Shortly after midnight on 30 July 1945, the U.S. Navy heavy cruiser USS Indianapolis, under Captain Charles B. McVay III, was struck by two torpedoes from the Japanese submarine I-58 in the Philippine Sea, between Guam and Leyte. The ship rolled over and sank in about twelve minutes. Of the 1,195 men aboard, roughly 300 went down with the cruiser; close to 890 entered the open Pacific with few rafts, little water and almost no organized survival gear. By the time the survivors were found by chance four days later, only 316 were still alive. Around 880 men died — the greatest single-ship loss of life in U.S. Navy history.
The disaster had two distinct phases, and the second was the deadlier. Many men survived the sinking only to die slowly in the water from exposure, dehydration, drinking seawater, wounds and the despair that drove some to swim off or slip from their lifejackets. Schools of sharks, primarily oceanic whitetips, gathered around the drifting groups and fed on the dead and the living; estimates of shark deaths range from a few dozen to more than a hundred, though most men were killed by the sea and the sun rather than by teeth. No distress signal was acted upon, and the ship’s overdue arrival at Leyte went unnoticed for days. The survivors were spotted only by accident, by a patrol pilot who happened to look down.
The Indianapolis is remembered for the secrecy that surrounded her and the injustice that followed her. Days earlier she had carried components of the Hiroshima atomic bomb to Tinian on a mission so classified that her loss was tangled in silence. Captain McVay was court-martialed in December 1945 — the only U.S. captain so tried for losing a ship to enemy action in the war — and convicted of failing to zigzag, on testimony from the very submarine commander who had sunk him that it would have made no difference. McVay took his own life in 1968. He was formally exonerated by Congress and the Navy in 2000–2001, more than fifty years too late for him.
On the night of 13–14 May 1866 the three-masted ship General Grant, bound from Melbourne to London under Captain William Loughlin, drifted in light winds onto the towering western cliffs of the main Auckland Island, in the subantarctic ocean some 460 kilometres south of New Zealand. The ship was carried into a great sea cave; her mainmast struck the rock roof and was driven down through the hull, and she filled and sank in the cave with most of the 83 people aboard still trapped inside. Sixty-eight drowned. Only fifteen reached the shore of one of the loneliest archipelagos on earth, and of those, ten would live to be rescued eighteen months later.
The survivors landed with almost nothing and faced a climate of near-constant rain, wind and cold. Their lives turned on fire and food. They learned to keep a fire burning continuously, having no reliable means to relight it, and they lived on seals, sea birds and their eggs, wild pigs descended from animals left by earlier visitors, and roots, eventually moving to better ground on Enderby Island. The Auckland Islands lay far off any shipping route, so no rescue could be expected to come looking; the castaways’ only hope was endurance or their own escape. After nine months, four of the strongest men set out in a small boat to reach New Zealand without compass or chart. They were never seen again.
The General Grant is remembered as one of the great subantarctic castaway ordeals, and as a lesson in the lethal isolation of the southern islands. One more survivor, David McLelland, died of illness on the island before the end. The remaining ten were found in November 1867 by the brig Amherst, by chance rather than by search, after eighteen months of marooned survival. The wreck — and a cargo that reportedly included gold — has drawn salvage expeditions ever since, but the ship has never been certainly relocated within the cave, and the bones of those who drowned lie there still.
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 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.