3/4: 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
⏱️ 12 minutes
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Summary
3/4: Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World Hardcover – May 7, 2024 by Eric Jay Dolin (Author)
1833 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 CBSI on the world. I'm John Batch from visiting with Eric J. Dolan. His new book is |
| 0:10.1 | Left for Dead, Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World. We're in the Falklands. |
| 0:15.2 | It's 1812, 1813. There's a shipwreck coming from Australia, and women and children and men are scattered on |
| 0:24.2 | the shore of a bleak part of the Falklands. Fortunately for them, there's a ceiling, experienced sealing crew |
| 0:31.4 | led by Charles Barnard, and they are about to see the burning grass, which suggests to them somebody's there. |
| 0:39.3 | And here they come across the shipwreck, and the shipwreck people believe they're rescued. |
| 0:43.6 | Except, well, they are rescued in a way, Eric, except for it's going to be a long way around rescue. |
| 0:49.9 | Who knows there's a war on, and who doesn't? |
| 0:53.4 | Yeah, when Charles Bernard and his other sealers come upon the erect ship and the castaways, |
| 1:01.1 | they are aware that war is broken out because a few months earlier, an American sealing ship |
| 1:06.5 | came by and told them that the war had broken out. |
| 1:09.5 | The people on board the Isabella, however, |
| 1:11.6 | were not aware that word broken out. So Charles Bernard and his men offer the castaways a great deal, |
| 1:17.7 | a humanitarian deal. They say, we're going to save you. We're going to take you back to South |
| 1:21.9 | American port so you can go back to London. And all that we ask in return is the right to salvage |
| 1:27.4 | the wrecked Isabella |
| 1:29.0 | and the cargo on board minus personal possessions. The British agree to this, but then Barnard |
| 1:34.7 | realizes they don't know the war is broken out, and he knows that they can overpower the Americans |
| 1:39.2 | at any moment. So he feels that it's incumbent upon him to let them know that the war has commenced. |
| 1:44.7 | He does. |
| 1:45.5 | They take another vote. |
| 1:46.8 | And the British, all except for one or two, say, no, no, it's fine. |
... |
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