Arabia Felix is the spellbinding true story of a scientific expedition gone disastrously astray. 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; all in all, an ill-assorted band of men who dislike and distrust one another from the start. These are the members of the first Danish expedition to Arabia Felix, as Yemen was then known, the first such scientific expedition ever mounted to a corner of the world unknown to Europeans, and a glorious venture, sponsored by the Danish crown, that had excited the curiosity of all Europe. After a slow voyage to Turkey and Egypt, during which the merry band of explorers pass their time by plotting to poison or shoot one another, the small party disappeared into the unknown desert that is their destination, and the exotic, dangerous, and disastrous make private animosity increasingly superfluous. Nearly seven years later, the sole survivor of the expedition finally makes it back to Denmark to find himself a forgotten man and to discover that the precious specimens that the researchers had sent back to Denmark in the course of the expedition have all been ruined by neglect. Based on diaries, notebooks, and sketches that had been stashed away in the Copenhagen museum and unread for years, Arabia Felix is both a dark comedy of very bad manners and an unforgettable tale of high adventure.