Trust the Whale

She buried her husband in the sea. Seventeen years later, she followed him across it.

In 1846, Eliza Sinclair watched a storm take her husband and son. She was left with five children, a sheep farm in New Zealand, and a grief that should have broken her.

It didn't.

At sixty-three years old, Eliza did something extraordinary. She gathered her entire family-thirteen souls across three generations-loaded them onto a ship with a piano, a flock of sheep, and everything they owned, and sailed ten thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean.

She was following a whale.

A great, scarred creature that had appeared in the waters after Francis drowned. A presence the Māori recognized as something sacred: a guardian spirit, an ancestor transformed. Eliza couldn't prove what the whale was. She only knew that when she looked into its eye, she saw her husband looking back.

The journey would take them through:

• The lush islands of Tahiti, where a Polynesian queen recognizes what Eliza carries
• The cold, unwelcoming shores of British Columbia, where every door closes against them
• San Francisco in the chaos of the Civil War
• And finally to Hawaii-to a dying king, a grieving kingdom, and an island called Niʻihau that seems to have been waiting for them all along

Based on the remarkable true story of the author's great-great-grandmother, Following the Whale weaves documented history with Polynesian spiritual traditions to tell an unforgettable tale of one woman's faith, one family's courage, and a love that refused to end at death.

The Sinclair family purchased Niʻihau in 1864. Their descendants own it still.

Some journeys are measured in miles. Others are measured in what we're willing to believe.