Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival (Hardcover)

~ Dean King (Author) "On a brisk early-May morning in 1815, when Captain James Riley gave the order to cast off from Savage's wharf in the Upper Houses section..." (more)
Key Phrases: camel guides, camel kneel, Bou Sbaa, Sidi Hamet, Sheik Ali (more...)

Editorial Reviews

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. King’s 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, with hopes of getting food and water, as slaves to the Oulad Bou Sbaa. After days of abuse, they are bought by Hamet, who, after his own experiences with his failed caravan (described at the novels opening), sympathizes with the plight of the crew. Together, they set off on a hellish journey across the desert to collect a bounty for Hamet in Swearah. King embellishes this compelling narrative throughout with scientific and historical material explaining the origins of the camel, the market for English and American slaves, and the stages of dehydration. He also humanizes the Sahrawi with background on the tribes and on the lives of Hamet and Seid. This material, doled out in sufficient amounts to enrich the story without derailing it makes Skeletons on the Zahara a perfectly entertaining bit of history that feels like a guilty pleasure. --Patrick O'Kelley

From Publishers Weekly

When the American cargo ship Commerce ran aground on the northwestern shores of Africa in 1815 along with its crew of 12 Connecticut-based sailors, the misfortunes that befell them came fast and hard, from enslavement to reality-bending bouts of dehydration. King's aggressively researched account of the crew's once-famous ordeal reads like historical fiction, with unbelievable stories of the seamen's endurance of heat stroke, starvation and cruelty by their Saharan slavers. King (Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed), who went to Africa and, on camel and foot, retraced parts of the sailors' journey, succeeds brilliantly at making the now familiar sandscape seem as imposing and new as it must have been to the sailors. Every dromedary step thuds out from the pages with its punishing awkwardness, and each drop of brackish found water reprieves and tortures with its perpetual insufficiency. King's leisurely prose style rounds out the drama with well-parceled-out bits of context, such as the haggling barter culture of the Saharan nomadic Arabs and the geological history of Western Africa's coastline. Zahara (King's use of older and/or phonetic spellings helps evoke the foreignness of the time and place) impresses with its pacing, thoroughness and empathy for the plight of a dozen sailors heaved smack-hard into an unknown tribalism. By the time the surviving crew members make it back to their side of civilization, reader and protagonist alike are challenged by new ways of understanding culture clash, slavery and the place of Islam in the social fabric of desert-dwelling peoples. Maps, illus.
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 368 pages
• Publisher: Little, Brown and Company; 1 edition (March 2004)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0316835145
• ISBN-13: 978-0316835145
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 5.8 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 15.2 ounces
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (82 customer reviews)
• Amazon.com Sales Rank: #284,394 in Books (See Bestsellers in Books)

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Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

49 of 50 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars A Gritty Story that Will Make a Super Movie Someday, February 8, 2004

By	Sophie Cacique Gaul (Austin, Tejas) - See all my reviews

In 1815 Captain James Riley and the crew of the United States merchant ship Commerce set sail from Connecticut for Gibraltar. Two months later they were shipwrecked near Cape Bojador, off the coast of Northern Africa, captured by Sahrawi Arabs, sold into slavery and dragged eight hundred miles across the hot and hostile Sahara Desert. Along the way they were fed meager rations and pressed into hard labor as the faced barbarism, murder, starvation, dehydration, scorpions, plagues of locusts, sandstorms, hostile enemies and death.

Also along the way they discovered secret oases and ancient cities as Captain Riley forged a surprising bond with a Muslim trader. They were forced to become allies in order to survive, even as Riley planed on betraying the trader in order to save his men.

Dean tells a disturbing, but true tale of endureance that finally came to an end when an Arab tribal leader brought the exhausted and emaciated men to the provincial trading post of Swearah where the British paid the ransom for their freedom.

This read like a pulse racing thriller. I know I couldn't put it down and I can't recommend it highly enough.

Sophie Cacique Gaul

43 of 44 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Desert Heroism, April 3, 2004

By	R. Hardy "Rob Hardy" (Columbus, Mississippi USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 50 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

As a boy, Abraham Lincoln read the memoir of Captain James Riley, and never forgot its story of slavery in the Sahara (or Zahara, as Riley would have known it). Thoreau knew the book. It was an international bestseller, and it might have been one of the few books besides the Bible in some American homes. Riley was a legend in his own time, but no longer is in ours. He is back, brought to us by Dean King, who read Riley's memoir of his adventure in the Sahara, and then read a narrative of the same adventure from a fellow crewman of Riley's, and then himself traveled in the still inhospitable and dangerous regions described in the two books. King has produced _Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival_ (Little, Brown), a wonderful account of fortitude under the most extreme conditions at sea and on the desert. This is one of the great adventure stories, full of the tortures by man and nature, and of course of the success of an indomitable spirit.

Captain Riley and his "good Yankee crew" of eleven left Connecticut for an ordinary merchant voyage in 1815, and eventually foundered on the west coast of the Sahara, six hundred miles south of Morocco. They were beset by hostile, thieving nomads, but briefly escaped by taking to sea in the ship's longboats. They were eager to be away from the Sahara, which everyone knew was a realm of death but which was at the time uncharted, mysterious, and full (so the stories went) of cannibals. They ran out of provisions at sea and were forced to make for Sahara land south of Bojador, and their prospects were just as bad. Other tribesmen captured them, took their goods, and made them slaves. There are many pages devoted here to pain, extreme sunburn, thirst, hunger and other travails. The means of relieving these tortures are often unpleasant to contemplate as well; the way the captors and crew made do eating unmentionable parts of camels as well as snails and locusts are detailed here. Riley's eventual captor was a desert merchant Sidi Hamet, who was in financial trouble. Riley assured Hamet that he had important friends at the British consulate, hundreds of miles away. He insisted that these friends would buy him and the crew back for a high price. Of course, there were no such friends, and Riley was bluffing; Hamet insisted that if the ransom price was not paid, he would slit Riley's throat, and perhaps he was bluffing as well.

The hapless Riley and the hapless Hamet make the core of this tale, and King cannot be faulted that his source narratives don't have enough details to describe Hamet fully. He emerges, however, as a friend and savior, even if he was initially only after the ransom. Riley could not have known it, but there was indeed a procedure for ransoming slaves, and a British consular official made it happen, becoming Riley's lifelong friend. A measure of the two months in captivity is that Riley normally weighed 240 pounds, and when he was ransomed he weighed less than ninety. Not all of his crew made it back, and some of them may have spent the rest of their lives as slaves. King's exciting and surprising narrative ends with the speculation that Riley may even have had an effect on his own country's slave trade. He became an active abolitionist, easily able to discuss the immorality of slavery; and perhaps since Lincoln admired Riley's book, it may have done its little part to bring emancipation about.

18 of 18 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Real survivors, March 15, 2004

By	Lynn Harnett (Marathon, FL USA) - See all my reviews (TOP 500 REVIEWER)    (REAL NAME)

In 1815 a New England merchant brig foundered in rocky seas off North Africa. Its crew survived though perhaps they later wished they hadn't.

In the first days, hostile nomads drove them to escape back to the sea in a small boat with a broken oar only to suffer such dehydration and starvation that even enslavement by the dreaded nomads seemed preferable - until it happened.

After a slow, thoughtful start laying out the background of the men and the voyage, Dean's story of the crew's ordeal reads like a runaway suspense thriller with torture. And it's well written and chock full of information you didn't know you needed - the camel, for instance, is an astonishing physical specimen, a creature with a face built for sandstorms; an animal that doesn't sweat or pant, but stores its heat for the cold nights when it becomes a kind of living stove.

Dean's book is based largely on two firsthand accounts - one by ship's captain James Riley, and another by crewman Archibald Robbins. Dean also retraced much of Riley's trek, and his selected bibliography is lengthy.

Near death, the crew puts back into shore and, unable to find water, throws themselves on the mercy of the first nomads they encounter. The men are immediately stripped naked, then parceled out as slaves - after a bloody and protracted fight among the desert dwellers. Their first guzzle of water and sour camel's milk rips through their intestines, a cycle that is to be repeated throughout their ordeal.

Separated, sunburned, depleted, still naked and unable to keep up, the men are put on camels. "It is no coincidence that a camel's gait is called a `rack'." Blood was soon dripping from chafed thighs and calves.

The ordeal goes from horror to worse. The nomads themselves often have nothing to eat or drink; bloody encounters and thievery are common. The sailors are worth rather less than a lame camel. Less than a good blanket, in fact.

The physical suffering is enough to make you marvel at their will to live, but Dean also conveys the helplessness of slavery. Purposely dehumanized, their lives are entirely subject to commerce or whim. Riley, a man of his time who, Dean speculates, may have planned on acquiring a slave cargo, became a fervent abolitionist on his return.

Riley comes alive on the page as a man of indomitable will, who takes his responsibilities to his men to heart. Eventually he strikes a bargain with an Arab trader, a promise based on a lie and a gamble that develops into something more personal, if precarious. The denouement is a protracted drama of danger, diplomacy and daring that will keep you on the edge of your seat.

Riley's book was a best selling sensation, which remained in print long after his death, so a certain amount of skepticism is necessary. But the later events of his life bear out his energy, strength and charisma. Dean's ("Patrick O'Brian: A Life Revealed") stirring account, fleshed out with information about the desert, the people, their history and the cultural importance of Islam, as well as the extremes the human body can endure, is as culturally informative as it is exciting.