The latest in the recent spate of true disaster tales, Skeletons on the Zahara should come with a warning sticker like those on prescription drug bottles: Do Not Take With Food. Dean King, author of a well-received biography of novelist Patrick O'Brian, recounts the tribulations of a crew of American sailors who were shipwrecked off the coast of Africa in 1815, captured, sold into slavery, fed almost nothing, forced to drink camel urine, and then schlepped all over the desert sands.
Joking aside, Skeletons is a page-turner, replete with gruesome details about thirst, a diet of dried locusts and animal bone marrow, relentless exposure to the sun and the changes in bodily functions that result. King's plot is right out of Homer: Will the stalwart captain and his mates ever see home again? He has structured it in such cinematic terms that one can almost see the words "An Anthony Minghella film" superimposed on the opening scene -- a caravan of 1,000 Arab merchants and their 4,000 camels stretched across the Sahara, caught in a howling sandstorm.
One merchant, Sidi Hamet, had made repeated trips from Morocco to Tombucktoo (King prefers older spellings of place-names, hence the "Zahara" of the title), ferrying loads of barley, cloth, salt and other goods to be traded for gold, exotic items such as ostrich feathers and slaves. He happened upon a nomad's tent camp, where a bedraggled slave who turned out to be an American sea captain made him an enticing offer: Bring him and his scattered crew to safety in a northern settlement, and they would be ransomed for "many pieces of silver." Hamet was in a quandary. Unsure of whether to trust the word of a "Christian dog," he prayed to Allah for guidance.
Flash back to Middletown, Conn., a bustling New England shipping center, at the close of the War of 1812. Capt. James Riley and his crew of 10 were preparing the merchant brig Commerce for an ambitious journey. They would go first to New Orleans, then the West Indies and on to Gibraltar and the Cape Verde islands off the African coast, where they would buy salt, a commodity that should earn a handsome profit back in the United States.
Once the ship is under sail, the story gathers force. King has based his account on Riley's own narrative, which was published in 1817 and had a wide readership throughout the 19th century. (King says that Abraham Lincoln was among its fans and never forgot the saga of Riley's ordeal.) In Gibraltar, the crew was almost drowned before the action began, as a wave washed over their longboat after a visit with another ship. King quotes Riley as writing ominously, "We were spared in order to suffer a severer doom." Indeed, doom hovered over the ship when it ran aground off Cape Bojador in the middle of nothing, just north of the Tropic of Cancer.
When the sailors made their first foray onshore, they were driven away by a band of wild local folk. They escaped in their longboat, only to be shipwrecked again farther south. Soon, fierce nomads captured them, stole most of their clothes and split them up among different bands to be bought, sold and bartered as property.
At this point, the Sahara becomes the star of the story. King does a fine job of bringing readers up to speed at judicious intervals on the customs of the time both in the seafaring world and in global geopolitics. However, the knowledge he shares about the hostility of the desert climate, the brutality of the warring tribes that inhabit it but cannot tame it, and the toll it takes on people and animals alike is graphic and scary. One captive went temporarily blind from the sand and sun. Sores on bodies reduced to skin and bone made walking and even sleeping agonizing. A swarm of locusts carpeted the landscape; the nomads gathered and ate them. A former slave reportedly gnawed on his own limbs for sustenance. The castaways on "Survivor" and contestants on "Fear Factor" wouldn't have lasted an hour.
As King writes, "the Saharan climate was arguably the most extreme on earth. Its temperature could sizzle at more than 120 degrees Fahrenheit in the shade, the ground temperature soaring 50 degrees higher in the sun; at night, the thermometer could plunge as much as 85 degrees. . . . While only about a tenth of the Sahara is covered in barren sand dunes . . . almost equally formidable are its stepped plains of wind-stripped rock covered in boulders, stones, and dust." Thirsty yet? King interrupts his tale just long enough for vivid discourses on how humans suffer through various stages of dehydration; the gastrointestinal workings of camels; Saharan customs (no matter who finds food, anyone in the vicinity can elbow his way into a meal; thieves are entitled to take anything left unwatched by its owner); and nomads' dietary preferences (they don't like fish and, being Muslim, won't eat pork).
The redoubtable Riley promised Hamet a reward from a friend in Swearah (known today as Essaouira, in southern Morocco) if Hamet could get the dispersed sailors there safely. The question became: Could Hamet sneak past not just other marauding bands, who would love to rob him of his bounty, but also his nasty father-in-law, Sheik Ali? Early on, Riley had a dream that, after many trials, he would encounter his savior, a man in Western dress on horseback. As the story's unremitting barbarism continues, not just the Commerce's crew but also the reader is likely to pine for the greenery of Connecticut.
Even armchair adventurers satiated with exotic travelogues will appreciate heroism amid adversity in this fast-paced account of slow torture -- and an almost-happy ending.
Reviewed by Grace Lichtenstein
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