On 20 November 1820 the Nantucket whaleship Essex, under first-time captain George Pollard Jr., was rammed twice and sunk by a large sperm whale in the remote equatorial Pacific, roughly 2,000 nautical miles west of South America. The crew of twenty escaped into three small whaleboats with a meager salvage of bread and fresh water. Twelve of them would not survive. After about three months adrift, only eight men lived to be rescued; some endured by eating the bodies of shipmates who had died, and in one boat by killing a chosen man after the survivors drew lots.
The disaster turned on a single navigational decision. The Marquesas and Society Islands lay downwind, within reach. Pollard wished to run for them, but his officers, Owen Chase chief among them, feared the islanders were cannibals and argued instead for the far longer beat toward the coast of Chile and Peru, against wind and current. Pollard yielded. The choice condemned the men to a voyage of more than 2,500 nautical miles in open boats, and to the very starvation and cannibalism they had sailed to avoid. The islands they feared were, in fact, safe; traders had been calling at them without harm.
The Essex is remembered less for the whale than for what followed it: a clinical demonstration of how fear of the unknown can be deadlier than the unknown itself, and how command under starvation collapses into the drawing of lots. First mate Owen Chase published his Narrative in 1821; cabin boy Thomas Nickerson wrote his own account decades later. Together they reached a young Herman Melville, who built the ending of Moby-Dick upon a whale that turns on the ship that hunts it.
On 2 July 1816 the French Navy frigate Méduse, bound for Senegal under Viscount Hugues Duroy de Chaumareys, ran aground on the Bank of Arguin off the coast of present-day Mauritania, the result of incompetent navigation that had carried the ship some 160 kilometres off course. The frigate carried roughly 400 people; her six boats could take only about 250. When efforts to refloat the hull failed, the senior officers and officials took to the boats, and at least 146 men and one woman were crowded onto a hastily built raft about 20 metres long, intended to be towed ashore.
Within a few miles the tow lines were cast off — by accident or by choice the record disputes — and the raft was abandoned on the open sea, almost awash, with little food and a quantity of wine but scarcely any fresh water. Over the next thirteen days the people on it died by the score: drowned, killed in fighting on the first nights, starved, driven to suicide, and in the end eaten by the survivors. When the brig Argus sighted the raft on 17 July, fifteen men were still alive; several died soon after rescue. The boats had reached the Senegalese coast; almost everyone left on the raft had not.
The Méduse is remembered less as a shipwreck than as an indictment. The grounding was avoidable, the abandonment of the raft was a betrayal, and the appointment of a captain who had barely sailed in twenty years was a symptom of a navy handing command by royalist favour rather than competence. Two survivors, the surgeon Henri Savigny and the engineer Alexandre Corréard, published an account that became an international scandal, and the young painter Théodore Géricault built from it Le Radeau de la Méduse, fixing the disaster permanently in the public conscience.
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.