Most Americans who have heard of the Falkland Islands probably associate them with the sour little war waged there by Great Britain and Argentina in 1982. (The Brits won, hands down.) In his new book, “Left for Dead,” historian Eric Jay Dolin chronicles an earlier brush with belligerence there, during the War of 1812. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that Dolin’s saga has as many twists and turns as a route through the mazy South Atlantic archipelago.
In the early 19th century, the Falklands had no year-round inhabitants but served as a base for ships hunting seals and whales. The seas around the Falklands run rough — the wind blows at an average rate of 18 miles an hour, and the average annual temperature is 42 degrees Fahrenheit. In the 1830s, Robert FitzRoy, captain of the ship on which Charles Darwin made the observations that undergird his revolutionary book “On the Origin of Species,” declared that “a region more exposed to storms, both in summer and winter, it would be difficult to mention.”
Dolin’s tale is full of Americans and Britons at pains to stay alive and maintain human decency under pressure. Fur seal pelts were highly valued then, especially by the Chinese, who made them into capes, caps and other articles of clothing. Elephant seals — so called because of their great size — were prized for their blubber, which was rendered into oil that burned bright and produced little smoke, making it “nearly as valuable as sperm whale oil, the most sought-after light source of the day,” Dolin writes. Accordingly, in early 1812, Charles Barnard, an American sea captain familiar with the Falklands, was able to talk a New York import-export firm into financing a sealing expedition to the region.
Barnard’s brig, the Nanina, arrived in the fall of 1812. After setting up a tent camp, the crew assembled bespoke lumber into a smaller boat called a shallop, which sealers could navigate through the archipelago with relative ease while the Nanina acted as mother ship. Seal hunters tended to employ one of two brutal killing methods. Sometimes, they would rush a group of animals while swinging clubs pell-mell. “Other times,” Dolin writes, “they formed a lane with men on either side, then drove the seals through this bloody gauntlet, clubbing and lancing them as they fled toward the water.”
Early in 1813, Barnard and his men hailed another American ship out of New York. Her captain broke the news that the anticipated British-American war had started and passed on a message from Barnard’s partner: cancel the expedition and return forthwith. Barnard disobeyed this order on the grounds that he and his men had come a long way, the sealing was easy, and, in Dolin’s words, “their chances of getting back to the United States without being captured by a British ship would be the same whether the Nanina was full [of pelts and oil] or only partly so.”
A month earlier, the brig Isabella, on its way to England from the Australian convict colony of New South Wales, had entered the archipelago from the east with 34 passengers on board. Knowing next to nothing about the Falklands, the Isabella’s captain wrecked it against a rock, but passengers and crew made it safely to shore. The Nanina’s shallop eventually found them, and both sides agreed that in such a remote and daunting place, the war mattered not. They even cooperated, as when the Americans, before continuing their seal hunt, left behind tools and a carpenter to help the castaways build shelters.
Enter the villain, William D’Aranda of the Royal Navy, commander of another British brig. Alerted to the Isabella’s plight, he came to its rescue but adopted a by-the-book approach to the current state of war. In vain did the Isabellans cite the aid given them by the Americans. D’Aranda not only seized the Nanina but also dispatched a small party of Americans to hunt for food and then abandoned them — they’re the left-for-dead unfortunates of Dolin’s title. A colleague of D’Aranda’s denounced his behavior to the Yanks as “a disgrace to the British flag.”
Dolin does justice to the drama of it all in a mere 259 pages of text without stinting on one of pleasures of reading 19th-century history: the wordsmithery of people high and low. He tells us that hungry castaways on one island called their makeshift abode “Pinch-Gut Camp” and quotes an officer’s verdict on pilferage by members of his own crew: “you might as well expect to squeeze honey out of a ship’s anvil, as to make an old marine or sailor honest.”
The author of several previous books on such maritime topics as piracy and whaling, Dolin is an expert literary steersman. As for the fates of the principal actors in “Left for Dead,” let’s leave it at this: Most of them, D’Aranda included, got what they deserved.
Dennis Drabelle, a former contributing editor of Book World, writes frequently on explorers and their expeditions.
Left for Dead
Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the Edge of the World
By Eric Jay Dolin
Liveright. 296 pp. $29.99
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