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 11th 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
