Author Series | Eric Jay Dolin | Left for Dead

Uncover the true story of five castaways abandoned on the Falkland Islands during the War of 1812 with bestselling author Eric Jay Dolin, hosted by the Hudson Library & Historical Society. Dolin’s latest book Left for Dead tells the tale of treachery, shipwreck, isolation, and the desperate struggle for survival.
Left for Dead 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. 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.
Eric Jay Dolin is the best-selling and award-winning author of numerous works in maritime history, including Leviathan, Rebels at Sea, and Black Flags, Blue Waters. A graduate of Brown, Yale, and MIT, he lives in Marblehead, Massachusetts.