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.
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 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.