Left for Dead
Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World
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- £7.99
Publisher 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 unequaled 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.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Maritime travel by sail was exceptionally "unpredictable" and pushed individuals "under great duress" to act in ways both noble and deceitful, according to this twisty tale. Bestseller Dolin (Rebels at Sea) unspools a fraught encounter on the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812 between the Nanina, a 13-man American sealing expedition, and the Isabella, a shipwrecked British convict transport bearing more than 50 crew and passengers, among them civil servants, prisoners released from an Australian penal colony, and the families of both. Stranded for more than a month, the Isabella was facing starvation and infighting when the Nanina stumbled upon the castaways in March 1813 and, despite the outbreak of war, offered them transportation in exchange for their cargo. The Isabella's captain agreed, and the two groups camped together for three months while undertaking a complex salvage operation. The tables turned drastically, however, when the British brig Nancy showed up, summoned by a boat the Isabella had dispatched shortly after foundering. The Nancy captured the Nanina, leaving five Americans marooned. For the next 534 days, they survived through Robinson Crusoe–esque ingenuity. This stunning account of shifting fortunes is riven with tension on every page, as Dolin provides detailed descriptions of bickering and backstabbing, tricky nautical maneuvers, and desperate survival techniques. It's an edge-of-your-seat adventure.
