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

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

Author: Eric Jay Dolin

Publisher: Liveright Publishing

Published: 2024-05-07

Total Pages: 356

ISBN-13: 1324093099

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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.


Four Against the Arctic

Four Against the Arctic

Author: David Roberts

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2005-09-02

Total Pages: 324

ISBN-13: 0743272315

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In 1743, four stranded Russian sailors survived the next six years in the Arctic with no provisions. Making a bow and arrows from driftwood--since there are no trees there--they survived on reindeer meat until another ship blown off course rescued them.


Adrift

Adrift

Author: Brian Murphy

Publisher: Da Capo Press

Published: 2018-09-04

Total Pages: 316

ISBN-13: 0306901994

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A story of tragedy at sea where every desperate act meant life or death The small ship making the Liverpool-to-New York trip in the early months of 1856 carried mail, crates of dry goods, and more than one hundred passengers, mostly Irish emigrants. Suddenly an iceberg tore the ship asunder and five lifeboats were lowered. As four lifeboats drifted into the fog and icy water, never to be heard from again, the last boat wrenched away from the sinking ship with a few blankets, some water and biscuits, and thirteen souls. Only one would survive. This is his story. As they started their nine days adrift more than four hundred miles off Newfoundland, the castaways--an Irish couple and their two boys, an English woman and her daughter, newlyweds from Ireland, and several crewmen, including Thomas W. Nye from Fairhaven, Massachusetts--began fighting over food and water. One by one, though, day by day, they died. Some from exposure, others from madness and panic. In the end, only Nye and the ship's log survived. Using Nye's firsthand descriptions and later newspaper accounts, ship's logs, assorted diaries, and family archives, Brian Murphy chronicles the horrific nine days that thirteen people suffered adrift on the cold gray Atlantic. Adrift brings readers to the edge of human limits, where every frantic decision and desperate act is a potential life saver or life taker.


Left for Dead

Left for Dead

Author: Howard Jencks

Publisher: Xlibris Corporation

Published: 2012-04-05

Total Pages: 241

ISBN-13: 1469190958

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While investigating the murder of a suspected serial killer in the Lake Tahoe basin, Detective Michael Garrett is lead back to the small desert border town he once called home, where he uncovers a violent drug cartel that has begun expansion into the United States, and discovers the frightening reality that he has now placed not only himself, but his family and others in harms way. Driven by tourism, the last thing the city of Stateline, Nevada wanted to do was announce the presence of a serial killer. Driven by the laws of nature, the last thing Rosa Jimenez wanted was to become his next victim. Called to assist with a gruesome fi nding, Detective Garrett fi nds himself entrenched in an investigation he cant walk away from. Recognizing Rosa from his past, he was resolute that justice be served. As the investigation leads Garrett south, he seeks the assistance of an old friend and current Vice-Detective with the LAPD, David Ross. When Ross is unable to open doors in the Los Angeles area, Garrett realizes his next stop is his hometown on the Mexican border where he stumbles on a link to Los Zetas, a Drug Cartel that has formed an alliance with the Mexican Mafi a. Used to operating with impunity in Mexico, the cartel targets Garrett and his family as his investigation begins to threaten their business. In a daring attempt to make things right, the detectives cross the border to confront the man directing the cartel henchmen.


Icebound

Icebound

Author: Andrea Pitzer

Publisher: Simon and Schuster

Published: 2021-01-07

Total Pages: 185

ISBN-13: 1471182754

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'An epic tale of exploration, daring and tragedy told by a fine historian - and a wonderful writer' Peter Frankopan, author of the bestselling The Silk Roads. 'The name of William Barents isn’t that familiar to us these days…but this enthralling, elemental and literally spine-chilling epic of courage and endurance should change all that’ Roger Alton, Daily Mail A dramatic and compelling account of survival against the odds from the golden Age of Exploration. Since its beginning, the human story has been one of exploration and survival - often against long odds. The longest odds of all might have been faced by Dutch explorer William Barents and his crew of fifteen, who on Barents’ third journey into the Far Arctic in the year 1597 lost their ship to a crush of icebergs and, with few weapons and dwindling supplies, spent nine months fighting off ravenous polar bears, gnawing cold and seemingly endless winter. This is their story. In Icebound, Andrea Pitzer combines a movie-worthy tale of survival with a sweeping history of the period - a time of hope, adventure and seemingly unlimited scientific and geographic frontiers. At the story’s centre is William Barents, one of the sixteenth century’s greatest navigators, whose larger-than-life ambitions and obsessive quest to find a path through the deepest, most remote regions of the Arctic ended in both catastrophe and glory - glory because the desperation that his men endured had an epic quality that would echo through the centuries as both warning and spur to polar explorers. In a narrative that is filled with fascinating tutorials - on such topics as survival at twenty degrees below, the degeneration of the human body when it lacks Vitamin C, the history of mutiny, the practice of keel hauling, the art of celestial navigation and the intricacies of repairing masts and building shelters - the lesson that stands above all others is the feats humans are capable of when asked to double then triple then quadruple their physical capacities.


Left for Dead

Left for Dead

Author: Nick Ward

Publisher: A&C Black

Published: 2007-01-01

Total Pages: 321

ISBN-13: 0713685220

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A gripping true-life story of survival against all the odds: Touching the Void meets Perfect Storm.


Last Man Off

Last Man Off

Author: Matt Lewis

Publisher: Penguin

Published: 2015-05-12

Total Pages: 258

ISBN-13: 0698187555

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“A sinister version of The Perfect Storm. Thrilling.”—Sunday Times (UK) For readers of The Perfect Storm, Between a Rock and a Hard Place, and Into the Wild There’s nothing that armchair adventure lovers relish more than a gripping true story of disaster and heroism, and Last Man Off delivers all that against a breathtaking backdrop of icebergs and killer whales. On June 6, 1998, twenty-three-year-old Matt Lewis had just started his dream job as a scientific observer aboard a deep-sea fishing boat in the waters off Antarctica. As the crew haul in the line for the day, a storm begins to brew. When the captain vanishes and they are forced to abandon ship, Lewis leads the escape onto three life rafts, where the battle for survival begins.


Endeavour

Endeavour

Author: Peter Moore

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2019-05-14

Total Pages: 432

ISBN-13: 0374715513

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"An immense treasure trove of fact-filled and highly readable fun.” --Simon Winchester, The New York Times Book Review A Sunday Times (U.K.) Best Book of 2018 and Winner of the Mary Soames Award for History An unprecedented history of the storied ship that Darwin said helped add a hemisphere to the civilized world The Enlightenment was an age of endeavors, with Britain consumed by the impulse for grand projects undertaken at speed. Endeavour was also the name given to a collier bought by the Royal Navy in 1768. It was a commonplace coal-carrying vessel that no one could have guessed would go on to become the most significant ship in the chronicle of British exploration. The first history of its kind, Peter Moore’s Endeavour: The Ship That Changed the World is a revealing and comprehensive account of the storied ship’s role in shaping the Western world. Endeavour famously carried James Cook on his first major voyage, charting for the first time New Zealand and the eastern coast of Australia. Yet it was a ship with many lives: During the battles for control of New York in 1776, she witnessed the bloody birth of the republic. As well as carrying botanists, a Polynesian priest, and the remains of the first kangaroo to arrive in Britain, she transported Newcastle coal and Hessian soldiers. NASA ultimately named a space shuttle in her honor. But to others she would be a toxic symbol of imperialism. Through careful research, Moore tells the story of one of history’s most important sailing ships, and in turn shines new light on the ambition and consequences of the Age of Enlightenment.


A Hard, Cruel Shore

A Hard, Cruel Shore

Author: Dewey Lambdin

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2016-02-02

Total Pages: 368

ISBN-13: 1250030080

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“You could get addicted to this series. Easily.”---The New York Times Book Review The year 1809 starts out badly for Captain Alan Lewrie, Royal Navy, and his ship, HMS Sapphire. They’ve extracted the sick, cold survivors of Sir John Moore’s army from disaster at Corunna, got hit by lightning while escorting the army to England, and suffered a shattered mainmast which may end Lewrie’s active commission if a replacement can’t be found or fashioned soon. Admiralty needs troopships, not slow, old Fourth Rate two-deckers, so Lewrie must beg, borrow, steal, and gild the facts most glibly if he wishes to keep her and her skilled crew together. Just when he imagines he’s succeeded, new orders come appointing him a Commodore over a wee squadron assigned to prey upon French seaborne supply convoys off the treacherous north coast of Spain, better known as the Costa da Morte, the Coast of Death, where the sea may be more dangerous to him and his ships than the French Navy! Basing out of newly won Lisbon, where Lewrie hopes his mistress from Gibraltar, Maddalena Covilhá, might move, he’s sure of one thing: It's going to be a rocky year that, hopefully, doesn’t involve wrecking on the rugged shores of Spain!