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 alltoo-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.
“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