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Summary
Summary
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.
Reviews (3)
Publisher's Weekly Review
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. (May)
Kirkus Review
The bestselling author of Rebels at Sea, A Furious Sky, and Leviathan returns with another adventure at sea. In his latest maritime narrative, Dolin chronicles an early-19th-century calamity featuring the usual privation and acts of heroism but more than the usual bad behavior. In early 1812, the American brig Nanina sailed for the then-uninhabited Falkland Islands in the South Atlantic, where its crew hoped to find an abundant supply of seals. Later that year, the Isabella left New South Wales for Britain carrying a mixture of pardoned convicts, soldiers, and their wives. The ship's incompetent captain barely avoided early disaster but later hit a reef in the Falklands; the crew managed to escape to a deserted island. When supplies ran low, a few men sailed the 17-foot ship's boat across 1,000 miles of stormy ocean to Brazil, where a British admiral dispatched a ship that reached the castaways, as well as the Nanina, which had just discovered them. With the War of 1812 in progress, the British captain announced that the Nanina was a prize of war. He sailed off with both ships, aware that he was abandoning five members of the Nanina crew who were off hunting seals. When they returned, they were mystified to find their base deserted. Though readers already know that they survived, Dolin maintains an interesting narrative of their 18 months alone on the barren subarctic Falklands. Despite the absence of firearms, food was rarely lacking on islands dense with seals, penguins, and feral hogs and the services of a large, aggressive dog. The sailors' mastery of sewing, carving, and carpentry proved invaluable. Personality clashes instigated much of the drama, with episodes of cooperation and mutual suffering alternating with selfishness, betrayal, and abandonment. Eventually, ships arrived to take them home, after which "most disappeared from the historical record." An entertaining castaway tale. Copyright (c) Kirkus Reviews, used with permission.
Booklist Review
A master of the maritime narrative, Dolin (Rebels at Sea, 2022) surfaces a submerged shipwreck story. It involves two merchant ships, American and British, off the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812. Dolin opens with the arrival of the Nanina; its mission was killing seals for oil and hides. The British ship from Australia wrecked nearby in early 1813. The castaways managed to sail to Buenos Aires. They contacted a British naval officer (who had been involved in the Bounty mutiny); he dispatched a rescue captained by William d'Aranda. Meanwhile, the Americans, led by Charles Barnard, discovered the marooned British and arranged to rescue them. When d'Aranda arrived, he turned the tables, capturing the Americans, seizing their ship as a prize of war, and abandoning Barnard and his companions. Barnard related this story in a book published in 1829. Dolin capitalizes on that source, its illustrations, testimonies of participants, and contemporary photographs of the Falklands, creating a work that will captivate a readership built from his many fans and all readers enamored of true tales of the high seas.
