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.
The yacht Mignonette, a small cruising boat being delivered from England to a buyer in Australia, foundered in a gale in the South Atlantic on 5 July 1884, roughly 1,600 nautical miles northwest of the Cape of Good Hope. Her four-man crew — captain Tom Dudley, mate Edwin Stephens, the sailor Edmund Brooks, and the seventeen-year-old cabin boy Richard Parker — escaped into a thirteen-foot lifeboat with almost no provisions: two tins of turnips and no fresh water. They caught a turtle a few days later, but by the third week they were starving and drinking their own urine, and Parker, who had also drunk seawater, lay dying in the bottom of the boat.
On 25 July, after about twenty days adrift and with no sail in sight, Dudley, with the assent of Stephens, cut the boy’s throat with a penknife. The three men drank his blood and ate his body to survive. Brooks took no part in the killing but shared the food. Four days later, on 29 July, the German barque Montezuma sighted the boat and rescued the three living men. They made no secret of what they had done, believing it sanctioned by the seafarers’ grim “custom of the sea” — that starving castaways might draw lots and sacrifice one to save the rest.
The law disagreed. Dudley and Stephens were tried at Exeter and, in the judgment of R v Dudley and Stephens (1884), convicted of murder, the court ruling that necessity is no defence to the deliberate killing of an innocent person. Sentenced to death, they were reprieved by the Crown to six months’ imprisonment. The case did not turn on whether the men were monstrous — the court accepted their suffering — but on whether desperation can license one person to kill another. It remains a cornerstone of the common law on murder and necessity.
The Andrea Gail, a 72-foot commercial swordfishing boat out of Gloucester, Massachusetts, was lost with her entire crew of six on or about 28 October 1991, somewhere east of Sable Island in the North Atlantic, in the storm later popularized as “the Perfect Storm.” No bodies were recovered and the vessel was never found. Her captain was Frank W. “Billy” Tyne Jr., 37; with him died David Sullivan, 29, and Robert “Bobby” Shatford, 30, both of Gloucester, Dale Murphy and Michael Moran of Bradenton Beach, Florida, and Alfred Pierre of New York City.
The boat sailed from Gloucester on 20 September 1991 for the swordfishing grounds of the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, ranging out toward the Flemish Cap, roughly a thousand miles from home. By late October, with a full hold and failing ice, Tyne turned for port directly into the path of a meteorological convergence of rare violence: an extratropical low east of Nova Scotia that, blocked from its usual northeastward track, retrograded back toward the coast and absorbed the dying Hurricane Grace. Buoys in the region recorded seas of sixty feet and more, with one reading of 100.7 feet on the Scotian Shelf, the highest ever measured there. The Andrea Gail was steaming through the worst of it when she went silent.
The boat is remembered through Sebastian Junger’s 1997 book The Perfect Storm and the 2000 film drawn from it, which fixed her name and her crew in popular memory. But the documented core is stark and finite: a sound, well-found vessel and six experienced men, caught in open water with no margin of sea-room, sent down by a storm so anomalous that forecasters estimated its like at once in fifty to a hundred years. What exactly broke the Andrea Gail — a rogue wave, a knockdown she could not recover from, a swamping — cannot be known, because nothing came back but a scatter of debris.
The Mary Celeste, an American brigantine of about 282 tons, was found adrift and deserted in the North Atlantic on 4 December 1872, roughly 400 nautical miles east of the Azores, by the Canadian brigantine Dei Gratia. She was seaworthy and still under partial sail, her cargo of 1,701 barrels of denatured alcohol nearly intact, six months of provisions aboard, and the personal effects of those who had sailed in her undisturbed. Her single lifeboat was gone, along with the ship’s chronometer, sextant and papers. No one aboard was ever seen again. Captain Benjamin Spooner Briggs, his wife Sarah, their two-year-old daughter Sophia, and the seven crewmen had vanished — ten people in all — and the reason has never been established.
The ship had cleared New York on 7 November 1872, bound for Genoa. Her last log entry was dated 25 November, placing her near Santa Maria in the Azores. The boarding party from the Dei Gratia found about three and a half feet of water in the hold, a sounding rod left on deck, and a single pump disassembled. The disorder was consistent not with violence but with a hurried, deliberate abandonment: the people had left the ship by their own hand, into a small boat, and the sea had taken them. The vessel they fled then floated on without them for nine or ten days until another ship found her.
What makes the Mary Celeste notorious is less the event than the fiction grown over it. There was no warm meal left on the table, no fire still burning in the galley, no sign of struggle, no abandoned breakfast — those are inventions, most influentially Arthur Conan Doyle’s 1884 short story, which even renamed the ship “Marie Celeste.” Stripped of embellishment, the documented case points to a frightened, rational evacuation that went fatally wrong: a captain who believed his ship was sinking or about to explode, ordered everyone into a boat that could not survive the open Atlantic, and lost them all.
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.