A comedy of errors (and elephant seals)

Sometimes when I am having a bad time I like to read about people having an even worse time, so it is fortunate for me that my hold on Eric Jay Dolin’s Left for Dead: Shipwreck, Treachery, and Survival at the End of the World came in right before I fell sick last week.

Dolin lets us know right off the bat that this is not a story of far-reaching historical importance; instead, it is merely a really wild tale that he wanted to rescue from oblivion because of how nuts it is.

There are a couple of main parties in this story, which takes place during the War of 1812. Party 1 is the crew of the Nanina, an American ship on a sealing voyage to the Falklands, which had sailed out of New York right before war officially broke out. They were hoping to spend a year or so sealing and then sail back when the war had blown over. This didn’t quite work out for them. It is important to note, however, that the Nanina was in the Falklands on purpose and was not shipwrecked. The Falklands were otherwise uninhabited at the time, the Spanish settlement having been abandoned a year or two earlier.

The second main party is the crew and passengers of the Isabella, a British ship inbound from Australia. The captain of the Isabella is not the greatest at his job and manages to wreck the ship on one of the outer islands in the Falklands. The resourceful Aussies are able to set up a little camp on their spit of land that keeps them all alive, although not quite in the style they are accustomed to. They send some guys out in a longboat on a hail Mary trip to South America to try to get help.

While the guys in the longboat are on their way to Rio, the American sealers discover the stranded British Australians. Though the two countries are at war, the Americans figure that’s not really the top priority here outside of what they would have considered civilization. The Americans agree to cut their sealing voyage short and give the stranded Brits a ride back to the mainland.

Unbeknownst to them, the hail Mary longboat trip works out! While the Nanina is preparing to house its own crew and the folks from the Isabella, the head of British naval operations in Buenos Aires sends out his subordinate, William D’Arada, out to rescue his fellow countrymen in a rickety tub called the Nancy. D’Arada, upon arriving in the Falklands, is delighted to find not only the folks he was sent to rescue, but also a bunch of Americans! He promptly, and somewhat illegally, takes the Nanina as a prize and its crew as prisoners. His fellow Brits find this pretty ungallant but don’t do much about it. D’Arada sends the Nanina off to England under his prize master and then sails the Nancy back to Buenos Aires with the rescues from the Isabella.

Unfortunately, while D’Arada was upsetting all their plans, a hunting party of five men–mixed American and British–had separated from the main group to get food. When they returned to the main camp, everyone else had departed. Again, some of the Isabella passengers thought this was pretty douchey of D’Arada, but nobody really had the standing to mess with him, nor did they try too hard.

Thus, in the second half of the book, our cast of characters is drastically reduced, from two or three ships’ worth of people to merely five, plus a dog. These five guys (and their dog) have an eventful but, fortunately, never fatal eighteen months of Robinson Crusoe-ing it up in the Falklands, having interpersonal falling-outs, at least one mutiny, numerous attempts at conflict resolution in different levels of success, trips to hunt seals, hogs, and penguin and albatross eggs, and other such shenanigans as they wonder if anyone will ever come to get them. Navigating around the Falklands in their little shallop is dangerous enough that sailing to Rio or wherever seems to be out of the question, although if I recall correctly they do try once and basically can’t get the little boat out of the Falklands in one piece. Meanwhile, back in Buenos Aires, and then New York, and then London, legal and press machinations are afoot, and eventually, the Americans who had made it back to America–after some time as British prisoners of war–are able to send a brig out to the Falklands to rescue the five men. It takes some of them a whole other relay race of shipping voyages to get their arses back home again, but at least in the meantime they got to see some other people. One of the stranded men, Captain Charles Barnard (the original captain of the Nanina), eventually writes a rather pompous memoir about his adventures, which sells moderately well for the time and then fades into obscurity, until apparently one day Eric Jay Dolin found it and was like “This is nuts; I gotta tell people about this” and wrote Left for Dead.

This was overall a very fun read. I’m not sure it quite reaches the “masterpiece of narrative nonfiction” level of something like The Wager but I’d still definitely recommend it for fans of The Wager because it tells a similar type of story, and is very fast-paced and readable. Dolin goes to great pains to avoid moralizing about things like the ethics of sealing or basically anything other than D’Aranda’s personal conduct, which pretty much everyone except D’Aranda agrees was shitty. The book has lots of pictures, which I thought was great, and lots of footnotes, which were informative but interrupted the flow a little. There is plenty of interesting historical context to flesh out what the world was like for the people involved, which I think is valuable even if there’s simply no case to be made that this event had any particular far-reaching impact on history writ large. It’s an excellent addition to the “putting dudes in Situations” canon of maritime literature. Those dudes were for sure in a Situation! In fact, the Situations kept compounding into new and worse Situations, for quite a while! None of these Situations devolved into cannibalism, which was frankly a lucky break for these guys, but there weren’t too many other people around to eat anyway, so instead we get interesting lessons in how to hunt all the weird fauna that was hanging out in the Falklands around 1813 or so, and several near-death experiences with elephant seals. Exciting!

Now the gallant Sir Gawain in God's name goes

Sometimes when I am sick I like to read poetry, and sometimes in the winter I like to read Arthuriana. Last week I was both so I decided to read the ancient paperback copy of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight that’s been sitting on my shelf for I don’t know how long. I can tell the copy is ancient because the price on the front cover is 95 cents. You can’t buy anything for 95 cents anymore.

I’d read J.R.R. Tolkien’s translation of this a few years ago, but it was long enough ago that I was ready to give the poem a “reread,” although this translation is by one Brian Stone. Brian Stone may not have written The Lord of the Rings but he does seem to know what he is about as far as medieval poetry goes, as well as the art of translation. I found this version of the poem gripping, surreal, and full of lively, concrete detail. The story itself is fey and freaky, and also seasonal–Gawain’s deadline is the New Year, so most of it takes place during that liminal week between Christmas and New Year’s when time comes unmoored and we are all confused and full of cheese.

The storyline is simple enough. One New Year’s, the Green Knight comes to Arthur’s court and demands to play a game–one of Arthur’s knights will cut his head off, and then in a year, the Knight will return the blow. Young Gawain, Arthur’s nephew, takes up the challenge and beheads the knight. The knight picks up his head and is like “See you in a year! Come find me” and rides out. Gawain procrastinates trying to find the Green Knight again until after Halloween, then goes riding around the countryside looking for the Green Knight’s chapel, to no avail. Around Christmas, he finds himself in a strange castle in an icy wood, and becomes the guest of the jovial castellan and his lady. The castellan tells him that he knows exactly where the Green Knight’s chapel is, and it’s less than two miles away, so Gawan should feel free to just hang out and celebrate Christmas week. This he does. In the days between Christmas and New Year’s, the castellan goes out hunting, and Gawain stays in and gets in a set of awkward politeness dances with the castellan’s lady, a sorceress who is trying to seduce him. In an interesting set of scenes, which read as very gender-swapped from a modern perspective, Gawain tries to defend his chastity without doing anything as impolite as overtly refusing the lady, caught between two opposing standards of honorable behavior. Gawain navigates this dilemma mostly cleanly but does find himself succumbing to the temptation of letting the lady give him her girdle as a favor, although this is less because he wants the lady’s favor than because it is a magical green girdle that is enchanted so the wearer of it can never be harmed. Gawain wears this convenient item to his appointment with the Green Knight, whose blow cuts through the skin of his neck but stops at the muscle, leaving Gawain with just a superficial cut, which will scar to remind him forever that he did do a tiny little sin in order to save his own life. Gawain is very penitent about this because a knight should face death fearlessly, but the Giant thinks it’s incredibly funny and that it’s very understandable to value your own life, and forgives him. In fact, the Green Knight, who unsurprisingly is also the castellan, knew all about his enchantress wife’s seduction attempts and thinks that Gawain is a jolly fellow who handled his tests pretty well, and considers them BFFs now. All the rest of Arthur’s knights are also pretty pleased that Gawain’s not dead once he gets back to Camelot.

Thus is the story, in brief, but the point of epic poetry is not to tell it in brief, it is to tell it very dramatically and with lots of scene-setting about the shining and richly embroidered armor and clothes and stuff everyone is wearing, and the food they are eating, and the savage beauty of the northern English or maybe Welsh countryside in the middle of bitter winter. This the poem does beautifully. The introduction tells us that it also describes armor and hunting and other parts of medieval life very accurately, showing that the anonymous author of the poem was well acquainted with courtly life and generally knew what he was about. I don’t know much about hunting so it’s nice to know I am not being led astray.

Really good medieval poetry really is quite like nothing else; the atmospherics are great and the rhythms of alliterative poetry are very unlike that of the rhyming poetry that would come to dominate later eras of English literature. I am always very glad when I revisit one of these types of works when they are translated well.