Book Review: Island of the Lost

Island of the Lost:  Shipwrecked at the Edge of the World, by Joan Druett

There’s truths in here that can speak to a prepper.

Island of the Lost is so improbable I’d have thought it a pretty heavy-handed morality tale … except it’s true.   Two ships, with two very different crews and very different circumstances, strand their crews on the same remote island deep in the sub-antarctic ocean at the very same time.  

Their outcomes, too, are very different.

Here’s the publisher’s blurb for Island of the Lost:

Auckland Island is a godforsaken place in the middle of the Southern Ocean, 285 miles south of New Zealand. With year-round freezing rain and howling winds, it is one of the most forbidding places in the world. To be shipwrecked there means almost certain death.

In 1864 Captain Thomas Musgrave and his crew of four aboard the schooner Grafton wreck on the southern end of the island. Utterly alone in a dense coastal forest, plagued by stinging blowflies and relentless rain, Captain Musgrave—rather than succumb to this dismal fate—inspires his men to take action. With barely more than their bare hands, they build a cabin and, remarkably, a forge, where they manufacture their tools. Under Musgrave’s leadership, they band together and remain civilized through even the darkest and most terrifying days.

Incredibly, at the same time on the opposite end of the island—twenty miles of impassable cliffs and chasms away—the Invercauld wrecks during a horrible storm. Nineteen men stagger ashore. Unlike Captain Musgrave, the captain of the Invercauld falls apart given the same dismal circumstances. His men fight and split up; some die of starvation, others turn to cannibalism. Only three survive. Musgrave and all of his men not only endure for nearly two years, they also plan their own astonishing escape, setting off on one of the most courageous sea voyages in history.

Using the survivors’ journals and historical records, award-winning maritime historian Joan Druett brings this extraordinary untold story to life, a story about leadership and the fine line between order and chaos.

Island of the Lost in review:

I didn’t read Island of the Lost intending to review it, but it just spoke to my prepper side.  This isn’t some author making up stories about how it can make a difference to be prepared and to have some skills, or supposing what a difference the social dynamics in a survival team can make.  

Rather, in Island of the Lost, we have an author laying out the truth as near as can be known from the journals of the men involved and showing how these factors impact lives for men living on the razor’s edge.  

It must have spoken to other folks too, as the story sparked something of a self-sufficiency fad among the public after part of it came out as a memoir written by one of the survivors, and provoked a wave of disaster preparedness by the local governments.  

Truth has an impact all its own.

I got this on Audible, in case you (like me) find it easier to fit in listening time than actual reading time.  (As always here on BBBY, we have no financial links with the products, other than as a paying customer.)