author

William S. Cary

1804–1883

A Nantucket sailor turned a near-impossible survival story into one of the stranger true adventures of the 19th century. His memoir follows the wreck of the whaleship Oeno in 1825 and the years he spent in Fiji as its sole survivor.

1 Audiobook

Wrecked on the Feejees

Wrecked on the Feejees

by William S. Cary

About the author

Born in 1804 and associated with Nantucket, William S. Cary is remembered for a firsthand narrative of shipwreck and survival rather than for a large body of published work. Project Gutenberg’s record for Wrecked on the Feejees identifies him as the author and dates him to 1804–1883.

Cary’s fame rests on the experiences described in Wrecked on the Feejees. The surviving summaries of the book describe him as the sole survivor of the whaleship Oeno, wrecked on Turtle Island in the Pacific on April 5, 1825, and say he later lived for years in Fiji. A foreword reproduced in online editions says the story was compiled from his log-book and first appeared in the Nantucket Journal in 1887, after the journal had been discovered.

What makes Cary interesting today is the immediacy of that account: it blends maritime history, endurance memoir, and a rare Nantucket perspective on the South Pacific. Reliable biographical detail beyond the shipwreck story is limited in the sources I could confirm, so his life is best understood through the remarkable narrative he left behind.