1/4: Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World Hardcover – May 7, 2024 by Eric Jay Dolin (Author)
The John Batchelor Show
John Batchelor
4.5 • 2.8K Ratings
🗓️ 2 November 2024
⏱️ 10 minutes
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Summary
1/4: Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World Hardcover – May 7, 2024 by Eric Jay Dolin (Author)
1907 Stanley, Falklands
https://www.amazon.com/Left-Dead-Shipwreck-Treachery-Survival/dp/1324093080
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 Deadshows individuals in wartime under great duress acting both nobly and atrociously, and offers a unique perspective on a pivotal era in American maritime history.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | This is CBS Eye on the World. Here's John Batchelor. |
| 0:10.0 | This is CBS, I on the World. I'm John Batchelor. Let's go sealing. A new book, Left for Dead, |
| 0:19.0 | shipwreck, treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World. |
| 0:23.3 | This is not only sealing a very, very lucrative occasion about the time of the revolution into the early 19th century. |
| 0:31.4 | It's also a story about the Falkland Islands that once we're at the edge of the world and are now in the conversation all the time between |
| 0:38.3 | Argentina and the United Kingdom. They remain part of the British Empire, British Commonwealth. |
| 0:45.1 | However, the conversation here takes us to another collision between the Young America and Mother |
| 0:53.0 | Britain. This would be the war of 1812. |
| 0:55.9 | Eric J. Dolan is the author. |
| 0:57.4 | I congratulate him. |
| 0:58.5 | The research is not only impressive, it's extremely persuasive, |
| 1:03.1 | that we're living the life of a sealer in 1812. |
| 1:07.6 | We begin, though, with the commerce. |
| 1:09.6 | What was it about seals or something near to something called a sea otter? |
| 1:15.1 | Who wanted such things in great quantity that you could launch an expedition to seal for one or two years? |
| 1:23.0 | Eric, congratulations. |
| 1:24.3 | Good evening. |
| 1:25.1 | What was the commerce of sealing? |
| 1:26.8 | Who bought? |
| 1:27.5 | Who sold? Good evening to you. Good evening to you was the commerce of sealing? Who bought? Who sold? |
| 1:28.2 | Good evening to you. |
| 1:29.5 | Good evening to you. |
... |
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