Sole survivor / By Ruthanne Lum McCunn

Sole survivor / By Ruthanne Lum McCunn

“The record for the longest survival alone on a raft is held by Second Steward Poon Lim. Castaway for 133 days after his ship was torpedoed in the Atlantic on November 23, 1942, he did not touch land until April 3, 1943. More than a record-setting feat, Lim’s wartime survival was a miracle of courage and ingenuity. Chinese, signed on by the Merchant Navy, but debarred by his race and by the maritime custom of the day from learning even the rudiments of sea and survival lore, Lim was forced to battle not only the elements but the indifference of his fellow men. Naked, alone, calling on memories of his village home to hold his fragile world together, Lim came through the ordeal with body and spirit intact. Here is his story.”

            Poon Lim lay in his bunk, one leg braced against a rib in the bulkhead. The SS Benlomond on the Atlantic supply run, was taking a precautionary zigzag course. At this stage in the war, U-boat wolf packs were reaping a heavy toll of Allied merchant shipping. Every 20 minutes she swung from starboard to port and back.

            The 22-year-old Chinese second steward glanced at his watch. It was 11.40 am; if he didn’t hurry he would be late serving tiffin. He had just finished dressing when the ship lurched, then heeled sharply. An explosion rocked through the tiers of steel decks, knocking him flat. He stared, stunned, as a pillar of water shot past the shattered porthole. Then a second explosion told him the Benlomond had been torpedoed.

            Grabbing his life-jacket, he stumbled out of his cabin, struggling to keep his footing. The ship listed too steeply for him to climb the ladder to his assigned boat station without both hands, so he took precious seconds to pull on his life-jackets while others rushed past him. By the time he reached the deck his assigned life-boat was gone and the Benlomond was settling ominously, the sea breaking over her deck amidships.

            Coughing, Lim leaned against the rail, hearing the hiss of steam and the screams of men trapped below him. Suddenly the ship listed sharply. Lim caught a glimpse of a seaman and the second and third mates struggling to launch the life-boat at the bridge station. He scrambled over to them as a noise like thunder ripped through Benlomond’s bowels. “ Over the side!” yelled the second mate.

            Before Lim could respond, the stern plummeted. Benlomond plunged, and tones of green sea dragged him down. He sucked in great gulps of water and oil, then was propelled upwards as brutally as he had been swallowed. Grabbing a broken plank, he cleared his eyes of the sticky ooze that blinded them and slowly worked the lids open.

            All that was left of the Benlomond was some large bubbles in a pool of fuel oil, pieces of debris and the broken litter of 55 men. Lim began to kick furiously, pushing the plank in front of him until he saw two men pulling a third on to a raft about 100 metres away.

            “Help! Here!” Lim called.

            They gave no sign of seeing or hearing him. Lim pushed the wood aside and struck out in a clumsy flail of arms and legs, but every time he looked up the raft seemed further away. When part of a hatch cover floated by, he lunged for it. He was clinging to it when there was a mighty convulsion dead ahead, and a submarine conning tower burst out of a swirl of scummy foam. A hatch rasped open and sailors spread across the grease-streaked hull to the guns fore and aft. The stern of the submarine churned to a halt a few metres from  the crazily rocking raft. Two sailors prodded the Benlomond crewmen up the tower and into the submarine.

            Minutes later Lim saw them herded back on to the raft. The submarine roared into life and turned in a great arc. There was the clang of watertight hatches, and it was gone.

            So was the raft. Had the submarine mowed it down, killing the men on board? Or were they alive and clinging to the wreckage?

            “Anyone there?” Lim called.

            The only answer was an eerie silence. He was alone in the Atlantic, some 1,200 kilometres off the Brazilian coast. It was November 23, 1942.

            Teetering on the crest of a wave, Lim saw the gleam of large metal drums. He sank into a trough, but struggled forward, forcing movement into leaden arms and legs. Waves smacked his face and stung his eyes. Gradually, the distant silhouette became clear. It was one of the Benlomond’s rafts—six watertight drums enclosed in a wooden frame about two metres by three.

            With agonizing slowness, Lim pushed towards it, battling cold, drowsiness—and a gentle voice that whispered the wind was blowing the raft closer and he could stop swimming and rest. His head drooped and he dozed, mouth and nostrils barely above the water. Then a sudden choppy wave jolted him awake, and he pushed wearily on.

The raft.

The sound of his own sobbing awoke him. It was pitch-dark. Vomit crusted his face and the slated decking beneath him. Vaguely he remembered fighting to reach the raft, gripping its lifeline, somehow climbing the two metres from water to deck.

            He snatched at bits of memory. Every day for two years he had passed this raft, lashed to a mast on the Benlomond. Gradually he visualized it: two narrow ledges of open-slat decking rising above the watertight drums that kept it afloat, a central well in between. From the boards surrounding him and the water licking his face, Lim knew he was in the well.

            He wanted to climb out, to take off his wet life-jacket, the clinging mess-jacket and singlet (his trousers had been sucked off in the Benlomond’s plunged). But he was terrified he might fall off the rocking raft. If only he could find something to secure him—a rope like the lanyard that had lashed the raft to Benlomond’s mast—he would not be carried away from the raft if he fell overboard.

            Shaking with cold and fear, he groped around the raft’s edge. On the second try he felt a knot. He pulled, and a rope slithered, dripping, across the ledge and into the well. He worked an end into a noose and tied it around his wrist.

            The straps and buckles of his life-jacket, wet and tightly fastened, were impossible to undo. Jerking the jacket over his head was like pulling off a layer of skin, but at last he wrestled free and climbed, panting, on to a ledge. Discarding his clammy clothing, he kicked it aside. Although free of the water sloshing in the well, he was now exposed to the bite of spray and wind. He tucked his hands under his armpits and curled into a tight ball. Shivering, the taste of vomit lingering in his mouth, he again fell asleep.

            He awoke to sunlight, burning thirst and a sense of danger. Unwinding stiffly, he gazed around him. Empty sapphire plains stretched out on every side. Though the morning sun was warm, Lim shuddered. He reached for his mess-jacket—but the narrow ledge where he had slept was bare. Panicked, stark naked, he half stood and examined the raft.

            The well was about a metre by a metre and a half. There was a compartment on either side, beneath the one-metre-wide ledges, and two metal containers fore and aft. The one in front of him had numbers and English letters stencilled on it. Lim strung the alien characters together one by one: “1-0 G-A-LL-O-N-S W-A-T-E-R.” He removed the heavy metal key secured to the container, and twisted the lid off.

            Clear water brimmed invitingly. But the grease and dirt on his hands would taint it: there had to be a ladle. He crawled to the opposite container and wrenched it open. Inside was a treasure trove of tins, packages and bottles—and a toy-like, long-handled measure.

            He went back to the water and gulped thirstily. Then he sorted through the other contents. Inside a large metal canister were six cylinders wrapped in waterproofed paper. He unwrapped one. The short tube with a wooden handle looked like a fancy cracker rocket. Lim sighed. After six years at sea, he had no idea how to set off a flare.

            He picked up a long torch and pushed the switch. The bulb glowed reassuringly. At last he would have a light if he had to spent another night on the raft! The next layer of tins and packages appeared to be food.. some were labeled with meaningless strings of letters. Others he recognized.

            He divided his haul into the known and unknown. In the “known” stack were a kilo of chocolate, five tins of evaporated milk, one bag of barley sugar, one bottle of lime juice. In the “unknown” six boxes, ten tins and one jar of tablets. He sounded out the words printed on one of the flat, oval tins: “PEMMICAN, DRIED BEEF, FLOUR, MOLASES, SUET.” All except the first item were familiar from the Benlomond. He dipped a finger into the paste and licked. It was somewhat salty and not unpleasant.

            He opened the jar of tablets. He recognized the word MILK in the label MALTED MILK, and the tablet he chewed reminded him of the Horlicks powder he used for making the officers’ hot drinks. Next he looked inside one of the boxes and saw  dark brown biscuits. Something substantial at last! But his teeth bit into an ungiving mass. The word HARD in the label HARDTACK leapt out at him. What if he soaked the biscuits in the sea, the way the officer with false teeth soaked his biscuits in tea?

            By now the afternoon sun was burning down, and Lim’s skin prickled as if he were being eaten by ants. He had to find something he could use for a shelter—quickly. Unlatching one of the side compartments, he found a pair of oars and a large roll of blindingly white canvas. He pulled it out. It was a strip nine metres long and about half a metre wide, with six grummets, each threaded with a rope tie, on both of the narrow ends.

            Puzzled, he unlatched the second compartments. It contained four poles and a large square of canvas, with a hole in each corner and rope ties attached. One end of each pole had a hole just large enough to thread a rope tie through. With the canvas strip, he had the makings of a shelter!

            Clutching the deck slats with one hand, Lim laboriously wound the canvas strip around the raft and tied the two ends together. Half a metre of canvas now rose in a bulwark above the raft’s sides. One by one he set up the heavy poles in pre-constructed holes he had discovered in the corners. Then he fitted the canvas square over them. By nightfall he had a shelter that shaded him, yet allowed passage of air and freedom of movement.

            Full of pride, he decided to celebrate. Chocolate melted thickly on his tongue.  Savoury pemmican followed. Then lime juice, pleasantly tart, making the barley sugar that followed all the sweeter. The afternoon breeze caressed him. The harsh glare eased. Newly confident, Lim stood on a ledge and awaited rescue.

“Don’t count on much!”

Night clouded his optimism. Unable to stop shivering in the damp air, he hugged his arms around his chest and thought of home.

            It was six years since he had first shipped to sea as a “learn boy” on European-officered vessels. Yet he knew no more about ships and the sea now than he did then. Not because he had not wanted to learn. He had. Taking refreshments to the officers on the bridge, he had been fascinated by the instruments. He had wanted to learn how to trace currents, chart a course—all the skills needed to match wits with the ocean. But Chinese worked as stewards, cooks, donkey men, firemen, painters. Not as mates.

            Lim had been the last of eight brothers and sisters to leave the family home on his native Hainan, the island hanging like a pendant from the mainland China Sea. The village school teacher, an embittered main leader who felt that Hainan was a back water, spent most days reciting to his students from the writings of officials exiled to Hainan long before. When Lim left school at 15, he could read, write a letter, keep simple accounts, recite the letters of the English alphabet and one or two common words or phrases, nothing more.

            He had learnt nothing about farming—and there was no other work in the village. But he was totally unprepared when his father announced, “Cousin Yee Tai is returning to his ship in Hong Kong tomorrow. You, Lim, will go with him.”

            Next day, after his mother’s tearful farewell, Lim and his cousin set off on the half-day’s walk to the ferry terminal and the steamer trip to Hong Kong. As his cousin dragged him up the gateway to the SS Tanda, Lim wondered if the ship’s officers would be kind or fierce, the work easy or hard.

            His brother—already on board in the starched uniform of a bar steward—left no room for doubt: “The European officers give orders to the Chinese crew through a head man they call Number One, so it doesn’t matter that you can’t speak English. You must be up at five to polish and sweep and prepare the saloons, then bring up supplies from the hold. All day you must be ready to work wherever you are needed, washing, scrubbing, fetching, carrying, stripping beds and making them up. The Chinese crew eats the passengers’ leftovers. Dinner is the only meal that isn’t leftovers, and that is eaten at ten—but don’t count on getting much! What you can count on is a salary of five Hong Kong dollars a month.”

            Exhausted, nerves strained taut by a night of broken sleep, Lim waited impatiently for the dawn. Near the eastern horizon, the sky turned a pearly grey, but to the north-west, clouds hung low and threatening. Suddenly the raft rocked. Sharp little puffs of hot air were scurrying across the smooth surface aft, churning the isolated burst of foam that signaled a squall.

            Tying the lanyard round his wrist, Lim lay flat on the ledge, ready to cling to the decking when the squall broke. Soon water was rushing through the slats into the well and the raft tossed up and down. Dark green swells, slate-grey in the troughs, rolled in from a heaving horizon. Lightning ripped through purple-black clouds, letting loose torrents of rain. There was a drum roll of thunder, and suddenly the squall was racing towards him with the fury of charging cavalry.

            Waves slammed the sides of the raft spray and wind-whipped rain stung. The lanyard chafed Lim’s wrist; splinters dug into his palms. Although his muscles cramped, he dared not move. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, it was over.  

            The night wind cut quick and deep. Shivering, dreaming of tobacco, of a hot bath, of warm food, Lim was suddenly sure he saw the dark bulk of an oncoming steamer. Quickly he turned on the torch to signal his presence. Something flew out of the water and flicked his hand. He screamed, dropped the torch—and saw a flying fish gasping for air in the slash of light across the deck. Feeling foolish, he tossed the slender, torpedo-like fish overboard.

            Next morning he tied three knots in the lanyard to make three days adrift. He had no appetite, but knew he must eat. He crushed a hardtack biscuit, then mixed the crumbs with water and a bit of pemmican for flavouring. But each lumpy mouthful stuck in his throat.

            Giving up the attempt to eat, he labored vainly to decipher the instructions for the flares. Then, making sure the signals were within easy reach at the top of the container, he settled back to scouring sea and sky. How could so many days have gone by without him sighting a single ship or plane? Was it possible that the Benlomond  had gone down too quickly to issue a distress signal? If so, no one would be aware that she had sunk until she became overdue.

            Lim sagged into the well, defeated.

Heartless scrutiny.

Seven days crawled by—each day Lim tied another knot in the lanyard. The sea rippled like a dragon flexing its muscles.

            Suddenly, to the south, a speck blotted the gold of approaching sunset. Lim’s pulse quickened. Scarcely daring to breathe, he tracked the smudge, his excitement growing as it sharpened into the lines of a destroyer. Too afraid of losing her to wait until she came closer, Lim leapt into the well to get the distress signals.

            Breathing a prayer to Kaun Yin, the Goddess of Mercy, he snatched a flare. Gripping it by the handle, he aimed towards the ship, and ripped off what he hoped was the firing tape.

            The tap came off with the tape. Nothing else happened. He glared at cap and flare. There was a scratch surface like the flinty sides of a matchbox on the top of the cap, and a small dark head on the tip of the flare. As if the flare were a huge match, he struck it repeatedly against the scratch surface. At length it sparked and he tossed it high. It soared in a wide arc and sank unlit.

            His darkest fears fulfilled, he tried once again to read the instructions, but the printed words ran together in a senseless muddle, and he decided to strike the next flare the same way. Jerking the tape free, he scraped the cap across the upper end of the tube. A blinding white flame hissed into a burst of reddish stars. Lim laughed, exultant. Surely the ship could not fail to see him now!

            But the ship was still ploughing ahead on the same course. She was close enough now for him to hear the beat of her engines—an extension of his own anguished heartbeat. He fired another flare; it worked. Heaving to, the ship steered towards him, throwing aside sheets of spray.

            They had seen him! He waved joyfully at the ship. Everything about her was beautiful: the low hull, the drab grey superstructure, the swaying lifeboats, event the guns fore and aft. Three men appeared on the bridge, a few at the rails and gun platforms. He caught the glint of binoculars, and set off his last flares.

            Suddenly he realized he was being scrutinized! He knew that enemy submarines had recently launched rafts with men pretending to be shipwrecked. When a rescue ship approached, she was torpedoed. Did the men examining him think he was a decoy? Lim waved frantically and yelled.

            The ship’s engines revved back to life, and Lim froze as she swung round and changed course. Swells rocked the raft and he clutched a corner pole. The ship was so close he heard a thud of a closing hatch, the swish of hose-pipes as the crew washed down the decks, a man’s cough. Then the sound of engines died. Soon she was gone—as if she had never been.

            All the bitterness and humiliation Lim had swallowed since leaving Hainan welled up, and he cursed the empty horizon: “ May fish be your coffin and water your grave!” There was no mistaking the rejection—the ship’s change of course, the binoculars’ glassy stare, the deliberate turning away.

            Lim saw that he had fooled himself about the Allies the way villagers back home had been fooled by the talk and gifts of Chinese returning from overseas. Their boasts had been so convincing that—even as an overworked, underpaid learn boy—he had found it hard to realize that it was men like his fellow stewards, with their empty grins, stooped heads and pidgin English, who swaggered so cockily once they got home. But gradually he had become aware of their anger over the long hours, poor pay, bad food and the refusal to allow Chinese any but the most menial jobs. He had realized that their frustrations mirrored his own and—in an act of rebellion—he had left the sea.

            But months later, with a world war on, his cousin had persuaded him to sign articles for the Benlomond; the wartime need for Chinese crews, he explained, had forced British companies to limit working hours and increase pay. On the Benlomond Lim had earned 16 times more than as a learn boy. The food was not bad; there was time to smoke, riffle through a newspaper, play cards, sleep. Satisfied, Lim had closed his ears to the complaints of Chinese seamen on other ships whose demands for equal treatment were still refused. He had ended up fooling himself—believing that all he had to do was catch the attention of an Allied ship to be rescued!

            How could he have been so gullible? The men examining him from the bridge could not possibly have believe he was a decoy. They had decided not to pick him up because he was “just a Chinaman.”

            Eventually he closed his eyes and slept.

A steelier resolve.

He awoke determined and refreshed. About to tie an eighth knot in the lanyard, he stopped. He would be less fretful without the tension of counting the days and scanning the seas. He must stop living from moment to moment and start planning.

            The level of the water tank was down about one-fifth. That meant he had drunk seven and a half litres in seven days. At that rate his water would last 28 more days. If he reduced his consumption by a quarter litre a day, it would last 40 days. Dividing his food supply by 40, he came up with a daily ration of one measure of evaporated milk, six hardtack biscuits, half a measure of pemmican, and two malted milk tablets—with the chocolate, sugar and lime juice in reserve for special treats.

            He was almost certain to lose additional weight, so he would need padding to cover the hard wooden ledge, as well as a blanket to keep off the night cold and spray. The canvas awning was too critical even to be considered, but what about the strip he had wound around the raft?

            It was dusk by the time he had taken down and folded the stiff, salt-encrusted canvas into six folds. Spreading it out like a shroud, he suddenly thought—on a ledge, he slid between the top folds and stretched out, arms at his sides. The bottom layers cushioned his bones, and the cover kept him warm. But the image of the canvas as a shroud kept him rigid and wakeful. Whenever he began the descent into sleep, he would jerk awake in an icy sweat.

            On his 11^th morning adrift, he rose wearier than when he had lain down the night before. The same was true of the days that followed. Exhaustion drained him, blurring his thoughts, muddying his vision. His moods swung from hope to despair. But gradually the nightmares receded, and his snatches of sleep grew longer.

            There were other battles. Often, during baking hot afternoons, he drank his water ration long before dusk. To compensate, he tried drinking more and eating less on hot days, drinking less than his ration and eating more on overcast days. Though not hungry for food, he craved variety. To relieve the torture as he chewed gritty, tasteless crumbs of biscuits, he imagined the fragrance of almond powder ground between smooth millstones. Or, dipping his fingers into the pemmican and licking off the fatty coating, he imagined himself slurping noodles one by one back home.

            Other adjustments helped. A tin of milk spoilt rapidly, so at first he drank it all as soon as he opened it. That left him weak and dehydrated from diarrhea. He started opening the tin at night, keeping it cool in a tin of sea-water by day. That way it spoilt less quickly and lasted him three days. By the second day each clotted mouthful had to be swallowed several times before it stayed down, and the sour milk fouled his mouth and gums. But there was no diarrhea.

            He washed after each rain; for a little while after, his mouth felt cleaner, his hair and skin less sticky. His weight loss seemed to stop. The parts of his body that were normally covered had tanned and his skin had toughened. His hair, grown long and thick, shaded his eyes.

           

“Balcony of endless days.”

“One of the exiles,” Lim’s embittered teacher had told the class, “built a verandah on to his house in Hainan. There he sat day after day, waiting for a messenger to come with an official dispatch ordering him home again to the mainland. The messenger never came, and after the exile died, people called his look-out post the balcony of endless days.”

            Waiting vainly for rescue, Lim began to think of the raft as his balcony of endless days. He had already seen the moon grow round once, and now—with his supplies shrinking fast—he was watching it wax again.

            His feet, genitals and ankles had swollen from long periods of confinement, much of it sitting in the water-sloshed well. Despite the canvas bedding, his open boils refused to heal. He had fallen overboard and lacerated himself badly on the barnacles crusting the raft’s sides. Worst of all, it seemed to Lim that he was watching it all happen to someone else. Vaguely he sensed he was treading a thin line between sanity and madness.

            He shook his head in anger. Here he was, with only a few biscuits, a sprinkling of pemmican, and about a litre of water between him and death, and he was pretending it was not happening! Yet after the Benlomond had sunk he had not simply floated passively: he had fought his way to the raft; he had kept watch, sent off signals, calculated rations, made bedding. Now he must find a way to provide himself with food and drink!

            He decided to tackle the water problem first. Hardly a day had passed without rain. But it was falling less frequently and in smaller quantities. What if he was entering a dry spell? He shrugged. The raft’s 38-litre tank was enough to carry him through a dry spell lasting two moons. All he had to do was work out how to fill it.

            Brain sluggish, teeth coated, tongue furred, Lim squinted speculatively at the canvas awning. By nightfall he had refastened two of the corner ties away from the base of their poles, then looped up the lower corners of the awning to form a shallow depression where rain-water could collect. The steep pitch of the canvas cut his tiny living space by half, but would allow rain to wash it clean of salt. And the catchment area at the bottom was low enough to make bailing into the water tank easy.

            Next he turned to the problem of food. If he picked the lanyard apart he could make a fishing-line out of its strands. But what would he do for a hook? He thought back to the night when the torch had attracted flying fish. Maybe that was the solution! Hopefully, he pushed the switch. The bulb glowed only feebly. Were the batteries running down? He unscrewed the handle. When he slid the batteries out, the spring that held them in place leapt out as well. Lim picked it up and gazed thoughtfully at the wire coil cupped in his palm. He smiled. A few twists, some fine honing of the point, and the spring would make a perfect hook.

            It took almost a full day to unravel and re-braid the lanyard. He plaited several strands of hemp for the line—the same length as the lanyard but a fraction of its thickness. With others he made a “handle” for the pemmican-tin lid he had been using as a knife. Its edges were sharp and it was awkward to hold: a generous wrapping of hemp gave it a safe, solid grip. He also braided ties to fasten knife and tackle to a corner pole.

            The moon had risen long before. Too excited to sleep, he twisted the torch spring into a hook and filed one end to needle sharpness against the water-tank key. Then he forced himself to eat. Painfully swallowing thick hardtack paste, he fell asleep dreaming of pearly slivers of fish sliding down his throat.

Victory!

Cold, wet pin-pricks punctured his dreams. He leapt up. Rain water was splashing over the rim of his catchment trough. He scooped some into cupped hands, gulped greedily—and spat. It was as salty as sea-water.

            He could not afford to wait for the rain to clean the canvass. This was the first rain for two days; he had barely enough water left to get him through one more stifling afternoon. Clinging to a corner pole, he leaned over the lower edge of the awning and frantically scrubbed the canvas with his right fist. Rain pelted him and lightning crackled as he crawled back into the well and pushed up the canvas to spill out the salt-tainted water.

            Finally he found a bailing tin and tasted the freshly collected rain. Still salty. He emptied the awning twice more before realizing that he was hoping for an impossible freshness. Frantically, he began scooping water from the trough and pouring it into the tank. By the time the rain had stopped and the dawn sun was drawing steam from the canvas, he had filled about a fifth of the tank. Next time it rained there would be a smaller salt build-up in the canvas.

            The next problem was catching fish. Uncertain what to use for bait, he wadded some pemmican into a ball. The way he had seen his father roll dough. But the ball disintegrated at once, little fish gulping down the floating specks. When he tried to force the hook into a piece of biscuit, it bent. And, soaked in sea-water, the biscuit did not hold up on the hook any better than pemmican. Perplexed, Lim flexed his stiff fingers, frowning at the cuts made by the barnacles that clung thickly to the raft’s sides. Suddenly he laughed. Barnacles. Bait! He was sitting on top of bait! Prising a barnacle loose from just below the water-line, he smashed its shell, pierced the lump of flesh with the hook, and dropped the line over the side.

            The succulent morsel was too sweet to ignore. He felt a downward pull and saw a small, brownish fish nibble away all the bait. Disgusted, Lim re-baited and recast. There was a tug. Wit an exultant yank he pulled in the line, grabbed the fish by its spiny tail and slammed it senseless against the deck. He worked loose the hook, lashed his tackle to the corner pole, and examined his catch.

            Almost half its length was taken up by its head. It was quite flat so there would be little meat. He began to gut and clean it. He cut a small wedge of flesh and cautiously sniffed the pinkish lump. His nose wrinkled at the odour of ammonia, but he closed his eyes and bit, forcing his teeth to grind back and forth over the rubbery mass.

            But he could not swallow. Throat. Contracting, he leaned over the side and spat, gargled furiously, then drank. The biscuits had almost made him choke at first, he reasoned, yet he had eaten them to keep alive. Deliberately, he went on gutting the fish. He had enough biscuits to see him through tomorrow. After that hunger would overcome all other considerations and he would eat the fish.

            He paused in mid-cut. Wouldn’t it be spoilt by then? If only he had salt he could preserve it. But he did have salt! A whole ocean of salt! He remembered his mother hanging rows of fish to dry from a bamboo pole. That was what he would do: string hemp between the corner poles and hang the fish he caught. As they dried, the salt that crystallized on the canvas and on his body would crystallized on them too!

            Fists high above his head, Lim shouted his victory to heaven.

For want of a nail…

Before the end of the afternoon, he had caught, cleaned and hung seven more little fish. By the next afternoon the fierce heat and the heavy concentration of salt in the air seemed to have completed the curing process. The dried fish were a fraction of their original weight and size, and their meat had darkened.

            Lim’s first nibble was cautious, but he was pleasantly surprised. The texture was chewy, the flavor mild.

            He welcomed the chores that now filled every daylight moment: pulling in his catch, scaling, gutting and cleaning it; busying himself with the drying lines; scrubbing the deck clean of scales and fish blood. But his hands were soon swollen and cracked from all the cleaning and cutting. The effort of catching and drying four or five dozen fish a day and of maintaining his tackle was exhausting. He was impatient when the rain fell, resentful of the extra burden that bailing water entailed. He had to be careful to keep the rain off his drying fish, too, since water quickly spoilt them. But if two or three days passed without a shower, he became anxious all over again.

            Yet another dawn. Less flesh, more angles and bruised bones. From the state of the moon—not quite full when he had begun and now a crescent—Lim knew he had been fishing for only 12 or 13 days. But getting started in the morning already took longer; by dusk sleep seemed more urgent than eating the fish he had toiled to catch and prepare.

            The fish entrails he was throwing overboard had started to attract sharks and other large predators. They were driving the smaller fish away, and Lim’s catch had begun to dwindle. Then one morning he felt a tug on the line, but no weight. He wound in the line, and gasped when he saw the hook: the slender twist of wire was pulled straight!

            Lim sagged to the deck, trembling as he realized how close he had come to losing the hook, his only link to food and life. But suddenly, through his fright, came the realization that his problem had not been the arrival of sharks and other big fish so much as the smallness of his hook. Why hadn’t he seen it before? He was using more energy than he could replace by catching such tiny fish? With a bigger hook—one that would support much bigger fish—a daily catch of two or three would take the place of his current need for 40 or 50.

            He tried to focus. Metal. The hook would have to be metal. The looked around the raft. What about the nails whose rusty heads studded the deck? That was it: he would make a hook out of a nail. Wincing as his lacerated fingers rubbed the rough deck, he ran a thumb over the rusted nail-heads.

            With the last rays of sunlight melting into the sea, he went to sleep.

            He awoke un-refreshed, and when he went to work on the nail-head, he saw that his hands were now a maze of cuts and welts. When he tried to wrench the partly uncovered nail clear of its wooden prison, his blood-flecked fingers slid up the shaft as if it were greased.

            The nail moved! Fighting thirst and crescendos of pain, Lim wrestled it on one side of  his jaw and then the other. Hour after hour, he persisted. And then, suddenly, the wood released its hold, the discharge so abrupt that his head jerked against the raft—and only his locked jaws prevented the nail from spinning overboard.

            Now came a period of unbearable waiting. He had wait for his hands to heal so he could fashion the nail into a hook. He had to wait for the sharks to move away so that he could reach down and cut the lifeline at water-level—his only remaining source of hemp for a new, stronger fishing-line.

            The stench on board was unbearable, for he had stopped throwing waste overboard for fear of attracting the sharks. But the lacerations on his fingers and palms slowly healed. And the sharks disappeared.

            When a day and a night had passed, he reached cautiously down and hacked away a length of lifeline. Stiff with salt and barnacles, it resisted unraveling. He persisted, his thoughts on his mother back home as she pushed long, thick needles in and out of the layers of paper and cotton wadding that made the soles for the family’s shoes. A thousand stitches to every sole. And a thousand twists of hemp for his fishing-line.

            At last it was done. But he still had to make the hook. He hammered a curve into the nail with the water-tank key, each blow reopening the sores on his hand. He pushed on, endlessly hammering and filing, rubbing the tip of the curved nail against the key.

            Six days had gone by since he had last fished. Without adequate food or rest, he was very weak. But he had a fine, strong, pointed hook.

Pale ghost.

His bait—a tiny fish he had caught with the old line—wriggled desperately on the new hook. What was it his grandmother said every time a landlord snapped up more of the farmers’ land? “Big fleas eat little fleas.” Lim hoped it was the same with fish.

            A grey shadow glided, swift and menacing, towards the hook. He felt a tug on the line, a violent arching that shocked him into recognition of his weakness. Playing the line one way and another, Lim prayed that the fish was not a shark, that it would tire before he did. The line cut deep into his palms, but his tension gave way to determination. When the fish surfaced, long and narrow, he yanked the line taut and lunged for it. His hand grabbed it just in front of its deeply forked tail, tumbling it on to the deck in a tangle of thrashing fish and tackle.

            Hugging it tight, he plunged his knife behind its eyes, then sawed off its head. Still convulsing, the fish close to half its length. Lim ripped his knife down the spinal ridge to split it in two, then gutted it and sliced it into long, thin strips. He threaded each strip with a loop of hemp, then tied it to the line between the poles. In all, there were 17 strips. Lim was exultant.

            His exhaustion and mental dullness rolled away like a fog; his movements became defter; his hands healed, developing calluses. And as the stacks of dried fish in the food tank piled higher, he felt an easing of his fears. He rose with the sun, spreading his bedding out to dry, washing and readying his tackle, then folding and storing the dried bedding. He delayed eating until he had made his catch for the day, hung it, and scrubbed the decks clean. Despite some spoilage from damp, his food tank soon held enough fish to carry him through a week. With rain almost every day, he managed to keep the water tank little over half full. He was proud of the scrubbed decks, the lines of drying fish, the ladle, knife and tackle hanging neatly—and of the self-sufficiency they proclaimed.

            The silhouette of a flying fish soared gracefully in brilliant moonlight. Sleepily, Lim wondered if it might not be a bird. Then a liquid call and the hard beating of wings broke his reverie. It was  a bird!

            He heard the cry again, hard and sharp. The bird was circling directly above, white, pigeon-sized, its pointed wings and long tail feathers almost translucent in the moonlight. It alighted on top of a pole and teetered as if undecided whether to stay or go. Then it winged away.

            Each night it became bolder. Sometimes it perched on the ledge near Lim’s feet. Once it jumped from his shoulder to his lap, as though daring him to catch it. Watching it, Lim remembered the thick, rich taste of egg. If he caught the bird, he might have eggs to break the monotony of his diet. It was worth a try.

            Lim moved his outstretched legs beneath him in a cross between a squat and a crouch, his left hand clutching rough hemp snares he had plaited together. Tension tightened his muscles. The bird hopped on to the ledge and pecked at a crumb of fish. Lim’s right hand slid forward—and grabbed.

            Wings flapping furiously, the bird pecked wildly at Lim’s fingers, the deck, itself. Lim twisted a plait around his thrashing captive. Trussed and helpless, the bird screeched its anger, its body thumping the deck a long time before it quieted.

            Lim untied the bird, first noosing a string around each leg and looping both around a corner pole. The bird shrieked, its wings beating frantically. When Lim placed water and dried fish within reach, it upset both. It took all night for the bird to wear out its strength. When Lim offered it fish at dawn it did not struggle. Nor did it eat. When he stretched out his hand, it backed away in terror.

            In the bright light of day, he saw that its feathers were tinged with pink, its bill was greenish-yellow, its facial skin blue-black, its feet dark grey. It continued to refuse food that day and the next. On the  afternoon of the third day, it drank water from the tin he held and accepted his caresses. But it continued to refuse fish. Its glossy feathers were dull, the black beads of its eyes lifeless.

            Sadly, Lim loosened the nooses round its legs, setting it free. It was too weak to fly away. But that night Lim heard pecking, the splash of water, the muffled sounds of preening. In the morning, it was resting on the water a few metres off. Just before nightfall it took off and became a pale ghost on the horizon, then a memory.

Portent of disaster.

A shooting star, a warning from heaven of calamity, fell that night. Lim pretended that he had not seen it. But next morning the sound of the ladle scraping the bottom of the water tank and the pungent odour of rotting fish told him otherwise.

            Obsessed with the bird, he had neglected his chores. There had been two rain squalls, but he had not bailed. Fishing only to tempt his captive, he had not bothered to dry what he had caught. And since he had not aired the stacks of fish in the food compartment, they had spoilt.

            He set his two lines. But his luck seemed to have flown with the bird. He did not catch as many fish as before. And there was almost no rain.

            Seething with self-reproach, he thought hard. Whenever his knife hit a backbone when he was cutting up a fish, fluid had leaked out. Now Lim split open each vertebrae and sucked out the spinal liquid. Although memories of his earlier attempt to eat raw fish made him hesitant, he gnawed a lump until it was dry, and then he swallowed the residue.

            In the days that followed, Lim found that eating raw fish made him less thirsty than eating it dried. To add variety as well as liquid to his diet, he ate the kidneys, liver and heart. One night, when a school of herring swam so thickly under the raft that he was able to scoop up handfuls, he ate them whole.

            But fishing remained poor and he could not rebuild his food reserves. Losing weight again, his fleshless limbs bruised by the hard deck, he tried to deny the void the white bird had left behind. Three moons had passed with no human voice or touch but his own, but he had been content before it came. Bitterly he regretted his shattered peace.

            In the morning his throat was so parched he could hardly swallow. The water tank was nearly empty, and he had promised himself he would wait till dusk before he drank. But would he make it? Then, squinting painfully at the sky, he saw wings glittering dark silver. He blinked impatiently. But the faint hum of engines and the vapour trail across the sky were clear.

            He jumped and shouted himself hoarse. What could he do to attract the pilot’s attention? He had lost the bright orange life-jacket. He had wasted all his flares. What if he made a flag? If he waved frantically enough, the movement might be noticed. He hacked a piece of canvas from his bedding, then stabbed holes down one side and tied it to an oar. The beat of engines had long since died away. But the plane might return. And this time he would be ready.

            That night he watched the yellow, lifeless half-moon rise. Where had the birds and plane come from? Was he on an air route? Near land? Could he still be drifting off South America?

            As dawn broke, his thoughts were interrupted by the distant sound of engines. Another plane had appeared. The sound grew louder, the plane larger, and Lim swung his flag frenziedly. But this plane, too, faded from sight.

            Lim dropped the flag and kicked it, angry at the plane, the pilot, himself. He reached for the water tank key, but did not take it down. There was no guarantee of either rain or rescue. Instead, he baited a line and cast. For a long time there was no reaction. Underwater turbulence seemed to be driving the fish beyond reach. Finally he hooked a large one. Sucking each moist vertebra, he could soon swallow easily again. But the sea now seemed darker—confused, almost lumpy. The strange sense of unrest worried him.

            He was anxiously scanning the horizon when he saw the planes. Six of them, and this time heading straight towards him! One of them began to circle, dipping lower, swamping the raft and Lim’s thin cries with noise, and dropped something that landed with a splash in the sea. A shiny, oily slick spread over the surface. The plane was waggling its wings. It had dropped a canister of dye to mark Lim’s position.

            As the planes vanished behind gold-rimmed clouds Lim laughed and waved. All day, his eyes raked the lumpy, grey-green ocean beyond the slick surrounding the raft. Towards dusk he saw smoke on the horizon. Curling his fingers into a fist, he rubbed his eyes and counted eight hazy spirals. A convoy! He was going to be rescued at last!

Devastation.

But the sea was pulsing sullenly. Dusk was becoming night. As the temperature dropped, a brooding sense of menace smothered the last shreds of hope that the convoy would spot him. Suddenly he understood the sea’s strange unrest. The stifling heat of the past few days, the cloying humidity that had rotted his fish, had been warnings of a storm.

            Clouds blotted out the moon. Wind-slapped canvas cracked like rifle shots. A blast pitched the raft, jolting Lim into action. He stowed his gear. The wind stiffened. The awning billowed and the raft scudded across swirling hills of dark water.

            Lim tumbled into the well just as a wave washed over the deck. Coughing and sputtering, he clung to the deck slats as the raft shot over the spine of a wave and hurtled into the trough. He hung on, choking, until the raft rode another swell and he could gulp air again.

            Lightning lit up the black sea. There was an awesome rumble of huge combers racing towards the raft, and the roar of even larger breakers coming from afar. Screaming winds ripped loose the flag and awning. Solid sheets of water swamped the well. His fingers too cold and numb to be prised loose from the slats, Lim hung on.

            When at last the wind subsided, waves still broke in every direction. The raft spun in corkscrews between spewing white-caps; Lim, his fingers finally torn loose, pitched helplessly from one side of the well to the other, choking, swallowing, spitting salt water and vomit. Gradually the waves flattened into heaving swells, and blackness swamped his thoughts.

            He awoke with a terrible pain in his groin and an even more terrible thirst. The awning lay crumpled in the well. String and rotten fish were strewn across the decks. The flag hung limply from the broken oar. His genitals were swollen to twice their normal size. His bruised, gashed skin was already prickling from the fierceness of the sun. if he did not restore the awning, he would burn. But first he had to drink.

            Crawling over the slime of old vomit and rotting fish, he labored to replace the awning and bail out the water tank. He took long breaks, but there was no restoration of energy. By sundown a desultory breeze was stirring the clouds. But he was too tired to eat, too pain-wrecked to wash the awning. He could only sleep.

            He rose with the first smears of light, stiff and hungry. But the smell when he opened the food tank told him that again his fish had rotted. Shattered, he groped through the muck in the tank for his knife and tackle. He leaned over the side and painfully began to prise barnacles loose. But instead of baiting the hook right away, he ate the largest of the barnacles, savouring the juices that trickled down his throat. Then, glancing worriedly at the sun already high in the sky, he baited the hook with the last of them and cast the line.

            He fretted and fished all day without the hint of a bite. At nightfall he pulled in the line and ate the bait. His movements sluggish, he spread his soaked bedding on a ledge to dry and sank into a deep sleep beside it. He awoke only once to crawl beneath the folds of canvas and escape the cold night wind.

           

                                                               Lowest ebb.

Next day exhaustion pressed his back into an old man’s stoop. Boils had broken out all over his body. His throat was too parched to swallow. He was urinating only once a day—instead of the two or three times when he was on full rations. Lim knew that drinking salt water meant certain death, but now he wondered about drinking urine.

            As far as he knew, it had never been tried. If he did drink his urine, he told himself, it would only be once, or at most twice, before he caught a fish or rain came. For a long time he resisted. Finally he stumbled into the well and found a tin. Soon Lim had half filled it with warm, lemon-yellow liquid.

            The stench was rank, but each sip dissolved the salt that had caked on his dry lips and rolled over his parched tongue before sliding down his throat. Bit by bit, as his saliva returned, he no longer felt he was going to choke.

            The relief seemed short-lived; the burning in his throat was soon as fierce as before. All day he lay exhausted, each breath of the burning air searing his nostrils and throat, his fleshless bones rubbing painfully against his rough canvas bedding. Questions raged through his head. Was he better off drinking his urine? Or should he try to go without, despite the extreme dehydration he had reached? By the time the night wind finally stirred, he could barely drag the bedding over himself.

            Next morning his mouth was dry and foul, his skin wrinkled as an old man’s. sores wept, pus oozed from clusters of broken boils. He baited his line, cast, and closed his eyes. Later in the day, his strength almost gone, he struggled to coax out another tin of urine.

            By the next morning he could manage only a few dark, thick drops of urine. He scoured the sky for rain clouds, but saw none. There was no sign of ship or plane or land. And still no fish.

            The days crawled on, the only sounds the incessant lisp of water Lim could not drink, the gurgle of gases in his cramp-twisted belly. He had not eaten or drunk for seven days.

            He was close to delirium when he thought he saw a bird hovering in the moonlight just above his head. Small and black, it landed  on the raft, close to the fingers of his right hand, eyed Lim quizzically, and hopped a little closer. Concentrating his whole being on keeping his hand steady, he reached out.

            He caught its legs and knocked its head three times against the deck. He rested, his harsh breathing audible, before slitting its neck and sucking the thin blood. Wearily, he dragged out its intestines and chewed and sucked at the carcass, resting, almost dozing, between swallows. Then he extracted and cut the heart, liver and kidneys into soft, moist bits he could eat without chewing.

            Next morning he baited his hook with scraps of skin. Surely the birth was a turning point. As if to confirm it, a warm drizzle fell shortly before noon. He was too weak to wash the canvas or collect the rain. But the few dirty, salty mouthfuls he swallowed strengthened him. That night he heard the dry rustling of feathers again. This bird too was small, but its blood and scrawny flesh revived him further, and he dozed. Next morning he found the sea thick with fish.

            The return of fish and rain brought enormous relief. He slept deeply; soon his hands were steady enough for him to lance his boils and repair his lines and tackle. He experimented more daringly with food, sipping the clear fluid around a fish’s tiny brain, crunching eyes, and eating the granular, roe-like masses of yellowish tissue he found behind swimming-bladders.

River of hope.

For four days it rained relentlessly. When the downpour finally slackened, there were still heavy showers most afternoons. In the constant moisture, meat spoilt before it could dry. But the fish bit so readily and birds were so plentiful that he had no more need for reserves. Fresh water fell faster than he could use it.

            One evening he noticed that the sea had a reddish tinge. Yet there was no trace of red in the diffuse gold of the sunset. On an impulse, he dipped a tin into the sea. The water settled, leaving a brown film at the bottom of the tin. Lim was exultant. Silt! He was close to a river—and to land.

            That night he was too excited to sleep. Among the birds that hopped about the raft was a land bird with no webs between its claws. Lim’s eyes tracked it as it took off. It wheeled across the moon—and he saw delicate black etchings on the moon’s face. Branches! Flat as a paper cutout, moon and branches looked unreal. Not daring to believe his eyes, he leaned over the side, scooped up a little water in his hands, and tasted it. It was sweet!

            As dawn mists faded, he saw the tips of lush green trees and swaying palm fronds. He was stunned—and soon in an agony of fear that he might drift out to sea again. The wind and current seemed to be pushing him first closer, then further away. Whenever he drifted close, he could hear the screech of birds and smell of the forest, moist and heavy.

            All through the day he searched for smoke, or a break in the distant, densely forested banks. With afternoon, the land sounds ceased, and it rained so heavily he could not see beyond the raft. But when the rain stopped, the jungle came alive with noise again, and with dark came a beating, insistent rhythm of breakers punctuated by shrieks and an occasional howl.

            In the morning, the mist dissolved to reveal blue-green islands rising out of an amber sea—and fishing boats! Still swathed in mist, they seemed unreal, but Lim had yelled himself hoarse long before the haze had burned off enough for him to see clearly. By then, all except one of the fishing boats had gone.

            Nine metres long, with a single brown sail, it looked like a junk. Could he really have drifted all the  way to China? It seemed to be sailing towards him. When he  opened his mouth to shout, all he could manage was a hoarse rattle.

            “Help!” he croaked in Chinese, then in English.

            Closer now, he saw that the boat was not much more than crudely carved logs lashed together. Were the people on board savages? He made out three figures—a man, a woman and a girl. They were too dark to be Chinese; their clothing seemed Western. The man waved.

            “English?” he shouted.

            Lim thought of the ship’s master examining him through binoculars, the ship turning away. He froze. He ploughed his fingers through his tangle of hair and beard. Then he slowly shook his head.

            “Chinese!” he shouted. “Me Chinese.”

            Suddenly he  was aware of his nakedness. Embarrassed, he held the flag like a shield before him. The man turned to the woman, who walked sure-footed to the boat’s stern. The tapered prow cut closer. Close from the raft it swerved. The woman grabbed one of the raft’s corner poles while, from the prow, the man pitched a coil of rope at Lim. Smiling, he held out his hand to help him on board.

            Lim hesitated. Suddenly he felt an unexpected reluctance to leave; the raft seemed solid, secure, while the boat, the people on board, and the distant jungle were unknown. Slowly he gathered his knife and fishing tackle. The man gestured, asking if he wanted the raft towed. Though he knew it was foolish, Lim felt a fleeting temptation to nod yes as he took the man’s hand and climbed on board the fishing boat.

            But he shook his head. He pushed the raft away. Slowly it drifted off down the coast.

            The fishing boat with Poon Lim  on board reached the Brazilian port of Belem near the mouth of the Amazon on April 6, 1943. He had been a castaway for 133 days—a record that remains unbroken. Yet Lim walked ashore unaided in remarkably good physical condition. He spent six weeks in hospital for rest and observation and the British Consul in Belem arranged his passage to England.

            In July 1943 Lim went to Buckingham Palace and was awarded the British Empire Medal by King George VI for his “exceptional courage, fortitude, and resource.” He became a US citizen in 1952, married that same year, and raised four children. In 1983, exactly 40 years after his ordeal, Lim retired as Chief Steward, United States Lines.

“Don’t tell me how hard you work. Tell me how much you get done”                            --J.Ling