The Batavia, flagship of the Dutch East India Company on her maiden voyage from the Netherlands to the East Indies, struck Morning Reef in the Houtman Abrolhos off the coast of Western Australia before dawn on 4 June 1629. She carried roughly 340 people. About forty drowned in the wreck; the rest, some 280 men, women and children, reached a cluster of small, low coral islands that had no fresh water and almost no food. What followed was not principally a story of exposure but of murder. While the commander went for help, one man turned the marooned survivors into victims of a planned slaughter.
The upper-merchant Francisco Pelsaert and the skipper took the ship’s longboat and about forty-seven people and made an open-boat voyage of roughly 1,900 nautical miles over thirty-three days to the port of Batavia (present-day Jakarta) to bring a rescue ship. In his absence the under-merchant Jeronimus Cornelisz, who had been entangled in a mutiny plot before the wreck, seized control of the largest island. To stretch the scant supplies and remove anyone who might oppose him, he and a band of followers murdered an estimated 125 of the stranded — men, women and children — by drowning, strangling and the sword over some weeks, while a number of women were kept and abused.
Cornelisz had sent a party of soldiers under Wiebbe Hayes to a separate island, expecting them to die of thirst. Instead they found water and game, learned of the killings from escapees, armed themselves with improvised weapons, and repulsed the mutineers’ attacks. When Pelsaert returned on the rescue ship Sardam in late September 1629, the soldiers’ resistance had held. Cornelisz and the chief murderers were tried on the islands and hanged in October, several first having a hand struck off; two lesser mutineers were marooned on the Australian mainland. Of the roughly 340 who had sailed, only a fraction reached Java alive.
On 28 April 1789, in the South Pacific about 30 nautical miles south of the island of Tofua, mutineers aboard HMS Bounty led by acting-lieutenant Fletcher Christian seized the ship from her commander, Lieutenant William Bligh, and set him and eighteen loyal men adrift in the ship’s 23-foot launch. The boat was dangerously overloaded, with only inches of freeboard, and carried little food, a small store of water, no chart of the seas ahead, and only a quadrant, a compass and Bligh’s seamanship to navigate by. Over the following weeks the launch crossed roughly 3,600 nautical miles of open ocean to the Dutch settlement of Kupang on Timor, arriving on 14 June 1789. All but one of the nineteen survived the boat voyage itself — a feat of navigation and command still ranked among the greatest in maritime history.
The Bounty had sailed from England in late 1787 to carry breadfruit plants from Tahiti to the West Indies. After five months at Tahiti, where the crew settled into an easy island life, the return to shipboard discipline under a sharp-tongued commander curdled into rebellion within weeks of departure. The mutiny was not a battle but a sudden, near-bloodless seizure at dawn. Bligh and his men were given the launch, some provisions, and their lives, and cast loose to fend for themselves in a sea where the only friendly port lay thousands of miles to the west.
The single death came early and ashore. At Tofua, where the launch first put in to gather food and water, islanders attacked the landing party; the quartermaster John Norton was stoned to death on the beach as the others scrambled off. After that, Bligh resolved to risk no more hostile islands and ran straight for Timor, holding his starving men to a regime of weighed crumbs and measured water, sailing through storms and burning sun. The voyage is remembered as a triumph, but it was a triumph of grim discipline over near-certain death, and several of the survivors, worn out by the ordeal, died of illness soon after reaching the Dutch East Indies.
In September 1704 Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailing master from Lower Largo in Fife, asked to be put ashore on the uninhabited island of Más a Tierra in the Juan Fernández group, roughly 400 nautical miles west of Valparaíso, Chile. He was not abandoned against his will; he chose the island over his ship. Selkirk had quarrelled with his captain, Thomas Stradling, insisting that the privateer Cinque Ports was so worm-eaten and ill-caulked that she would founder before the voyage was done. When Stradling refused to refit, Selkirk demanded to be set down on the nearest land. He survived there alone for four years and four months until a passing English privateer took him off on 2 February 1709. He was, when found, clothed in goatskins and barely able to speak.
Selkirk’s judgement of the ship proved exactly right, which is the dark irony at the centre of his story. The Cinque Ports did founder, off the coast of what is now Colombia; Stradling and the handful of men who survived were captured by the Spanish and held prisoner in Lima for years. The man who refused to sail in her lived. Selkirk’s ordeal was therefore not a disaster in the usual sense of this catalogue but a survival earned by a correct technical assessment, a strong constitution, and the accident of an island stocked with feral goats. He endured loneliness, near-capture by Spanish landing parties, and the slow erosion of his own speech and clothing, and he came home.
He is remembered chiefly because Daniel Defoe, writing fifteen years later, drew on accounts of his solitude for Robinson Crusoe (1719). Selkirk was not Crusoe — there was no shipwreck on his beach, no Friday, no decades of isolation — but his real, documented four years alone gave the fiction its spine. The man himself returned to the sea, served in the Royal Navy, and died of fever off West Africa in 1721, the survivor of the island consumed at last by the ordinary hazards of the trade he never left.
On 28 July 1609 the Sea Venture, flagship of an English supply fleet bound for the struggling colony at Jamestown, Virginia, was deliberately driven onto the reefs of Bermuda by Admiral Sir George Somers to keep her from sinking under him in a hurricane. The ship had been separated from her fleet, battered for days, and was leaking faster than her exhausted company could bail. Rather than let her founder in open water, Somers steered the dying ship at the land. She wedged between two reefs close enough to shore that every one of the roughly 150 people aboard — colonists, sailors, the new governor of Virginia, women and children — got safely off. Not a single life was lost in the wreck. It is one of the rare entries in this catalogue in which the doom was averted by the very decision that destroyed the ship.
The castaways then spent about ten months on Bermuda, an uninhabited island feared by sailors as the “Isle of Devils” but in fact mild and abundant, thick with wild hogs, fish, birds and cedar. They survived comfortably enough that survival itself bred a new danger: discontent. Several factions argued that the wreck had freed them from their indentures and that they should stay in this paradise rather than sail on to the hunger and disease of Virginia. Sir Thomas Gates, the colony’s incoming governor, suppressed a series of conspiracies, and one ringleader, Henry Paine, was executed by firing squad. A handful of people died on the island of illness or violence, and two parties sent for help in a small boat were never heard from again, but the great majority lived.
From Bermuda cedar and salvaged fittings the company built two new ships, the Deliverance and the Patience, and on 10 May 1610 sailed for Virginia, reaching Jamestown on 23 May 1610. There they found the colony nearly annihilated by the “Starving Time” — perhaps sixty survivors of some five hundred. The Sea Venture‘s castaways, given up for dead, had arrived as unexpected rescuers. Reports of the wreck, above all William Strachey’s vivid True Reportory, reached London in 1610 and are widely held to have helped inspire Shakespeare’s The Tempest.