John Wetherell was a native of Whitby, one of the thirteen children of Nathan Wetherell, a whaling captain. He was born in 1780, and his father died in 1789 — killed, according to Wetherell, in a skirmish with Eskimos in Davis Strait. Wetherell himself died, probably in New York, sometime after 1834. He left behind him an autobiography, in three volumes of manuscript amounting altogether to a thousand pages. It had been the object of a fruitless search by students of the period until, a few years ago, Mrs. Anne Klein of New York, an enthusiastic collector of rare nautical books, discovered it at the New York auction of the library of the late Gabriel Wells. There can be no doubt about its genuineness; the paper, the script, and the ink help to bear it out, even if the internal evidence was not conclusive. The water colors with which he illustrated his work, some of which, quite charming in their simplicity, are reproduced in this volume, could only have been painted by a seaman of the time.
There can be no doubt about the genuineness of the document, but unfortunately there is room for doubt about the truth of many of the passages contained in it. It purports to be a diary, but on the face of it the manuscript is at best a fair copy made from the original documents — that is obvious from the uniformity of paper, ink, and handwriting, and the absence of erasures or corrections. And a very brief further analysis shows that there is considerable variation in the value of different parts of the book. Wetherell was shipwrecked over and over again, a dozen times in all, and on more than one occasion he was the sole survivor, escaping with nothing more than his life and most certainly without the current volume of his diary. Later on he reconstructed the lost passages from memory — his memory was clearly very tenacious of names and dates — but then he never could resist the temptation to embroider his narrative. Some of the reconstructed passages are absurd, and some are demonstrably false, which is a great pity. For instance, there can be no doubt that he was an eyewitness of the Battle of the Nile, being present as one of the crew of a hired storeship, and if he had stuck to the truth in his account he might have made a decided contribution to history; but what he wrote about the Nile is so colored by newspaper accounts (the style can be detected) and so distorted by faulty memory as to be valueless.
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