Countless tales have been crafted about amazing stories of sea survival and people trapped on desolate, remote, inhospitable islands. However, much of the lore is either rooted in or pales in comparison to some real tales of men who have survived at sea. Needless to say, this is a topic, real or fictional, that has fascinated mankind for eons. To that end, we are here to inform you about 10 amazing sea survival stories that are not only incredible due to their circumstances but also in that they are all real-life accounts.
TOP 10 Amazing Sea Survival Stories
1. Pedro De Serrano
Considered the original sea survival tale, the story of Pedro De Serrano is one full of impressive mysteries. The Spaniard’s ship sank for reasons that were never uncovered, but he alone survived, washing up on a Caribbean island with only a shirt on his back and a knife in his teeth.
The island he ended up on was not much to speak of, hosting virtually no shade cover, devoid of any vegetation, and being, in essence, just a large sand strip. On top of that, this predated Christopher Columbus accidentally landing on the shores of the new world, so there was not much hope for flagging down ships coming over the horizon. Serrano knew his hopes were slim.
So how did he survive? He had the local turtle population to thank for that. He killed the reptiles, ate their meat, then collected water from their shells. However, turtle shells don’t make great clothing material, so when his clothes fell apart, there was not much he could do to replace them. With the beaming Carribian sun, he found his only relief from the heated dipping in the ocean.
Three years into his survival, Serrano had a glimmer of hope in spotting a ship. Unfortunately for him, it wrecked, dashing any hopes of this being his ticket to survival. Much like Serrano’s shipwreck, this one produced one survivor as well. When he washed up on the island, his meeting with Serrano was one characterized by terror. After all, Serrano now resembled a beast more than he did a man. But over time, the two were able to cohabitate on the deserted island and keep each other sane by preserving a strict daily routine.
But residing on a shadeless strip of sand with only turtle meat for survival isn’t exactly an ideal situation for sanity preservation. They spent four years on the island together, though their relationship took a big hit at some point and they begrudgingly agreed to split the island in half. Ultimately, a ship did come by and rescued the two men. They did however have to sufficiently prove to their rescuers that they were not devils.
2. Jeronimus Cornelisz
In 1629, the Batavia ran aground, and unlike most shipwrecks that yield a small number of survivors, this one stranded hundreds on an island on Australia’s west coast. The wreck, however, would be only the first of the issues for the crew of the spice runners. One of the reasons for the wreck, it seems, was an on-board mutiny led by Jeronimus Cornelisz, one of the officer’s on the ship, against the Dutch East India Trading Company.
The mutiny angle was a concern for him since he suspected that he would be arrested for the mutiny attempt when the rescue arrived. When the ship’s captain took a dingy with 40 selected members of the crew and headed for the Java island, he promised he would have rescuers come back for the remaining 300 men. Jeronimus Cornelisz became the ranking officer at that time, leaving him to deal with the issue of rationing supplies and figuring out a plan to avoid arrest.
His approach was swift and harsh. He started by hoarding the salvaged provisions from the wreckage, leaving loyalist crew members to guard the supplies, day and night. He then organized smaller “search parties” and brought them to “explore” neighboring islands. Of course, he couldn’t care less about the exploration since he had no intention of coming back for those members of the crew. He did this to mitigate opposition on the island, especially when rescue showed up.
After all, they might get in the way of his plan to hijack the rescue vessel and get away from the scene. Those who were not loyalists that remained on the island had other problems. Jeronimus Cornelisz and his cronies would find minor offenses to execute these crew members for on the regular.
Jeronimus Cornelisz then saw a signal hailed by one of his “forever search parties” that indicated that they found water and food on their island. Their leader, a soldier named Weibee Hayes, it turns out, caught on to Jeronimus Cornelisz’s plan.
Anxious for getting their hands on the found supplies and nourishment, Cornelisz and some mend traveled to the island where Hayes’s men attacked the mutineers, capturing Jeronimus Cornelisz in the process, and throwing him into a pit dug on the island. Those mutineers who survived began an assault of canon fire on Hayes’s crew. This conflict happened just in time for the rescue to show up. Over Cornelisz’s terror-driven reign, nearly 100 crew members died.
3. Robert Drury
Traveling on The Degrave, the crew including the English sailor Robert Drury was forced to abandon the damaged ship on the coast of Madagascar. When they made it to shore, their welcome was equivalent to a Pirates of the Caribean scene where Jack Sparrow is chased off by angry island natives. Unlike the fictional pirates, however, they had no ship to which to escape.
The crew’s first 4 days in Madagascar essentially consisted of attempting to dodge the 2,000 Tandroy warriors. However, they didn’t keep up the running for long. The crew was soon caught, and almost entirely executed save Drury and three other crew members.
They were enslaved instead. The next 8 years saw Drury become a royal manservant, though during that time he earned some measure of Tandroy respect, and even fought alongside them. His perceived loyalty got him a degree of freedom. This included him being permitted to marry one of the Troy women and raise cattle on his own.
15 years into his servitude, Drury finally managed to escape on an English slave ship. He hoped to take his wife with him, but she feared a well-known Tandroy myth that told of the unnatural death of any slave who escaped. He made it back to England alone, but to a world that moved on for him, and he would ironically return to Africa later in life himself, except this time, as a slaver.
4. Phillip Ashton
Working on a fishing boat off of Nova Scotia, it was just another day in 1723 on the job for 19-year-old Phillip Ashton. That is until he and his fellow sailors were boarded and overtaken by a pirate crew led by their captain Ned Low. Instead of executing them and taking their possessions, Low gave the young men a choice: death or join the pirate crew. Phillip Ashton preferred life, so he chose the pirate’s life.
But Ashton was not suited for the pirating lifestyle and the barbaric cruelty that came along with it. He also figured that Low would eventually go down, and there was a good chance that his crew would be going down with him. Needless to say, Ashton was always looking for a way out of this life, and eight months into his unwilling career as a pirate, he finally got his chance.
When Low anchored just off the coast of an island near Honduras, he sent a score of men to bring back fresh water, with Ashton being part of the pack. He tried to slip away casually, wandering off while the others were retrieving fresh water from a stream. He wasn’t stealthy enough though, so they asked him where he was going. Realizing he was spotted, Ashton yelled “Coconuts!!” and bolted into the jungle. The men from the crew as well as additional men sent by Low searched for him for a week, but after they failed to find him, they gave up and marooned him.
Luckily for Ashton, the island had plenty of fruit and the tortoise population left many eggs for him to poach. Ashton was barefoot and empty-handed when he made his escape, so he needed every provision he could get his hands on. Ashton would spend nine months on the small island in complete isolation (longer than his stint with Low’s crew).
At that point, a Spanish trader canoed to the island and encountered Ashton. While he could not take him along, he left Ashton a flint and a hunting knife, which allowed him to hunt and cook his food, while assuring him that he would have a search party come for him as soon as he could get the word about his presence. This was fortunate since it would be another 7 months until another ship would finally rescue Ashton from isolation.
5. The Crew Of The Peggy
After trading in the Azores, the American sloop The Peggy was on its way back to New York in 1765, but its trip back was met with treacherous weather, as subsequent November storms slowed its progress by causing damage to the rigging, the mast, and the ship’s sails. With a seriously leaky hull, The Peggy was adrift for most of a month, which meant that the provisions not washed away by the storm, were quickly consumed by the crew who was working hard to keep the ship afloat.
When the provisions ran out, the crew killed and at the ship’s cat, but they were nowhere near their destination, which put them in a perilous position. They had all but exhausted their hopes that another ship would pass nearby and spot them.
The crew began talking about cannibalism, which their captain, David Harrison, shut down quickly. The crew scaled back, resorting to eating candles and all of the leather on the ship. Harrison would fall ill and was confined to his bed. Without their captain to tame their primal natures, the crew would resort to cannibalism. While there was a “lottery” put in place for who would get eaten, the crew had planned to do so with the captain’s black manservant.
The captain would have no part of it, surviving strictly on a mixture of rum and water. By January, the manservant’s body was completely consumed, so a second lottery for the next person to be “sacrificed” had commenced. The unlucky “winner” was David Flatt. At the pleading of Harrison, the crew granted Flatt a night’s reprieve to pray. The crew agreed, and luckily so, as they awoke the next morning to spot their salvation in the form of a ship, The Susan, bound for London. The captain of this ship not only provided the crew, who was preparing to consume Flatt, with food and tackle, but the ship also escorted The Peggy to London.
6. Robert Jeffrey
As a young sailor of just 18 years of age, Robert Jeffrey, a member of the British Royal Navy on the HMS recruit in 1807, committed an offense against his captain, who clearly enjoyed his alcohol, by sneaking an extra helping of beer. The captain was not going to take this without punishment, so he opted to maroon Jeffrey on the first island that the crew encountered. The crew pleaded with their captain to reconsider such a drastic punishment, but he would not be moved. He left Jeffrey on a rocky outcropping without any provisions. Jeffrey was only lucky in that he managed to survive 9 days when he was rescued by an American ship.
However, this was only the beginning of Jeffrey’s trials. The Captain who marooned Jeffrey was court marshaled for his actions. It was not until 1810 that it was discovered that Jeffrey was alive and working as a blacksmith in Massachusetts. As his mother was still alive, the British citizenry demanded that the two be reunited and a Royal Navy vessel was dispatched to bring him home.
When Jeffrey arrived back home, he was greeted by cheering crowds and church bells. He reunited with his mother in the public square, in front of many spectators. Once Jeffrey was confirmed alive, another public outcry demanded that the captain who marooned him pay reparations for having nearly killed the young man.
7. Charles Barnard
In 1812, captain Charles Barnard, who was leading a sealing expedition at the time, spotted smoke. When he turned to investigate, he found a crew of 45 British sailors marooned from a shipwreck. Barnard offered to drop the sailors at any South American port, though he was weary of hostilities due to the war of 1812 raging in the United States at the time.
While the Brits promised they would not hijack the ship (a condition of their rescue), when the ship ported at a small island, Barnard, one of his crewmen, plus three of the saved Brits took a small boat to shore to hunt pigs. Barnard’s concerns would then be realized as the rest of the remaining survivors of the shipwreck ended up leaving him, as well as their three brethren on the island, sailing away in Barnard’s ship.
The five men had a small boat that allowed them to travel to nearby islands in search of food and water when necessary, surviving together for 18 months in such a manner. They were finally rescued by a British ship in 1814. Barnard, his shipmate, and the three Brits all classified themselves as “Americans” and asked to be dropped off near a Peruvian port. When the British ship obliged, they were taken into custody as Englishmen by the Spaniards that controlled the area.
After finally clearing his name and being released, Barnard found another British ship for transport. He would ask them to go off on another sealing expedition during their travels in his small boat and was permitted to do so. While he did not encounter any seals, he did get picked up by an American ship which gave him passage on their trip to China and the Sandwich Islands. He would eventually find his way back to his home in the United States in 1816.
8. The Crew Of The Essex
The Titanic was the most infamous ship in the 20th century, but in the 19th century, that distinction belonged to The Essex, a ship that served as an inspiration for Herman Melville’s signature novel Moby Dick. After the 1819 departure from Nantucket for a projected 2.5-year whaling excursion, it only took 2 days for the ship to be hit by a massive storm that damaged it, risking its ability to proceed. Luckily, the crew was able to refit and repair it enough to keep on going.
Thousands of miles and several months later, The Essex was rammed by a gigantic whale. The shocked crew began to assess the damage to the ship when the whale rammed it again. This time, the damage was too significant to repair, so the men grabbed the provisions they could, lowered their smaller boats, and abandoned The Essex.
The 20-man crew was near the Marques Islands, known for their cannibalistic native inhabitants, so they chose to head south instead. That decision turned out to be a risky one as the three boats they were spread across began to leak and the food quickly ran out. Ironically, the first man to perish was cannibalized by the crew. Three more sailors would follow suit, with the living cooking and consuming their remains. Then, one of the small boats disappeared, a vanishing that to this day has no explanation, while the other two, one headed by First Mate Owen Chase and the other by Captain Pollard, became separated.
The three remaining men on Chase’s boat would finally be rescued by an English ship after nearly 3 months adrift. Pollard’s boat had to draw straws for who would be consumed next. The fate befell Pollard’s younger cousin. Pollard asked the crew to allow him to take his place but was refused.
Just one week after the rescue of the crew on Chase’s boat, an American ship picked up Pollard and another crew member for rescue, finding them crazed with hunger and gnawing on the bones of their former crewmates. Melville, who would late author the book that told the tale of The Essex, actually met Pollard at one point, but out of respect to the captain’s ordeal, did not question any of the man’s experiences.
9. The Essex’s Other Survivors
While the three boats that took off for rescue met a generally unfortunate fate, the rest of the crew of The Essex stayed behind on an island that is now known as Henderson Island after the survivors landed there. While they had initially hoped for salvation, they found the island to be a barren wasteland. Three crew members chose to stay on the island in order to help those on the boats have a bit more food. The island, however, had no food or sources of fresh water to speak of.
All in all, their choice might have been for the best. While the food was very hard to come by, the rainwater did pool in the island’s rock pools, allowing the men to at least have something to drink. They had no fishing equipment, rendering them unable to fish, and while they found a population of crabs on the island, they were quickly consumed. The crew caught some birds, ate them, and drank their blood. The situation seemed even direr when they found skeletal remains of previous castaways on the island.
Had it not been for Owen Chase beckoning for a search of the Pitcairn Islands after their 89-day-long trek at sea, the three men, who were rescued 111 days after their voluntary marooning would have certainly died of thirst.
10. Bernard Carnot
The French used several remote islands for their penal colonies. While not much is known about Bernard Carnot, what is known as the son of New Orlean’s innkeeper was convicted of a murder he was innocent of in 1922, and was sent to one of such islands, name The Devil’s Island off of French Guiana’s coast. As its namesake implies, this island is the earth’s equivalent of a literal hell. If the prisoner-on-prisoner violence didn’t mark the end of someone there, the rocky jungle isle full of perilous vegetation and diseased-carrying mosquitos most certainly would.
Even if one found or constructed a boat or raft, escape was improbable. The currents around the island smashed nearly everything into the surrounding rocks, and if one was to survive that, they would be plunged into shark-infested waters.
Carnot would have been but a footnote in the forgotten realms of history, if it wasn’t for William Willis, and the American Don Quoitte type, who met his mother and heard of the man’s tale sixteen years after Carnot’s banishment to the hellish island. Willis was so moved by her story that he traveled to South America where he enlisted the services of former convicts and current prisoners to help him find Carnot on the island and help him escape.
They would ultimately find Carnot, barely clinging to life, dressed in rags, and delirious. Willis provided the man with clothing, money, and a fake passport and then smuggled him onto a Brazil-bound supply ship. While he made it out alive, Carnot would join the French forces led by Charles de Gaulle during World War II, and it is suspected that he was killed in action.
Conclusion:
the top 10 amazing sea survival stories showcase the human spirit’s resilience and determination in the face of adversity. These tales of bravery, quick thinking, and resourcefulness serve as a testament to the strength of the human will to survive. They remind us of the importance of preparation and the power of the human mind and body to overcome seemingly insurmountable odds.
These stories are a source of inspiration and give hope to those who find themselves in similar situations. They remind us that even in the most dire of circumstances, there is always a chance for survival.
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Frequently asked questions:
How to survive on land and sea Houston?
To survive both on land and sea in Houston, it is important to:
1. Prepare for natural disasters such as hurricanes and floods, which are common in the area. Have an emergency kit ready and know evacuation routes.
2. Familiarize yourself with the local environment, including dangerous wildlife and poisonous plants.
3. Stay hydrated and bring sufficient supplies of food and water, especially when venturing into remote areas.
How long can you survive drinking sea water?
Drinking seawater is not a safe or sustainable way to hydrate yourself. In fact, it can lead to dehydration and other health problems. Consuming saltwater increases the amount of salt in your body, which makes you even thirstier and can lead to dehydration. The human body can only survive for a few days without fresh water, so it is important to find a safe and reliable source of drinking water.
Hello, and welcome to my blog! My name is Idammah, and I am the founder of this site dedicated to exploring the world's mysteries, uncovering fascinating facts, and delving into science's weird and beautiful aspects. I have always been fascinated by the unknown and the unexplained, and I love nothing more than digging deep to find the answers to some of life's greatest mysteries. Whether it's exploring the depths of the ocean, investigating ancient civilizations, or unraveling the mysteries of the universe, I am always on the hunt for new knowledge and insights. As a self-proclaimed weirdo and science enthusiast, I believe that there is always more to learn and discover, and I am constantly seeking out new and exciting ways to expand my understanding of the world around me. Through FoxPeek blog, I hope to share my love of all things strange and wonderful with like-minded readers and inspire others to embrace their inner curiosity and seek out the world's mysteries for themselves.
