Product Description

Everywhere hailed as a masterpiece of historical adventure this enthralling narrative recounts the experiences of twelve American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815 captured by desert nomads sold into slavery and subjected to a hellish two-month journey through the bone-dry heart of the Sahara. The ordeal of these men - who found themselves tested by barbarism murder starvation death dehydration and hostile tribes that roamed the desert on camelback - is made indelibly vivid in this gripping account of courage brotherhood and survival.

Amazon.com Review

Some stories are so enthralling they deserve to be retold generation after generation. The wreck in 1815 of the Connecticut merchant ship Commerce and the subsequent ordeal of its crew in the Sahara Desert is one such story. With Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival Dean King refreshes the popular nineteenth-century narrative once read and admired by Henry David Thoreau James Fenimore Cooper and Abraham Lincoln. Kings version which actually draws from two separate first person accounts of the Commerce's crew?? offers a page-turning blend of science?? history?? and classic adventure. The book begins with a seeming false start: tracing the lives of two merchants from North Africa?? Seid and Sidi Hamet?? who lose their fortunes?and almost their lives?when their massive camel caravan arrives at a desiccated oasis. King then jumps to the voyage of the Commerce under Captain Riley and his 11-man crew. After stops in New Orleans and Gibraltar?? the ship falls off course en route to the Canary Islands and ultimately wrecks at the infamous Cape Bojador. After the men survive the first predations of the nomads on the shore?? they meander along the coast looking for a way inland as their supplies dwindle. They subsist for days by drinking their own urine. Eventually?? to their horror?? they discover that they have come aground on the edge of the Sahara Desert. They submit themselves?? wit