Status Updates From Survive the Savage Sea: She...

Looking back on their experience, they thought it was rather exciting and in fact, two days out from Liverpool on our return to Britain, Neil, bored with the shipboard routine, said "I'm fed up, Dad, I wish we were back on the raft!"

If any single civilized factor in a castaway's character helps survival, it is a well-developed sense of the ridiculous. It helps the castaway to laugh in the face of impossible situations and allows him, or her, to overcome the assassination of all civilized codes and characteristics which hitherto had been the guidelines of life.

This goes a long way to show the lessons learned from Bligh's mutiny: "...any departure into the realm of orthodox authority at this stage is specious nonsense, and the crass idiocy of creating work for "idle" hands should be instantly exposed as such. There is usually plenty of time for discussion about policy decisions and if people know why they are doing a thing it helps them to do it."

Remember that it is easier for exhausted castaways to travel by sea than by land, and to destroy one's craft making a useless landing on an uninhabited island which won't support life, or on a part of the coast which is cut off from habitation, is to waste the effort expended on reaching it.

"I have noticed tropic birds four hundred miles out in the Atlantic from Barbados, and if they can travel as far as that, they can go much farther. "

Not the soundest logic.

Interesting that Robertson embraces Cook's anecdote about drinking turtle blood, but he tells us to ignore the ship's surgeon's experience, who sees the blood making sailors sick.

Definitely could use more evidence for this claim: "Robin, who refused the enemas, showed no particular disability because of it, unless his delirium could be regarded as a sign that he was perhaps more dehydrated than the rest of us."

Based on the authors' writing and my own understanding of survival techniques, if I had to choose between the two opposing views of drinking seawater presented here (Robertson against, Bombard for) I would trust Robertson. That being said, Bombard lasted almost twice as long as the Robertson family, and he was able to walk to a rescue station, whereas the author admits he collapsed after reaching the rescue boat.

I cannot emphasize too strongly that survival conditions are not the same as those voluntarily undertaken by brave men who wish to help survivors fight for their lives. The physical conditions may be quite similar, but the moral incentives, the attitude of experimental interest as opposed to that of escape from catastrophe, can alter a person's judgment of what is right or wrong and this difference can kill!

The suggestion that a castaway should stop alleviating his despair when he feels the need for the substance he is using to allay it is a useless nonsense, and I propose to show by quoting from actual shipwreck experience that there is indeed nothing to be gained, and much to lose, from following this most dangerous advice.

Direct contravention of Bombard--"There has been a considerable amount of experiment, carried out under practical and hazardous conditions, to demonstrate that sea water may be used to supplement the diet of castaways...drinking sea water, requires that the castaway should not be dehydrated when he drinks it."

So much insightful scientific breakdown of the survival efforts and obstacles, yet the author never addresses what might be the biggest mystery of the story. Why did the whales attack? How often does this happen? How unlucky were they?

They feared being eaten if they entered the water, but as far as I know that's unheard of.

I think it is probably a help to others who are afraid, if one can conceal the outward evidence of one's own fear, but it is better to work quickly even if the appearance of haste gives the impression of fear if the loss of time also involves the loss of lives.

The closing section is devoted to a critical analysis of survival techniques--could this be any better?

The detour to relive navigating to Fernandina and Galapagos is a little confusing in context of the "coincidence" chapter, which seems to really only refer to the final couple of paragraphs, but it reminds us that the voyage was a peaceful adventure, with the one notable exception.

Not throughout, but a poet when he wants to be: "...deep, sea-green pools and scarlet crabs sparkled the black rocks like a primeval rash. Nearer to us, on a tower of rock isolated from the clifiF, black marine iguanas lay piled on each other in motionless heaps, intertwined like hideous black spaghetti, their dull wrinkled skin and toadlike heads belonging to another era."

..the whale coming to the surface and blowing occasionally, the spray from its vent drifting across Lucette in an evil-smelling mist until Lyn, holding a handkerchief to her nose, shouted "Go on the other side, your breath smells!" As if it had heard, the whale dived...the peculiar rolls were repeated, until, tiring of Lucettes lack of response to this most pressing courtship, the whale dived steeply and disappeared.

Robin had never lost hope of being rescued, and I had calculated the chance of being rescued to be so small that it could be discounted. A case of the statistician adopting the attitude which rightfully should have been mine, and of my adoption of an attitude which ought to have been his!

Though they had four days on the ship to gradually increase their intake of (cooked) food, the starvation reaction doesn't seem to have afflicted them for as long: "...the consumption of large quantities of steak and eggs, with pancakes and waffles on the side, and ice cream to follow. (Douglas and Robin had three breakfasts each that morning, only one of which was supposed to satisfy a rancher!)"

This far into the book and the author reveals that he was on a naval ship sunk during World War II, as if he wasn't coming off heroic enough. Mind blowing.

I am impressed with everything about this book and the story it tells, but the most exceptional aspect is that these survivors didn't need to be saved. The rescue is a revelatory climax and the achievement is legendary: "My estimate of 8°2o' north, 92°45' west, without sextant, chart or compass, wasn't a bad guess after thirty-seven days adrift in the cross currents and trade drifts..."

I knew from hard-won experience that where the land may be kindly to man, the sea was as impartial as the sky and that, in an environment where every other living creature had adapted and perfected its means of survival over millions of years, our chances of surviving among them lay in our ability to adapt our past experience to present circumstances.

Their second day and already they have to resort to reinflating the raft by blowing into it because the bellows failed. Immediate attention from dorados is reminiscent of Steven Callahan's Adrift.

Keeping your head in a crisis:

"When I was swimming to the raft," she said, "and it was making that funny noise with the extra gas, Douglas thought the raft was leaking and blocked the pipes with his fingers; he shouted to me to give him a patch; in the middle of the Pacific!" She chuckled again. "He kept on so I gave him an orange and said, 'Will this do?'

Great Coleridge reference:

I was a Master Mariner, I thought ruefully, not an ancient one, and could count on no ghostly crew to get me out of this dilemma!

The others had probably eaten the injured one with the V in its head, which must have split its skull when it hit Lucette s three-ton lead keel. She had served us well to the very end, and now she was gone.

Lyn gazed numbly at me, quietly reassuring the twins who had started crying, and, apart from the noise of the sea around us, we gazed in silent disbelief at our strange surroundings.

My senses still reeled as I dropped to my knees and tore up the floorboards to gaze in horror at the blue Pacific through the large splintered hole punched up through the hull planking between two of the grown oak frames.

Lyn protested vehemently at the thought of starting our journey on June the thirteenth, even when I pointed out that the most superstitious of seafarers didn't mind so long as it wasn't a Friday as well, but Douglas and Robin both now joined with my feelings of anxiety to be gone, and after a short spell of intense activity, we stowed and lashed the dinghy and secured all movables on deck and below.

This story has foreshadowing and narrative tension like a novel. It's understandable that this book would be included in a collection of maritime classics, but some of the other major titles in the series are such entirely different reading experiences. Slocum, Moitessier, Bligh and Shackleton--all essential historical accounts, but like chewing gristle compared to the ribeye tenderness of this prose.