Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World - Hardcover

Dolin, Eric Jay

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 1324093080 ISBN 13: 9781324093084

Publisher: Liveright, 2024

Synopsis

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.

8 pages of full-color illustrations

About this title

About the Author

Eric Jay Dolin is the best-selling author of numerous works in maritime history, including Left for Dead; Black Flags, Blue Waters; and Leviathan. His books have won many awards including the John Lyman Award for U.S. Maritime History; Fraunces Tavern Museum Book Award; National Society Daughters of the American Revolution Excellence in American History Book Award; and the Samuel Eliot Morison Book Award for Naval Literature; and he was a finalist for the Kirkus Prize. He now lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts, with his family.

Edition details

• Publisher: Liveright
• Publication date: 2024
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1324093080
• ISBN 13: 9781324093084
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 320