On 15 June 1972, about 200 nautical miles west of the Galápagos Islands, the wooden schooner Lucette was holed by a pod of orcas and sank within minutes, leaving the six people aboard adrift in the open Pacific. They were the Robertson family — Dougal Robertson, a Scottish former merchant-navy officer turned dairy farmer; his wife Lyn; their son Douglas, then about eighteen; the twin boys Neil and Sandy, about twelve — together with Robin Williams, a young Englishman taken on as crew at Panama. All six survived. After 38 days adrift, first in an inflatable life raft and then crammed into the Lucette‘s nine- to ten-foot fibreglass dinghy Ednamair, they were picked up alive by a Japanese fishing trawler.
The ordeal was a study in deliberate, disciplined survival rather than disaster. The raft and dinghy held only a few days’ water and rations. The inflatable raft deteriorated and failed after about sixteen days, forcing all six into the tiny dinghy. From there the family built a survival regime out of almost nothing: they caught turtles and dorado and flying fish, dried strips of meat in the sun, drank turtle blood and rainwater, and rigged the dinghy to catch every shower. Dougal, drawing on his seamanship, navigated by dead reckoning toward the shipping lanes off Central America rather than waiting passively to be found, and Lyn’s nursing knowledge and improvised remedies kept the weakening bodies functioning.
The Robertsons are remembered as one of the rare cases in which an entire group, including children, came through a long open-water ordeal alive and without resorting to harming one another. They had, the family later said, explicitly resolved that they would not eat one another to survive. Dougal Robertson recorded the experience in his 1973 book Survive the Savage Sea, and later distilled its hard lessons into a survival manual; his son Douglas told the fuller story decades afterward in The Last Voyage of the Lucette. The dinghy Ednamair survives in a maritime museum as the small, battered vessel that carried six people through five weeks of open ocean.
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.
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.
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.