Sailing the Seas of Sand

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Abraham Lincoln once made a list of the books that had influenced him. Mostly he went for the heavy hitters — Plutarch, the Bible, The Pilgrim's Progress — but one of his choices sticks out for its total obscurity: James Riley's An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce, a memoir by a luckless sea captain who was shipwrecked on the Saharan coast of Africa, where unspeakably horrible things happened to him. Dean King, the author of a biography of Patrick O'Brian (of Master and Commander fame), stumbled on a copy of Riley's memoir and decided to produce a thoroughly researched, authoritative account of Riley's disaster.

Skeletons on the Zahara (Little, Brown; 353 pages) begins in 1815 when Riley, on his way back from a routine trading voyage — the proverbial three-hour tour — got lost near the Canary Islands and ran aground in what is now southern Morocco. He and his crew suffered horrifying extremes of exposure, hunger and thirst (King is especially good on the gruesome physiology of dehydration) and were eventually taken as slaves by the Bou Sbaa, a tribe of nomadic Arabs who scratched out a perilous living in the Sahara, trading and feuding and drinking surprising amounts of camel urine. Seen through Riley's eyes, the Sahara is a nightmare looking-glass world, where camels are sacred and men wash their faces with sand. It couldn't have been more alien if he had been captured by Klingons, but Riley manages to form a kind of friendship with one of his captors, a charismatic merchant named Sidi Hamet who helps him survive the ordeal.

You can see why Lincoln went for it. These 19th century naval disasters are satisfying largely in direct proportion to the suffering of the protagonists, and Riley's agonies are of truly Shackletonian proportions. But there's richness in the narrative too. Skeletons on the Zahara (the Z is a 19th century spelling) is more than a horror story. It's a tale about a man who discovers his own courage in the face of catastrophe, and an instructive fable about cultural contact: Americans and Arabs searching for firm common ground in a wasteland of shifting sands.