Shipwreck on the Sahara | Interview with Dean King | 5
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From Wondery, I'm Mike Corey and this is Against the Odds. Over the last four episodes, we've told the story of James Riley and his crew who wrecked off the coast of Western Africa. The shipwrecked sailors soon found themselves captured and enslaved by a nomadic tribe. To get their freedom, they would have to cross hundreds of miles through the Saharan desert under extreme conditions and the constant threat of being attacked.

It wasn't until they met up with a merchant trader, Siddy Hammett, who had his own incredible journey where the two men's fate would become intertwined.

It was one of our most epic journals of survival. And today I'm talking to Dean King, the author of the book that inspired this series. It's called Skeletons on the Sahara, a true story of survival. In addition to all the fascinating research he did, he actually retraced the path of Captain Riley and his crew through the Sahara desert. He's written several nonfiction books and his articles on adventure and survival have appeared in the New York Times, National Geographic Adventure, Outside,

Well, Dean, it's an absolute pleasure to have you here. And it sounds like you've had some incredible adventures in your life and also researching this story. So I'm so happy we could connect here. And normally on Against the Odds, we try to find someone who was there for the adventure. But this adventure happened in 1815. So it was a little while ago and you are literally the next best thing. You are the person who knows the most about this adventure. And I

I want to start out how you even first found out about it. So the story that I heard is you were in a yacht club library. You found a leather bound book. You opened it up and it basically changed your life. That's about right. Yeah. I was at the New York Yacht Club Library in New York City researching a companion book to the Patrick O'Brien novels. And I looked up on the shelf and saw on the spine of a book the word sufferings in Africa. And I thought, wow, that looks interesting.

Pulled it down, cracked it open and started to read. And it was Captain Riley's memoir from 1815. I had read a lot of sailors memoirs and I knew a fishing tale when I read one. And this really had the ring of authenticity. So I sat back and started turning the pages and I could not put it down for two days. I did none of my research. I just read his the story of his incredible journey.

Well, there's a quote and it's something like, don't let the truth get in the way of a good story. But I guess I want to know what those first passages were like. This thing was published in 1817. And, you know, a lot of stuff from that period would be pretty stilted and hard to read. But Riley had a very clear voice, very believable when he spoke. You could just feel he had lived what he was saying he had lived.

He did tell some stories that I thought, OK, maybe he's stretching the truth here a little bit. Turns out he wasn't. Well, the book, I think, lives up to its name, Sufferings in Africa, after going on this

This journey together for the podcast, it's incredible what had to be endured to make this happen. And at what point did you realize you had something on your hands here? When I found out that Abraham Lincoln had listed it as one of the six books that made a big impact on him as a boy.

You know, the others were Aesop's fables, the Bible, you know, and then this book, Sufferings in Africa. It was kind of hard to believe. So what happened to this book? Why had I never heard of it? And clearly it had made a significant impact in American history, given what Abraham Lincoln did.

And so for me, it was this amazing little piece of American history that was so exciting to have in the palm of my hand in a way when nobody else seemingly knew about it. So Captain Riley painted a picture with words of this experience. What picture did you want to paint? Well, the story in some ways, it was so timely and relevant because it was about the clash of

east and west. You know, you have a caravan trader who would get Riley and cross the desert with him. And to see them come together and sort of bridge the gulf in the culture at that time, you know, and to do it now when we're struggling with that very same issue was amazing. You mentioned the trader and the trader is Siddy Hammett.

And so how did you know exactly Sidi's role in all of this? The really amazing thing about Riley's narrative, Sufferings in Africa, was when I got to the end, even though Sidi Hammett had taken him across the desert to ransom him, they had become friends. And at the end, Riley got a translator and interviewed Sidi Hammett and got his life story.

So when you get to the end of Riley's account, here you have the life of C.D. Hammett, which is unheard of at that time. Right. To have that kind of material for a writer, it was crazy. That's incredible. I didn't realize that. Wow. And besides the dedication you put into putting it all together, you also are truly dedicated because you went all the way to the Sahara and retraced Riley's steps. Yes.

yeah there was no way i was not going to do that that's what i do with with all the stories i tell is i try to really dig into the history and and then go experience it go on go on that trail and sit around that campfire smell those smells discover what about the culture and the in the period as as much as possible if it's in the past

that I can bring, what kind of insights I can bring to this story that I couldn't have picked up just by reading old accounts or researching in the library. And that's what I did. Well, man, I am assuming once you landed, you got to feel what it would have been like to be lost in the Sahara. And I can't wait to hear what you have to say next. In our fast-paced, screen-filled world, it can be all too easy to lose that sense of imagination and wonder.

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Dean, I have been to that part of the world and there is a magic in that part of the world that I have never felt before. And I'd love for you to explain it to everybody. Peace Corps has a saying, people in Peace Corps who go to this part of the world, they call it that Wawa, West Africa wins again. And it's almost like no matter what plans you make going there,

They're not going to happen the way you thought they would. And that's what I experienced too. I had all these plans that I've made from my office preparing for this. And when I got there and hit the ground, it was completely different. And I think ultimately what Riley did and what I found I had to do is you have to surrender to the place. You have to accept what it is and function within what it offers you.

My trip went spectacularly wrong. I mean, everything that could have gone wrong practically did. And yet, in a way, it couldn't have gone better because by experiencing all of the challenges, I think it was much more like what Riley had experienced than if everything had gone as planned. Right. Exactly. Very, very, very similar to the story. And how do you even prepare for a journey like that? There's no top 10 tips to cross Sahara online.

I had planned to try to do as closely as possible what Riley had done. So I wanted to ride and run on those camels for 50 miles in a day if I could. I'm in Richmond, Virginia. It's very hot and humid here. So through the summer, I was running up to seven or eight miles a day and just getting in the best shape I could so that I could do this. And I had told the crew that was helping me orchestrate all this in Africa that

This wasn't a tourist trip. You know, I wasn't going there for fun. You know, I was going there to try to learn something and experience something. And, you know, you carry a pack around, you do that kind of stuff just to prepare for living out in the elements.

You didn't go wreck a ship or something on the coast first. I wonder if I could have figured that out. I mean, it might boost the expenses a little bit higher. I did hire a boat over there. And it was one of the first things that went wrong because Riley wrecked, you know, and then they went out in the boat for a couple of weeks and came back to shore. And and so one of the things I told him was, hey, I want to go right to, you know, where the shipwreck was and go out in a boat and try to come ashore where they did.

And when I got over there, though, there was no boat and I'd already sent a check for the boat. I'd paid for it. I thought for sure it was going to be there. It's the first thing that went wrong there, like there's no boat. So that was the first point that I knew I was going to have to start negotiating and figuring things out. For you, what was what was it like for someone who's never really been to the Sahara or felt like a desert before? What what's the landscape like and what's the heat like there and the thirst you feel? Can you explain that to us?

I guess most people, we have these visions of sandy dunes and most of it is hard pan.

hard rock with kind of boulders embedded in it. And it's a really tough, brutal landscape with dunes that kind of shipped across this hard landscape. And they, you know, they, they blow and, but you can get into sections of dunes and get lost really quickly because the way they ripple, you, you, you lose your sense of direction very quickly. Um,

Um, you can't see any kind of distance when you're in the dune and they're in the sands, caving down, cascading down. But it's, it's also a wonderful landscape. It's, it's a, it's a very peaceful, uh, quiet contemplative place that I think I can understand why some of these great explorers, you know, came to love the desert. And, um, we, we came to one desert and.

there were people sitting around on blankets drinking tea. And I asked the guy, it's like, why are these people here sitting on blankets in the desert drinking tea? And he said, well, they came out of the town because this is where they live. This is what they love. This is why they're here. They love the desert. Even though they have to live in a town now, it's like going to the, we go to the park, they go to the desert to do that. It's really kind of a beautiful thing.

And so Riley's trek was about 200 years ago or so. How do you think your trek compared to his trek

The terrain hasn't changed, and there are no maps of that area. You need a local guide wherever you go. There's still no water, very little rainfall. There are parts of that desert where it hasn't rained in six years. When Riley was there, people were used to going longer distances on their camels. When I got there, I had to truck my camels in from Morocco, and I almost didn't get them there because 9-11 happened.

Just three weeks before I was supposed to go there, I was about to cancel the trip when the guide that I had lined up said, you can't cancel the trip. I've got the camels on a truck. They're on their way there. You got to go. And I said, OK, OK, all right, I'm going to go. But it turns out that even my guides and these camels

couldn't do the distances I wanted to do. And I got upset with them from the very beginning. I was like, hey, you know, I came here. I want to go 50 miles today. I don't want to go 10 miles or 15 miles. And I pushed hard and, you know, created some issues among the crew to try to accomplish what I wanted to accomplish. But it wasn't going to happen.

So, you know, that was the beginning of my lessons. At one point, I challenged my guide to race across the desert. I trained for, you know, all these runs. And so I go tearing off out in front of them. And pretty soon I realized,

I don't know where I'm going. It doesn't do me any good to win a foot race on the desert, you know, and leave my guide behind. And it was these kinds of incidents where I had to change, you know, I wasn't going to be that American who came in and made things happen the way he wanted them to happen. And I had to adapt and figure out how do I survive here and how do I relate to these people and not, you know, be some kind of jerk. So what were exactly Riley's footsteps then?

So he shipwrecked near the Canary Islands. And back then it was just the Sahara. Today it is Western Sahara. He hit the coast and then he got in his longboat and went for a couple of weeks, went down the coast and hit a place called Cape Barabas. And they were captured and they went to a well inland. And that's what you do. Even amazingly, I think you can look on some modern maps and what you'll see in that part of the world is wells.

They're marked on the map. That's what's marked there because that's all that matters. And one of my guides, when I laid Riley's map over a modern map, said, this is where I want to go. He said, oh, yes, that's where you'd want to go because that's an Ula Busbo well. They would have gone to that well. They did that. And then when City Hammock came along, then that altered his course to start heading north. And let's talk a bit more about the journey. You come over. What were you most worried about?

I'd been to Morocco a couple of times before that, and I knew that Moroccans like Americans. So I wasn't too worried about that aspect of it. But but we did go into some towns and they would see that Americans were there. Towns where Americans.

They don't see white people very often. I did get harassed at a newsstand. There's a photograph of Osama bin Laden in the newspaper and a guy came up and picked up the newspaper and pointed at it and said, "He's a friend of mine." It was an interesting, great, powerful feeling of being remote, alone, vulnerable. I guess I was worried mostly that I wouldn't be able to get the research that I wanted to get for this book.

And what were some of the biggest challenges during the journey? The whole first week, the national police and the army wouldn't let us get on our camels. So we eventually, to start our journey, we had to go just above the border of Morocco and Western Sahara. And once we did that, they were hands off. They let us go.

We had six camels and there were five of us and several other people. So we didn't have enough camels for everybody. So somebody did sort of have to prod along. But it turns out they had two really beautiful, great riding camels and then four camels that were pack camels.

And riding one of those was excruciatingly painful. I mean, it, it dug into your thighs. They had kind of a metal saddle kind of thing that, you know, you were either falling off the, they're one hump camels. You're either falling off the front onto its neck or you're falling off the back, hanging on for dear life. And it's thumping you pound, you know, pounding you down the desert. Riding camels kind of like an oxymoron. That's,

it's not a good time no no yeah and there again i understand okay riley's telling me yeah their their legs were getting shredded by the camels and that it when it became too painful to ride the camel they would jump off and just run and if they fell down they would get beaten because they had to keep up with the camel and and then when they couldn't run anymore they would get back on that camel and hang on for dear life for a while longer now i didn't

experience it to that degree, obviously. But I did, you know, I had a taste of, boy, it was not fun to be on one of those camels. Well,

Well, the other two riding camels were a lot better. But first my guide told me, "Well, I have to be on one of those good riding camels because I'm the guide." Eventually it's like, "I don't know, maybe we should share that good camel." And so we had to negotiate these kinds of things. And he spoke Arabic and Spanish and I speak English and French. So we had to sort of piece these things together. Riley was the same way when he was negotiating to get somebody to buy him, to take him across the desert.

He had to use stones to indicate, you know, numbers and he had to piece together a language, cobble it together and, and,

You know, just living that moment, doing the same kind of thing was much more educational for me than even going to the exact place that Riley had gone to. Right. Because at the end of the day, it's mostly about getting a feeling, a glimpse, a fragment of a feeling of what it would have been like to survive for that long. Right. And the destinations, sure, would be great. But at the end of the day, it's.

The research you were doing was how to write this so it can encompass the feeling these people would have to cross the desert.

That's, that's exactly right. You know, and, and, um, and it also is what, you know, connected me closer and closer to Riley. You know, at one point he falls off his camel and, uh, he's lying on the ground and his guide comes up to him and says, Riley, you know, if you'd fallen off of a donkey, you'd be, you'd be dead, but you fell off of a camel. Camels are sacred. Those who fall from camels are never hurt. Get up, let's go. And I,

I read that in his memoir and I thought, OK, well, maybe he's stretching the truth here. He is, you know, he's a seaman. So let's give him a little leeway here. Well, on the very first day I was on my camel and I'm telling you, I've never been on any. You know, when that camel gets up, you're first you're you're looking straight down at the ground as it's getting up onto its knees and then it rears you back and you're about to fall off the back and then you're up higher than you've ever been on anything.

And Muhammad El Arab, my guide, goes running down the desert on his camel. He was raised on the desert. His father was a nomad. And so riding a camel is like riding a bike for him. So my camel goes chasing his camel.

Pretty soon I'm dodging rafts of foam coming out of my camel's mouth and hanging on for dear life. And I feel my saddle starts to slide to one side. And, you know, I'm falling over and I realize I'm either going to go into this camel's whipsawing legs or I've got to let go. And so I let go and fell off my camel and hit the ground hard.

And Muhammad finally realized I wasn't behind him anymore. And he comes galloping up and he looks down at me and he goes, King, what's wrong? And I'm checking my head to see if I've broken anything, checking my ribs. And he goes, it doesn't matter. You fell from a camel. Camels are sacred. You're fine. Let's go. And boy...

That was an amazing moment. I never expected to experience anything like that. I thought, no way. But here's the exact same thing that happened to him in 1815. It was happening to me in 2001. It was incredible.

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Yeah, he did many hundreds of miles across the desert, and I did about 100. And did you lose about 100 pounds like Riley? He lost 100 pounds in a couple hundred miles in the Sahara? Is that what it was? Yeah, yeah, a couple months. And one of the amazing moments, I think, in the story is when Siddy Hammett buys a camel to feed the sailors that he's going to take up north to ransom, and he

When they slaughter the camel and cook it, Arabs pour in. They come in from, they don't even know where. They're just up here and they start eating that camel. And Riley's beside himself because he knows this is the food that he needs for his men to survive. And he's heartbroken. And he thinks Sidney Hammett's betrayed him by letting everybody eat this camel. But it turns out when you're on the desert, it's part of the moral system there. The morality is that

If you have food and there are hungry people, you feed the people. Allah gave you the food, Allah gave you the water, Allah gave you the camel's milk, and you can't betray that. If you do that, you're an infidel, your life's not worth living.

there. So even if you don't know if you're going to have enough food to survive for the next day or two or week, you're going to share that food with other starving people. It's a beautiful thing. Again, somewhat counterintuitive. It goes against what as Westerners, what we might think, hey, that's my possession. That's my food and you can't have it. I need that food. You know, it's an amazing thing. That's how they've managed to survive so long on the desert.

It's almost like a pay it forward kind of mentality where it's, I've got food now, I might not have food later. If we all share, when we have an abundance, then we'll all be okay. Yes, and they live by that. And did you have any moments where your thirst or the alarms were sounding in your head that this environment might be a bit too much?

I have to be honest, my crew took really good care of me and we always had plenty of water and they fed us well. We had a Land Rover assisted camel track, but the Land Rovers would leave us and they would go ahead and set up a camp and we rode the camels and had to go find them. So

And we had to pack our lunch. And typically we were looking for people to talk to. I wanted to talk to anybody I could meet. And if we could find somebody to share our food with them, we would do that. And that happened several times. We met a family and we went to their tent. All they had were sacks of grain. They had young kids. And it was like, how are these, what are these kids doing out here in the middle of this desert? They're not in school. They're, you know, we took our food out and we shared it with them. And

They shared their camel milk with us. And, you know, it's how you commune and you take your time about it. You have, you know, three cups of camel's milk and then you'll have three cups of tea and it's sort of a ceremony.

Yeah, I actually remember the same thing from over there where every time we were invited to tea, it always would have to be three cups and they'd pour it back and forth to make a special froth on top. And it was this ritual that you had to do. It was one of the most important parts of the day. And you come to appreciate that, you know, especially if you've been trekking across the desert for several hours. And it's just a wonderful feeling of exhaustion and camaraderie.

During all this, was there a specific moment where you, when all the pieces came together and you realized that you're standing in a spot where Captain Riley stood himself? I went back to the Sahara with History Channel to do a two-hour special documentary. And we were up north where...

In the town of what's known as Esawira now, that was called Mogador. And Riley had made sort of a deal with the devil. He had told Sidney Hammett, I know somebody there. And Sidney Hammett was desperate. Sidney Hammett said, OK, I'm going to believe you. But if you're lying to me, I'm going to slit your throat.

And so they traveled across the desert under this threat. And Riley didn't know anybody there. You know, he would have done almost anything to try to save his men and get them across the desert. And he told this lie to a man he didn't really know. But as they're traveling, they become friends. They begin to respect one another. They bond. And so this friendship forms in Riley's

traveling up there knowing that he's lied to this guy who's risking his life to take him up there. And Riley probably didn't know that this guy was going to risk his life to save his life. So when they finally get up to Essaouira, they meet at an old fort.

They meet this guy who has Riley's been sending messages to whom it may concern, you know, among the traders up there. And this English trader has gotten the message and has kind of vouched for him and said, yeah, I know him. I'm going to pay for him. And that guy, William Wilshire, comes down from Essaouira.

to what was an old fort. And Riley describes that fort. And he said it had four towers and it had green tile roof. And this is where we met. And this is where my life lay in the balance and I was saved. So I hadn't gotten up there in my first trip. And we go out to this area to film.

And I knew kind of where it was because Riley had told an artist and they'd drawn a picture of it. And so we get out there and we're just looking around in that spot. And I'm looking for the same perspective on the town. And my God, we become upon the ruins of a fort. And I look over in a pile of rubble and there are green tiles. And I picked up one of those green tiles and I realized, wow.

I'm holding my hand, the green tile that he talked about in 1815 that he had seen here. And it's making the hair on my arm stand up right now, that moment. Yeah, I mean, it was just, it was phenomenal to make that connection. Honestly, that was one very important part of the story. This man who's traveled across the Sahara, then finally hears that his plan, his grand scheme, this thing that he had been holding onto for so long, actually is going to pan out.

Yeah. Yeah. And, you know, the thing that that I think raised this story up above just being a good adventure story was Riley's ability to understand that even though he and his crew were brutalized to a certain extent on the desert, that.

The people weren't bad people. And particularly before City Hammett kind of rescued them, they were tending the camels and they were sleeping on this rock hard desert and they were fed very little and they suffered a lot.

And even with City Hammett, they had to work the entire time because there's no free ride on the desert. You know, you're not if you're not working hard, you're not going to survive. But Riley came to realize that City Hammett was a good man, a smart man, a capable man. And City Hammett came to realize that Riley was the same, that he could keep his men even though they were emaciated and starving and

barely alive at times, he could keep them moving. His will was keeping them going. And they had to fend off other warriors on that desert who would have tried to grab Riley and his men because these white slaves were worth a lot. So they needed each other to survive together. And so the way they bridged the gulf of their cultures, they were both men of faith.

They both came to respect one another. And that is what elevated the story and made it so powerful for me. And I think makes it something that we should revisit is that

spending time together, getting to know one another is how we bridge the gulf, you know, and I had to experience that live too. I didn't understand it till I actually went there. You know, I pushed my guides. I made them angry at certain points yet at the end of the day, we can laugh together and we could get over it. And I came to understand them better. And I had to understand where they were coming from. There, there was an amazing moment with the guide, uh,

uh, Muhammad El Arab. At the end, Muhammad gave me a, a, a friendship ring, uh, you know, and this was 20 years ago now. I still have it, uh, you know, on my, my hand. You know, we, we developed a relationship that I'll never forget. And, uh,

And it gave me some insight into what Riley had experienced. And obviously his experience was a lot more profound, but I was lucky to be able to go there and just catch a glimpse of it and to experience it and hopefully be able to fuse that into the narrative.

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Well, yeah, there's a tradition of literature about shipwrecks on the west coast of Africa, and that's what happened. If you wrecked there, it wasn't a question of if it was when. You were going to be captured and enslaved and probably eventually sold either up the desert or down the desert. And if you went down the desert to the Senegal River, in a town there controlled by the French,

you know, the French were going to buy. And if you went north, it was to be the British that were going to pay for you. And today we got in the desert. We went to a very remote tribal house and these were Arab Arab peoples. And there was a black African who was

in a room in the back and who wasn't allowed to come out and who was kind of looking forlornly out of the window as we were leaving. And our guides told us that they thought that this young guy was a slave.

And so, you know, in these remote parts, it still goes on. There's still a trade there among the tribes. I don't know how extensive it is. Honestly, I saw the same thing when I was there, when I was in the remote parts of Mauritania. And we actually inquired about it. And while they didn't acknowledge the word slave, but it was very apparent that it wasn't a two-way relationship. And so human trafficking does still exist in remote parts.

in West Africa and it's a terrible, terrible thing. And so you go to Western Sahara, you retrace the captain's steps as best as you can, you feel the heat, you feel some thirst, and you see that maybe not everything has changed as much as you'd think in this area. And what do you bring back home with you? - Wow, just a wealth of experience and

understanding, empathy. I was a changed person.

And, um, and, and that's the beautiful thing is that if you open your mind up to a different culture and place and go there with an, an open heart and, uh, you know, it can change you. So I came back, um, even though, you know, my, my trip went very wrong and we're at a very fraught time right after nine 11. Um, I came back with that feeling that, um,

people are all alike in, in many ways. And that, um, if you spend time together and you sort of suffer together and you laugh together, you eat together, um, you know, all those kinds of, you know, rituals and things that we do as humans, uh, you understand one another and it's hard to hate somebody that you understand. And so for me, um, understanding,

And understanding the value of Riley's story of what he experienced and what he came back with, I guess I understood, you know, how he came back with that message and how important it is and how little...

known and understood that message is and how we continually maybe relive the results of not understanding that that kind of interaction is the best way to have peace.

and to love one another. And so, you know, that's kind of a big place to go. But I think that's why we explore these kinds of stories and try to write books and continue keeping them alive. The journey these two men had together was beautiful, right? Because they were from two different worlds. They came together and

The reason why Riley survived was because of the deal he made with Siddy Hammett. And one really fascinating thing you said in the beginning was that we know so much about Siddy Hammett because of the interview Riley did and had translated, which is such an incredible nugget right there.

And we spoke a lot about Riley and his shipmates and a bit of their struggle, but it wasn't exactly a breeze for their captors either. There was tribes and a lot of other issues they had to think about constantly and are always threatened by. Do you know much about what their day-to-day life was like?

There are probably a lot of similarities between their lives and the sailors' lives, you know, going out into difficult situations, trying to make a living, trying to provide for their families back home, living to get back home and reconnect with their children and their wives and their, you know, sisters and brothers and parents, all that, you know. And so Sidney Hammett has risked everything he has

and that he needs to trade to get back with his family to buy Riley to take him up north. And so that's the beautiful thing. It's not like when they're crossing the desert, you're just rooting for Riley and his men. You're rooting for these Arab traders because you understand them and you understand what's at risk for them. And so it becomes a much richer tale, I think. And in the end,

City Hammett saves Riley and then passes away, saving his other men. I guess it kind of plays to the relationship these two men had formed with each other. In the beginning, City Hammett was like, this can't happen. There's no way I'm taking you and your men. In the end, he fought for the men and he died for the men. It's a powerful thing. It tells you the relationship that they had.

developed, you know, crossing that desert. And so that that bond remained true. So so much so that that Sidney Hammett, even when Riley was, you know, across the Atlantic Ocean, was still looking for his men and, you know, essentially sacrificed himself for Riley's men, men he didn't even know. Incredible.

And in the end, most of Riley's men did make it back to America. And then Riley wrote Sufferings in Africa. And what was his message in that book? Well, his message essentially was that

In the end, the slavery that he encountered made people greedy and bad and cruel. And it wasn't the men per se. It was the institution of slavery. That message, let's be honest, when it was a white person experiencing it over in Africa, hit home in a different way, in a way it communicated to white America at the time in a way that no other story could.

Abraham Lincoln read it as a boy and it made a big impact on him. And Lincoln would have read this book and then thought very critically about slavery in America, realized that, okay, this is all backwards, and then basically lighted a powder keg that changed a lot in America.

That's right. I think it really took root in Abraham Lincoln and was at some point going to become a driving force. It was going to help him withstand all those other arguments in support of slavery and the economy and everything they came up with to try to support slavery. Here was a very powerful story that refuted that. It said that, no, it doesn't matter where it is. It's an evil institution.

Everything about this is just so fascinating to me, from finding a leather-bound book, opening it up, digesting it quickly over a couple of days, following the footsteps, and hearing about these two men, and then changing America in the process. I think people need incredible stories like this in their life. And I'd love for you to tell me your greatest takeaway. You know, I've shared some stories with you, but one of my favorites was that...

The guy that I challenged to the foot race, his name was Ali, and he was our wrangler. Every time we came to a well, he would find the bucket that was hidden and get the water out for the camels. And one night, Ali, who hadn't said two words to me, really, we'd sort of butted heads. We had a long, hard day and we got lost from our land rivers, but we were able to connect with them by cell phone. They drove their land rivers down.

And everybody that was with me, the rest of my crew got in the Land Rovers and went to camp. And I said, no, I'm not. I came here to experience what Riley experienced, the hardship. And so I'm going to stay with you. And we still had to ride those camels to the camp overnight. When I stayed with Ali, things changed. He saw that, you know, I wasn't going to take the easy way out and I was going to stick with him. We had another amazing experience that night. We stayed together in the tent.

they mixed the food in the bowl and all we had was our hands and we ate the food with our hands out of the bowl when riley was on the desert the arabs considered them infidels and wouldn't eat food or drink out of the same vessel you know here i'm having that experience with this guy that i butted heads with and we're eating food out of the same bowl having bonded just over enduring something tough together for me you know

I guess that's the deepest thing I learned was that if you spend time together and find that you can depend on one another, you're going to develop bonds that are kind of magic and are what life is about. Dean King, wise words, beautiful stories. And thank you for joining us on Against the Odds. Thanks, Mike. Really enjoyed it. This is the final episode of our series Shipwreck on the Sahara.

If you'd like to learn more about this event, we highly recommend the book Skeletons on the Sahara by Dean King. I'm your host, Mike Corey. Peter Arcuni produced this episode. Brian White is our associate producer. Our audio engineer is Sergio Enriquez. Our executive producers are Stephanie Jens and Marshall Dewey for Wondery.

My name is Georgia King and I am thrilled to be the host of And Away We Go, a brand new travel podcast on Wondery Plus, where we'll be whisked away on immersive adventures all around the world. Where we go, what we do, what we eat,

drink and listen to will all be up to my very special guests. We've got Ben Schwartz taking us on a whirlwind trip around Disneyland. We'll eat a bowl of life-changing pasta with Jimmy O. Yang in Tuscany, Italy. And how do you

feel about a spot of sugaring off with Emily Hampshire in Montreal. And Away We Go will immerse you in some of the wonders of the world. We're going to be seeing some yellows and vibrant oranges. And the shoes clicking against the cobblestone. If you're looking to get somebody in the mood, have them look at the Chicago skyline. You can listen to And Away We Go exclusively with Wondery Plus. Join Wondery Plus in the Wondery app or on Apple Podcasts.

Georgia, do you know what joy sounds like? I think I'm hearing it right now.