Poon Lim
Here’s another one the sea couldn’t have. Poon Lim, a Chinese-born sailor aboard a British Merchant Navy Vessel, which was torpedoed halfway to South America from South Africa in 1942.
He had enough time to grab a life-jacket and jump clear of the sinking ship. Although 11 of the 55-man crew were rescued, they somehow missed him, and he fought the water for two hours before happening upon a wooden life raft, well-stocked with water and survival rations.
Image: US Navy/Wikimedia Commons
The image up above is a reproduction from a U.S. Navy survival training manual. Lim was so awesome at surviving, his methods are taught by national navies.
The rations he had wouldn’t last forever, so he adapted everything he had on the raft to make it easier for him to replenish his dwindling supplies. The lid of a biscuit tin was carved into a makeshift knife, fish hooks were made from nails and the nylon from his life raft was used to catch rainwater. He even managed to snag seagulls for extra meat.
At one point, he noticed the bloodied bird remains he’d tossed overboard attracted sharks that scared the fish away. No matter. Lim snagged one with a braided fishing line, hauled it aboard, bludgeoned it with a water bottle full of seawater, and dried and cured the remains.
It was still a hell of an ordeal, with the occasional storm washing over him. At one point, his painstakingly built-up stock of dried fish was washed overboard by waves.
Boat after boat passed him by without noticing him. A U.S. Navy plane dropped a locator beacon near him, but a storm blew him off course away from it before rescue could arrive.
Three Brazilian sailors finally found him and took him ashore. Despite having lost around 9 kg of body mass, he walked ashore unaided, after 133 days at sea, the longest anyone has ever spent cast away in a life boat or life raft.
Image: US Navy/Wikimedia Commons
He died in 1991, at the good age of 72. After defying the sea for 133 days and living to tell of it, he certainly wasn’t going to go before his time.
Louis Zamperini
Some people would consider qualifying for the Olympic games as the highlight of their lives. Not Louis Zamperini.
After coming 8th in the 5,000 m race at the 1936 Olympics (you know, the one with Hitler), he joined the U.S. Air Force and found himself serving as a bombardier aboard B-24 Liberator bombers in the Pacific theatre of the Second World War.
Image: USAF/Wikimedia Commons
Mechanical problems forced his plane from the skies and into the ocean while on a search-and-rescue mission in 1942. Of its 11 crew, only Zamperini and two others survived, and faced the ocean aboard a life raft.
Like others on this list, they survived on rainwater, birds and fish. Unlike others on this list, they had to put up with the occasional strafing run by the occasional Japanese plane (incredibly, they were never hit).
One of the trio died after a month at sea. Zamperini and the other survivor made it to day 47, when they reached the Marshall Islands. Only instead of helpful residents, they found the Japanese army, which immediately took them prisoner.
Former Olympian Zamperini was kept alive, but went through various internment camps and was singled out for torture by Japanese army officer Mutsuhiro Watanabe.
After two years of this, he was released at the end of the war, and went on to become a social worker and speaker. As for his captors, it seems Zamperini, who became quite religious in the years following his ordeal, forgave his captors, and even met with some of his former prison guards.
His chief tormentor Watanabe, who was never prosecuted for his crimes, never met with him, and even turned down a meeting at the 1998 Olympic Games in Nagano. He died in 2003. Zamperini, meanwhile, is not only still going, he regularly gives motivational speeches and his story will soon make its way to the big screen.
Captain Bligh
This one isn't famous so much as infamous, thanks to several VERY harsh portrayals of the man in the various film adaptations that have been made over the years of the famous Mutiny on the Bounty (watch below for all of Anthony Hopkins' best blow-ups as Bligh in the 1984 film "The Bounty"):
In reality, he probably wasn't much harsher than other captains at the time. The famous 1789 mutiny aboard the Bounty, on a science mission to the Pacific, was almost certainly motivated as much by the mutineers desire to remain in warm and sunny Tahiti with the local wives.
And regardless of what kind of taskmaster he was, he soon proved himself one of the best sailors of all time after the mutineers finally took over.
They crammed him and 18 loyalists into an open 7 m launch, gave him a sextant, some supplies and some cutlasses, and sent him on his merry way. We have no way of knowing whether the mutineers actually expected him to survive.
Image: National Maritime Museum/Wikimedia Commons
As it happens, the story of Bligh's voyage is way more interesting than the mutineers', in our opinion. With such meagre equipment, the captain somehow managed to get most of his men to safety in the town of Kupang, in what is now the western part of Timor in Indonesia.
It took him 47 days, during which he travelled 6,700 km. Casualty rate? Exactly one man, who was bludgeoned to death by residents of one of the islands the group stopped on for supplies.
Bligh had a pretty tempestuous career all told (he must have had some serious deja vu when he was deposed as governor of the Australian colony of New South Wales in 1808).
But whatever kind of person he was, it can certainly be said that there's no way he'd let a little thing like a mutiny AND being cast adrift thousands of miles from rescue get him down.
