Books
James of Arabia
by Julia Millen
SKELETONS ON THE ZAHARA: A true story of survival, by Dean King (Heinemann, $55).
In August 1815, an American merchant brig was wrecked on the Moroccan coast of west Africa. Experienced master James Riley, 37, and his crew had set out from New Orleans a week after the Battle of Waterloo, crossed the Atlantic to Gibraltar and then sailed south-west, bound for Cape Verde to pick up cargo (possibly slaves). Instead, the ship ran into fog and foundered at infamous Cape Bojador.
The adventures of the Commerce survivors make for a great story: nail-biting suspense; courageous though flawed heroes; exotic landscape; unspeakably brutal enemies; last-minute rescue by a charismatic Arab.
Saved from drowning, Riley and his 11 men found themselves on a desolate shore – the edge of the great Sahara – which was far from deserted. Local Arabs, Sahrawis, seized both wreckage and crew. The sailors escaped back out to sea in their battered longboat, praying for rescue by a passing ship. Days later, reduced to drinking their own urine, the crew were back on land.
Sahrawis swooped, and refused to waste precious water, let alone food on the “Christian dogs” unless they were useful, as slave labour or hostages. Separated, bought and sold numerous times, forced to travel hundreds of agonising miles, barefoot or bareback on camels, the mariners became human wrecks, starved, crippled, sick and sunburnt. Riley wrote: “I tried to soften the hearts of the women to get me a little water, but they only laughed and spit at me.” On rare occasions when food was available, the sailors stuffed themselves and then suffered agonising stomach cramps and diarrhoea.
Dean King has researched the background and origins of the Commerce survivors and retold the story, using as a basis the respective accounts (published 1817) of Captain Riley and able seaman Archibald Robbins. King also journeyed by camel and Land Rover through the Sahara, retracing the stumbling meanderings of the mariners, and verifying historical and geographical details.
King uses somewhat formal prose and archaic speech patterns to blend the original accounts and dialogue with his new material. Conjecture, needed at times to fill the black holes between the known and unknowable, is kept to a minimum.
Although his prose style serves to retain the period flavour, it distances and shields the modern reader from the men’s excruciating experiences. Riley describes a shipmate as nearly without skin. The inside of his leg “hung in strings of torn and chafed flesh”.
Riley, who had lost a fine ship and valuable cargo, wrote his account largely to make money and exonerate himself, but corroborating testaments – like that of the British Consul in Mogador (Essaouira) – showed that the Captain had in the main acted responsibly. King attributes the survival of Riley and his men in part to Riley’s linguistic abilities (Spanish and French) and his efforts to learn and understand the language and customs of his captors. Riley developed a particular rapport with the suave Sidi Hamet, who in turn put the “Christian dogs’” seemingly miraculous deliverance down to divine intervention. (The ship’s cook, an African American, was less fortunate. Though his pigmented skin protected him from sunburn, it marked him as a slave.)
Riley became an American hero and, changed by his experiences, campaigned against the admission of Missouri, a slave state, to the Union. King’s stated aim is that retelling this story will provide greater knowledge of the Sahara and its peoples. He succeeds, but whether it will also change readers’ views, and open possibilities for finding common ground for understanding between Muslims, Christians and Jews, seems much less certain. Nevertheless, Skeletons is a magnificent read.
