A Salty Tale of Survival
IN HIS NEW BOOK LEFT FOR DEAD, AUTHOR ERIC JAY DOLIN CHRONICLES THE TORTUROUS SAGA OF CASTAWAYS DURING THE WAR OF 1812
Eric Jay Dolin was flipping through an old book that included snippets about maritime stories. A tale from the early 19th century that involved a man named Charles Barnard caught his eye. The more Dolin learned, the more the story refused to let go of his imagination.
Barnard was the captain of a New York-based ship that was hunting seals in the Falkland Islands. He discovered the survivors of a British ship that had wrecked, and agreed to rescue them— even though, the castaways were surprised to learn, their respective nations had gone to war. Despite the American’s humanitarian gesture during what became known as the War of 1812, a British warship arrived, and its commander seized the American ship. He declared the Americans prisoners of war and intentionally left behind five men. They struggled to survive for a year and a half before British whalers rescued them.
The story of what happened during the ordeal was so compelling that Dolin turned it into his just-released book Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World. The nonfiction work is based on Dolin’s extensive research into not only the noble and atrocious behavior of the people involved, but also into the broader events of the era, based on all kinds of articles, warship logbooks and other materials in historical archives.
Some of Dolin’s research included a 250-page book that Barnard wrote about the experience. “That was a good start,” Dolin told Soundings. “A number of people on the ship kept logbooks or diaries. There were some semi-legal cases that revolved around this story. There were protests that were lodged by individuals who felt that they were treated wrong.”
If all of that sounds like a whopping load of research, it was. Dolin has never shied away from that sort of thing when
it comes to the world that exists in and around the water. As an undergraduate, he earned a double major in biology and environmental studies. He then got a master’s in environmental management from Yale University, and a Ph.D. in environmental policy and planning from MIT.
Dolin’s previous books could be the basis for a sprawling course in all things maritime. Just some of his other titles include Rebels at Sea: Privateering in the American Revolution, about privateers who were critical to the founding of the U.S. Navy during the Revolution. He also wrote A Furious Sky: The Five-Hundred-Year History of America’s Hurricanes, which tells the history of America through its battles with big storms. In Black Flags, Blue Waters: The Epic History of America’s Most Notorious Pirates, Dolin weaves a tale from the late 1600s through the early 1700s, when American piracy was in its prime. In his book Brilliant Beacons: A History of the American Lighthouse, Dolin unearths the story of how early America turned into a global industrial power. Leviathan: The History of Whaling in America, is about the epic history of iron men in wooden boats.
As odd as it may sound, he says, much of his curiosity began when he was a boy with a dedicated passion for collecting shells.
“I joined shell clubs,” he recalls. “My mom would put together all these old clothes. We’d send them off to the nuns in the Philippines, and then they’d send me a box full of shells. I saved up my lawnmowing money, and I went into New York once a year with my folks, and there was a shell store there, and I bought shells.”
His senior paper in high school was 150 pages long—about the mollusks of Long Island Sound. He wrote pieces that got published in a seashell magazine.
“The point is, I always have loved the ocean,” he says from the office where he works today in Marblehead, Massachusetts. There, he still keeps about 400 shells.
Dolin never did become a boater, despite being immersed in a region that’s packed with them, but he occasionally heads out on other people’s boats. And while his books are all based around maritime culture, he chooses the topics based on whatever seems interesting at the time.
“The reason I wrote Pirates is partly because of my kids,” he says. “They were teenagers, and I had a couple of ideas for books, and I decided to run them by my kids. When I mentioned, ‘Hey, I want to write a book about pirates,’ both my kids got super excited.”
Left for Dead is being published on the heels of David Grann’s book The Wager, a number-one
New York Times bestseller about a 1740s shipwreck in South America. These types of stories, Dolin says, have remained popular with readers for centuries because they share common, compelling themes.
“I think people love stories of adversity, overcoming adversity, people acting horrifically towards one another, people acting in a humanitarian manner towards one another, surviving against the odds,” he says. “Another classic one is In the Heart of the Sea by Nathaniel Philbrick, which is about a sinking of a ship, and then the people survive, and there’s cannibalism. People just love these salty tales that have interesting twists and turns and many dramatic events.”
Dolin loves all of those twists and turns too, which is why he says he couldn’t help but write
Left for Dead. The more he learned about what happened during the War of 1812, the more he wanted to keep learning, and the more he realized it was a story that should not be lost to history.
While the work is nonfiction, some early reviews note that it reads like fiction. Publishers Weekly gave it a starred review and called it “riven with tension on every page.”
As so many boaters know, human beings can be just that compelling when they go off to sea, endure great hardship, and have to figure out how to carry on when it seems that all is lost.
“It’s people acting great, abysmally and everything in between,” Dolin says. “It’s like human nature in the raw.” — Kim Kavin