around it,

sometimes while on land, they would kill a lot of seals because they knew that that was another product that could help make their voyage financially remunerative. These sealing voyages were fairly common. The Ninina itself was built in the early 1800s. It was described as a very fine-looking vessel, a very sturdy vessel. and it was the one that they were going to place their faith in, and basically they relied on it for their, not only their livelihood, but their lives. Because you think about it, this is a time when navigation is still quite difficult. They don't have GPS.

Certainly the maps around the Falkland Islands are barely available at all. And the Falkland Islands is an archipelago of 700 different islands. 200 of them are fairly sizable. And it's a very big. very dangerous area to navigate around. Charles Bernard had been there before, as had a couple of other people on board the vessel. But still, you had to be in a ship you trusted because not only did you have to leave New York, go to Cape Verde to pick up additional supplies, then go another three or four months down to the Falkland Islands and all kinds of weather conditions. But once you were there, you anchored the Ninina, which could be dangerous in and of itself because there were a lot of major storms. And sometimes they had to put out three or four anchors to keep the vessel

from being washed to shore. But then this was your main base for upwards of a year or two years. And then you also had to have faith in this shallop that you put together because that would be the way that you get around. What was Charles Bernard like? Yeah. Based on how he acted on the way down, he was a overbearing, fly off the handle, very errant. And he was very errant. rassable kind of guy. He was suffering from some kind of leg condition during part of the voyage, but he seemed to get into fights with everybody on board. Now, part of that was perhaps a little bit understandable because of the unusual circumstances of the voyage. There were five captains on board. There were five men on board who had formerly been captains of their own vessels. It's difficult

enough to having one captain giving orders, but when you have five captains and all the captains invested their own money in the voyage, it becomes even more potentially volatile. But it's clear from how he acted on the way down and how he's been described that Charles Barnard was a rather volatile individual. But after they got there and a number of fights sort of erupted among the various captains, his father, who was also on the voyage, Valentine Barnard, basically calm things down by having a conference with the captains that Charles had been berating and he said, Charles is going to promise to be on better behavior from here on out. Let's continue this trip.

And Charles have basically agreed because after that conference that was occurred, the other people never complained about him again. And then throughout the remainder of the story, he comes off quite a bit better than he did early on. How big a crew are we talking about here? Well, there are 13 men on board. Oh, okay. So, I mean, sealing vessels, you basically, all the men on board, all the crewmen,

including the captains that were on board, would engage in the ceiling and the stripping of the skins. And 13 people is more than enough people to man a vessel of this size. And it's a good size ceiling crew. In a whaling vessel, you would likely have more people just because there are more whale boats you have to send out and a couple of more things that need to be done. But it wasn't a large crew. I'll be back with more American history after this short break. So present is the war of 1812 that they actually have to take measures right from the outset to avoid being blocked from leaving, right?

They have to anchor outside of the harbor in Sandy Hook so that they're free of the blockade. Yeah, Charles Bernard and the owners of the vessel, John Muriel's son, they knew that this embargo was potentially coming. And they were hell-bent on leaving before the embargo clamped down New York Harbor. So as soon as they heard that the House of Representatives was going to vote on the embargo and it was likely to go through, they sent the Ninita just offshore, as you mentioned, Sandy Hook, and then they ferried the rest of the crew to the Ninina. And just so you know, this was not something unique to the Ninina. They were joined by 70 other vessels sort of hovering off of Sandy Hook saying, we're going to get in our last voyage before this war breaks out.

So it was a potentially dangerous or risky maneuver. Right. They arrive in the Falklands September 1812. I've never been to the Balkans before, but I've sure seen pictures. Very rugged, remote. Yes. Paradise for a seal. Yes.

But importantly to this tale, winters are lousy and dangerous. Yes. Well, the entire year round, it's fascinating. The place had no native trees. They did have this thing called tussock grass, which grows to about eight or nine feet, that covered much of the island. But it's essentially barren. It's very cold.

In the winter, the average temperature is about 36 degrees. In the summer, the average temperature is about 49 degrees. But you have to factor in how windy the Falklands are. The average wind speed is about 18 miles per hour. So that turns a 36 temperature into 26, how it feels. So year round, they were extremely cold, exposed to all these, tempests and a lot of people who visited the Falklands in the early years had nothing nice to say about them. I think they're beautiful, but to somebody who had to spend time there, they were rather

desolate, barren, dreary, dark, cold. And very difficult to navigate because of the wind, apparently. That would be a real trick. We won't get into the war too much. That's another conversation for another podcast, but treacherous waters, I will say, just the basics. War of 18, 12, as we discussed, maritime rights, territorial expansion, Britain taking American ships and impressing sailors. It's terrible for the shipping industry and for the economy, of course. They decide to stick it out in the Falklands. Why is that? Why don't they just come home knowing there's a war on? Well, in their agreement that the Charles Bernard and the other captain signed, should war break out, they were supposed to return to an American port. But they gathered together and they decided to stay on the Falklands. They had been on New Island, which is an area where a lot of whaling ships go to.

They knew that they couldn't stay there, so they went about 80 miles away to a small, secluded harbor. But the reason that they chose to stay is they figured, if we went back now and got captured, we would end up in a British prison. So wouldn't it be more comfortable and pleasant for us just to spend our time here for another year in the hopes and the expectation that the war would be over by then

and we can go back Scott Free? So that was the essential calculation was let's continue sealing, let's continue accumulating peltz, let's hope that the war is over. And even if the war isn't over after a year and we go back and get captured, then we'll still go to a British prison. But at least for the previous eight or nine months, we wouldn't have been in a British prison. So it'd be much more pleasant on our account. So, Eric, you discussed this as a three-ship story. The other ship we'll get to is the Isabella, which is a British ship. that has crashed on a reef. Is this a meanwhile sort of thing? Did this happen in the same time frame as the

Nina? Yeah. The Nina got down there in September of 1812. The Isabella took off from Australia, or New South Wales, which was a penal colony at the time. And it basically had 54 people on board, a bunch of Marines, some other soldiers, and 10 former convicts who had received pardons or served their sentence, including four women who were formerly prostitutes. So they had this big group of people, they were heading back to London, and they left in the summer, but they crashed into the Eagle Island on the Falklands in February of 1813. So this is a number of months after the Ninena had already been there. So they crash. They establish this little area called Newtown Providence, and I don't know if we're going to get into it, but one of the things they initially decide to do is they have a

17 and a half foot long boat on board the Isabella, which wasn't destroyed. in the crash into the reef. So they took that off and they elected six of their own, including two mariners and one military man, to take that 17 and a half foot boat and travel throughout the Falklands hoping to find either British or a Spanish settlement. But unbeknownst to them, both the British and Spanish had evacuated the Valklands. So they essentially were, there was no settlements. And if they didn't find anybody, they were supposed to go to South America, Rio de Janeiro, Braynos Ares to get help. So that's essentially what happened in early February and March and April and the British

castaways are there. And then come April, Charles Bernard and his crew discover on a sealing expedition, hey, we're not alone here. There are these British castaways. What are we going to do? Right. And they decide to be big about it. Yes.

They take them aboard and explain that there is a war, but we're going to take you home. And this is really where things get very complicated and very, very gnarly for Bernard and all the rest of them. Yeah, they essentially, what happens is they agree in this humanitarian gesture to save the castaways. And so Barnard leaves two of the other captains and some of his men with the castaways to prepare for departure. He takes a bunch of other individuals, including about 10 Marines with him, because he's short-handed, to go back to the Nina, which is hold up. in a harbor about 110 miles away from where the wreck occurred. And he wanted their help to get the Ninina back into ship shape so they could sail back to Eagle Island and everybody could leave

the Falklands. And I don't want to go into too many details, but what basically happened is a lot of bad weather and delays ultimately led to the British who were with Barnard and the Ninina to rise up and, in a sense, they mutinied because Barnard agreed to go to another island. with another American and three British to get food, which they were fast running out of. And while they were away, the British, with the support of the British Marines and the captain of the Marines, rose up and said, we're not going to wait. We need to go back. You know, who cares about this bad weather? We need to get back to Eagle Island. We need to leave. And the Americans on board begged them to stop off at this other island and take on the

hunting party. But they basically went by the island. They shot a couple of guns off, they refused to stop, and they left leaving that hunting party behind. And then when they got back to Eagle Island, where the shipwreck was, another twist in the story, because that 17 and a half foot boat that went off to get a rescue succeeded. They made it to Buenos Aires. And a British warship the Nancy was sent to evacuate the castaways. And that captain knew nothing about the American sealing vessel because of the timing. But when he gets there, he goes, I don't care about this humanitarian agreement. I don't care that these Americans were nice to you. This is a prize of war. The Ninina is a prize of war and all those Americans are prisoners. And that's where it gets

even more sticky because he has an opportunity to save those, the hunting party, but basically doesn't. And they ultimately leave, leaving the five men behind. So I want to review. here. Okay. Because it gets complicated, but it's fascinating. We're talking about three ships. First, Nanina goes on a ceiling expedition. At the same time-ish, the Isabella's coming from Australia. They crash on the reef outside. Those two ships are kind of in the same world at the same time. On top of which, there's a war ongoing. And a British ship, I guess a warship, I suppose, comes right out from Buenos Aires and discovers the American vessel, which they then steal and take as booty. You know, this is their prize.

How good a sealing expedition have they had? Were there a lot of seal skins on that ship? Yes, they had had a fairly good run. The first eight months they were there. It would have been a lot better had they been able to stay a year and a year and a half. That's what the Brits are seeing. I can make money off these steel skins. Let's take this boat.

Yeah. Well, it wasn't only the seal skins, the many thousands of seal skins that the Americans had gathered, but the Isabella was also transporting many seal skins, as well as whale oil, which they had retrieved from the wreck. So Captain Duranda, the guy in the British warship, saw an opportunity to gain a valuable prize. And what he did was treacherous at best and just evil at worse.

Yeah. What's fascinating to me about the story, as you're telling it, is the unusual quality of the emergence of the shipping industry and this whole commerce on the oceans against the backdrop of war, which is really unusual. And I suppose that's what drew you to the story. Yes, that was a big part of it because that sort of threw a wrench in everything. And the way that I looked at it is being a mariner in the early 1800s was incredibly dangerous during times of peace.

Now you throw a war into the mix, much of which was fought on the open ocean and it becomes even more tricky. Exactly. It's a story about not only the challenges of this lifestyle. the whole seafaring life and making money on the waters, but also it's the personalities involved. It's really fascinating. And there's all these little episodes. I love the fact that the guy who was bringing the Isabella around brought from Australia,

but it has a tension on board. One captain who knows how to get around these waters, we're talking about Cape Horn here, which is one of the most dangerous waters in the world. Yeah, I mean, Captain Higden, the master of the Isabella, was a drunk, a poor sailor, and a totally irresponsible individual. And they nearly crashed off Campbell Island before they got to Cape Horn.

They barely made it around Cape Horn. And then they crashed into the Falklands. But had it not been for another captain on board, a guy named Richard Brooks, they would have probably crashed off Campbell Island near Tasmania and not even made it to Cape Horn. And despite his heroic efforts on the edge of the Falkland Islands, they still met with disaster. But that was in large part because Hicton had been warned that there's land off the bow and we need to do something. And he was sleeping with his girl and drunk to boot and refused to come topside. And finally, Captain Brooks came up and tried to steer them out of trouble but was unsuccessful.

It was too late. But they get on, this is what I loved. They get in in that little straight there between the rocks, which he's complimented for in the, in the log. And then he chops the mass down. It collapses intentionally on a rock to the left, I guess. And that becomes their sort of stabilizing force. I mean, these are like the little nitty gritties of great seamanship that you just don't

even hear about. It's really cool. Yeah. In this book, there are 100 points at which if something had happened differently, if somebody had made a different decision, the outcome would have been quite different. And yes, his seamanship, Brooks's seamanship. at the very end, got them closer into shore, and at low tide, they were actually able to almost walk out to the wreck and start offloading it. So it could have been much worse. Well, it's an

adventure. And to you understand what happens to these wayward folks, you have to read the book, and the book is called Left for Dead, Shipwreck, Trettery and Survival at the Edge of the World comes out early May. I run to get this book or any of the other books of this fine author. Thank you so much. Eric J. Dolan, I really appreciate you coming on the show. Well, thank you for having me. It was great. Hey, thanks for listening to American History Hit. You know, every week we release new episodes.

Two new episodes dropping Mondays and Thursdays, all kinds of content from mysterious missing colonies to powerful political movements to some of the biggest battles across the centuries. Don't miss an episode. By hitting like and follow, you help us out, which is

great. But you'll also be reminded when our shows are on. And while you're at it, Share it with a friend. American History Hit with me, Don Wildman. So grateful for your support.