Poon Lim — 133 days alone on a raft, and lived

Summary

On 23 November 1942 the British merchant steamer SS Benlomond, sailing alone in the South Atlantic, was torpedoed by the German submarine U-172 and sank within about two minutes. Of the roughly fifty-five aboard, only one man lived: Poon Lim, a Chinese second mess steward, then twenty-four years old. He surfaced in a lifejacket, drifted for about two hours, and found an eight-foot wooden raft adrift on the open sea. Alone on that raft, with the equator's sun overhead and no land in sight, he survived 133 days before three Brazilian fishermen found him near the coast of Pará on 5 April 1943. It remains the longest documented solo survival on a raft at sea.

The raft carried a fixed store of provisions — about ten gallons of fresh water, biscuits, chocolate, tins of pemmican and evaporated milk, a little lime juice — enough for a man to last weeks, not months. Poon Lim's achievement was to outlast that store by improvisation and discipline. He rationed the water and food from the first, then extended his life by catching rainwater in the canvas of his lifejacket, fashioning a fishhook from a wire spring and a line from unravelled rope, catching fish and seabirds, and on one occasion killing a shark and drinking the blood from its liver. He marked each passing day, watched ships and aircraft pass without seeing him, and held on.

His survival was not luck but method, sustained over four and a half months of solitude, exposure and slow starvation. By the time the fishermen reached him he had drifted close to the South American coast and had lost about twenty pounds, but he could still walk. For his endurance King George VI awarded him the British Empire Medal, and the Royal Navy folded his improvised techniques into its survival training. He later emigrated and lived four more decades, dying in Brooklyn in 1991. No one has since spent longer alone on a raft.

Timeline

The sinking and the raft

The SS Benlomond was a slow, unescorted British cargo steamer crossing the South Atlantic in the winter of 1942, a year in which Allied merchant shipping was being slaughtered by the U-boat campaign. On 23 November the submarine U-172 found her alone and put a torpedo into her; she went down in roughly two minutes, too fast for any orderly evacuation. Most of the crew of about fifty-five went down with the ship or died in the water. Poon Lim, working below as a mess steward, got clear, found a lifejacket, and was carried away from the wreck as the sea swallowed everything else.

He floated for about two hours before he came upon the raft, a simple square wooden platform some eight feet on a side, of a standard type carried for exactly this purpose. Lashed to it was a survival store: a tank holding about ten imperial gallons of fresh water, boxes of hardtack biscuit, a couple of pounds of chocolate, tins of pemmican and evaporated milk, a bottle of lime juice, a flashlight and flares. For a single man it was a generous start, but only a start. The provisions would carry one survivor perhaps a few weeks. The nearest land was hundreds of miles off, the shipping lanes were a lottery, and the rescue services had no idea he existed. From the first day, his survival was a problem of stretching finite supplies across an unknown and probably very long wait.

Living off the sea and the sky

Poon Lim's response was disciplined husbandry. He rationed the fresh water and food from the outset rather than eating to comfort, and he set about replacing them from the environment before they ran out. Rain was the key. He used the canvas of his lifejacket, and later the structure of the raft, to catch and store rainwater, and he learned to drink to fullness when rain came and conserve in the dry stretches. Water, not food, is what kills the castaway fastest, and his rainwater collection is the reason he could outlast a store meant to last weeks.

For food he turned the raft into a small, patient fishery. He took the metal spring from the flashlight and worked it into a fishhook; he unravelled the hemp rope of the raft's lashings to make a line; he used crushed biscuit and, later, scraps of caught fish as bait. He pulled fish from the water, and when seabirds settled on the raft he caught and killed them, soaking the meat in seawater and drying it in the sun into a kind of jerky against the lean days. The most extreme episode came when a shark attacked: he fought and killed it, ate its flesh, and drank the blood from its liver for fluid. He kept count of the days by knots or marks, watched the sky for aircraft and the horizon for ships, and endured the unbroken solitude that breaks many castaways as surely as thirst.

The Five Factors

Aftermath

Poon Lim alone survived the loss of the Benlomond; the rest of the crew, some fifty-four men, were lost when she sank. After recovering in Brazil he was repatriated, and the scale of his feat was quickly recognised. King George VI awarded him the British Empire Medal, and the Royal Navy studied his methods and incorporated them into its survival training and manuals, so that the improvisations of one desperate steward became instruction for others. He had wanted only to be useful; he became a textbook.

He tried to join the United States Merchant Marine after the war but was initially barred by exclusion laws, and only later, by special dispensation, emigrated to the United States, gaining citizenship in 1952. He settled in Brooklyn, ran a business, and lived a long ordinary life, dying on 4 January 1991 at the age of seventy-two. His record endures. Decades of war, shipwreck and disaster at sea have produced no documented case of anyone surviving longer alone on a raft than the 133 days Poon Lim spent on a wooden platform in the South Atlantic, kept alive by rain, fish, discipline and will.

Lessons

References

• Poon Lim WIKIPEDIA
• Mess Steward Poon Lim Survived 133 Days Lost At Sea WAR HISTORY ONLINE
• Surviving 133 days at sea: the remarkable life of Poon Lim GEOGARAGE
• Adrift — Poon Lim survived 133 days at sea on a wooden raft OUTDOOR REVIVAL