Skeletons on the Zahara: A True Story of Survival

[...] what's the use of lying down to die as long as we can stand up and walk.

Hamet, Seid, and Abdallah were stung by the irony that on the wild desert, where people had virtually nothing, they shared freely, but here, where resources were comparatively abundant, no one would offer them so much as a drink.

Riley had no doubt that an "immediate and merciful act of the Almighty" had saved them from the surf at Bojador. According to him, all of his men believed this too. Later, when a friend advised him to play down this conviction, because skeptics would use it to discredit the rest of his account of the voyage, Riley refused.

Riley, who was not wholly above the racial prejudices typical of his era, had higher hopes for Mohammed, in part based on his light complexion.

Since at least Homer’s day, such accounts of distant voyages, especially voyages gone bad, have mesmerized their audiences, reawakening them from domestic slumber to the world’s wonders: its raging elements, its exotic and unyielding geography, its isolated peoples.

Massa was also where British merchant James Grey Jackson once saw a pair of colossal whale jawbones arching up from the sand. A local informed him that they had always been there and that, when the whale had beached, a man named Jonah had emerged from it's belly. Jackson laughed at the tale. His earnest informant responded only that 'nobody but a Christian would doubt the fact.

Before Riley, the French traveler Saugnier had wrestled with the Sahrawi ethic regarding property. According to him, on the desert things stolen unperceived became rightfully the property of the thief, and things unwatched, it followed, deserved to be stolen.

... while we were in inhabited country every Bedu for miles around would come to feed at our expense. It would be impossible to refuse them food: in the desert one may never turn a guest away, however unwanted he may be. T.E. Lawrence observed that 'the desert was held in a crazed communism by which Nature and the elements were for the free use of every known friendly person for his own purposes and no more.

To the Arabs, hardened by life on the desert, tears from a man were shameful. When the Frenchman Brisson was reduced to weeping in front of the Bou Sbaa, he wrote, "some women perceiving it, instead of being moved to compassion threw sand in my eyes, as they said, to wipe away my tears.

For all their piety- they prayed regularly and devoutly, as their religion required - Riley wondered how the Arabs could ignore the fact that under their care he and his men lacked the most basic necessities of life and suffered inhumanly.

The women in this camp examined the tattered Christians, whose skin had turned to chaff before the sun. Instead of arousing sympathy, the spectacle ignited a fit of disgust in women deeply encumbered with superstitious fears. In a culture where females were often denounced as conduits of evil, any contact with Christians was dangerous. They reviled the men with shrill curses and spat on them.

What they could use and carry from a shipwreck, the Sahrawis took. What they could not take, it was their custom to burn. To the victims who witnessed this destruction of their personal articles and the cargo of their vessel, it was often the last cruel blow before they assumed the life of a slave to some of the poorest people on earth, living in some of the harshest conditions imaginable.

In Lincoln’s day, Riley’s account also spoke to a burning issue: the troubling institution of slavery. Inverting the American paradigm, it provided a useful perspective and helped expose the brutality of that abysmal practice. In our time, when one of the great challenges we face is to find common ground for Muslims, Christians, and Jews, the plight of the crew of the Commerce achieves a new relevance. It