A riveting account of a landmark expedition that left only one survivor, now back in print for the first time in decades.

Arabia Felix is the spellbinding true story of a scientific expedition gone disastrously awry. On a winter morning in 1761 six men leave Copenhagen by sea--a botanist, a philologist, an astronomer, a doctor, an artist, and their manservant--an ill-assorted band of men who dislike and distrust one another from the start. These are the members of the Danish expedition to Arabia Felix, as Yemen was then known, the first organized foray into a...