Author of Sailors in the Holy Land: The 1848 American Expedition to the Dead Sea and the Search for Sodom and Gomorrah at Navy Memorial

Andrew C.A. Jampoler Will Discuss and Sign His Book Followed by a Q&A 

Wednesday, November 3, 2010, 12:00 NOON 
Free and open to the public

Ordered to fix the exact elevation of the Dead Sea and to collect scientific specimens, the expedition was the Navy’s first and last to the storied salt lake of the Old Testament. The expedition’s leader, Lt. William Lynch, was at once a coolly scientific and a devoutly religious man who hoped to find the ruins of Sodom and Gomorrah and sustain the Book of Genesis’s account of the cities’ destruction. Drawing on his extensive research in Turkey, Jordan, and Israel, the author presents not only first-time details of the expedition but also sets the expedition into a colorful context of biblical story and of the great events of the mid-nineteenth century, including global epidemic disease, political revolution in Europe, the collapse of Ottoman imperial rule, and the secularization of America. He also offers a taste of Navy life at sea during a decade when sail began to give way to steam.

Readers join Lynch and his team as they launch two small boats on the Sea of Galilee at Tiberias to run the Jordan rapids and then plumb the depths of the Dead Sea while members of the shore party and their Arab escorts follow along on camels and horseback. Officers and sailors alike believed that every previous expedition had been stricken by disease or assaulted by murderous desert tribes, but specially selected volunteers were prepared to suffer on a mission as much about religion as science.

Andrew C.A. Jampoler, a retired naval aviator and former commanding officer of Patrol Squadron 19 and of Naval Air Station Moffett Field, is also the author of Adak and The Last Lincoln Conspirator.