Description
The true story of five castaways abandoned on the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812—a tale of treachery, shipwreck, isolation and the desperate struggle for survival
In Left for Dead, Eric Jay Dolin—“one of today’s finest writers about ships and the sea” (American Heritage)—tells the true story of a wild and fateful encounter between an American sealing vessel, a shipwrecked British brig and a British warship in the Falkland archipelago during the War of 1812.
Fraught with misunderstandings and mistrust, the incident left three British sailors and two Americans, including the captain of the sealer, Charles H. Barnard, abandoned in the barren, windswept and inhospitable Falklands for a year and a half. With deft narrative skill and unequalled knowledge of the very pith of the seafaring life, Dolin describes in vivid and harrowing detail the increasingly desperate existence of the castaways during their eighteen-month ordeal—an all-too-common fate in the Great Age of Sail.
A tale of intriguing complexity, with surprising twists and turns throughout—involving greed, lying, bullying, a hostile takeover, stellar leadership, ingenuity, severe privation, endurance, banishment, the great value of a dog, the birth of a baby, a perilous thousand-mile open-ocean journey in a seventeen-foot boat, an improbable rescue mission and legal battles over a dubious and disgraceful wartime prize—Left for Dead shows individuals in wartime under great duress acting both nobly and atrociously and offers a unique perspective on a pivotal era in American maritime history.
Reviews
"It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that Dolin’s saga has as many twists and turns as a route through the mazy South Atlantic archipelago....Dolin does justice to the drama of it all... without stinting on one of pleasures of reading 19th-century history: the wordsmithery of people high and low…The author of several previous books on such maritime topics as piracy and whaling, Dolin is an expert literary steersman." — Dennis Drabelle, The Washington Post
"It’s a tale with all the elements of a movie blockbuster: shipwreck, mutiny, greed and a desperate struggle for survival in a hostile environment. There is also high-minded altruism, persistent backstabbing, drunkenness and—as if a movie executive had ins" — Bill Heavey
"Eric Jay Dolin’s depiction of early 1800s seafaring is filled with as much adventure, intrigue, action, and colorful characters as any classic Hollywood movie. Surviving a thousand-mile ocean journey in a small boat is just one of several scintillating ingredients. Left for Dead is a true account that reads like a grizzled sailor’s tall tale." — Tom Clavin, author of Lightning Down: A World War II Story of Survival
"In Left for Dead, a handful of sailors abandoned on a remote island by their mates more than two centuries ago is only the beginning. Eric Jay Dolin delivers surprise after surprise. With a plot worthy of the best seafaring fiction, Dolin’s grippin" — Andrea Pitzer, author of Icebound: Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World
"An absorbing adventure that explores the dark shadows of instinct and self-preservation, and the hardships and stress that stretch the bonds of humanity. Fascinating reading." — Stephen R. Bown, author of Island of the Blue Foxes: Disaster and Triumph on the World’s Greatest Scientific Expedition
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