Skeletons on the Zahara

Dean King is a maritime historian, and Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival, published in 2004, is his account of the wreck of an American merchant brig on the coast of North Africa and of the ordeal of its crew.

Its principal source is the memoir of the ship's captain, James Riley, which appeared in 1817 as Sufferings in Africa, subtitled An Authentic Narrative of the Loss of the American Brig Commerce. After the ship was lost, Riley and his men were captured by nomadic tribesmen and forced into slavery. The book became an international success and made its author a national figure in his own lifetime.

King came across a leather-bound copy of it in 1995 while he was working in the library of the New York Yacht Club, and the find set off years of research in the libraries and archives of Virginia. He also discovered that another survivor, Archibald Robbins, had published an account of his own, and since sailors were famously given to improving their stories, he set the two versions against each other, which nobody had done before. They agreed on the significant details. King then retraced the route himself, on an expedition sponsored by the National Geographic Society.

The result is a narrative of shipwreck, capture and desert travel, drawn from the words of the men who lived through it and followed over the same ground almost two centuries later by the man retelling it.