A Thousand Miles from Freedom

A Thousand Miles from Freedom - The Unforgettable Ordeal of the Commerce's Crew

In the summer of 1815, the American merchant brig Commerce ran aground on the shoals of the western Sahara in the dark of an August night. By dawn, Captain James Riley and his eleven crewmen had come ashore on one of the most hostile coastlines on earth, without water, without food, and without any understanding of the world that was about to devour them.

What followed was fourteen weeks of enslavement, starvation, and forced march across the largest desert on earth, a thousand miles of burning sand and killing sun, traversed by men who had been reduced to skeletons and yet refused, under the sustained and extraordinary leadership of their captain, to stop walking toward the world on the other side.

Riley's story is one of the most astonishing in the annals of American maritime history: a ship's captain who learned Arabic in captivity, who invented a fictional friend in a Moroccan port to negotiate his own ransom, who held his crew together by the force of will alone when every other resource had been exhausted. It is also one of the most consequential. The book Riley eventually wrote about the ordeal sold a million copies, shaped the moral imagination of a young Abraham Lincoln, and contributed, through the long, indirect, real line of Lincoln's convictions, to the abolition of American slavery.

A Thousand Miles from Freedom is the full account of this extraordinary story: the men, the desert, the captors, the rescue, and the lasting meaning of a journey that changed everyone who survived it, and, through the book it produced, much of the world beyond.

"A masterwork of narrative non-fiction. Riley's ordeal is one of history's great untold stories - a tale of survival, slavery, and the indestructible human will, told with the power and precision it has always deserved."

"Harrowing, humane, and impossible to put down. This is the story that shaped Lincoln's conscience, recovered at last for the readers who need it most."

"Riley negotiates his own freedom from the depths of the Sahara with nothing but wit, Arabic learned in captivity, and an invented friend in Mogador. It is among the most remarkable human stories ever committed to the page."