On November 23, 1942, the British merchant ship SS Benlomond was torpedoed by a German U-boat in the Atlantic Ocean and sank within minutes. A 25-year-old Chinese sailor named Poon Lim found himself alone in the water with a life jacket. Hours later, he spotted a drifting wooden raft and climbed aboard.
He would spend 133 days on that raft — entirely alone — setting the longest known record for individual survival at sea.
The raft held a few tins of biscuits, some water, a bit of sugar, and a flashlight. The supplies ran out within weeks. From that point on, everything depended on Poon Lim’s ingenuity.
He bent the spring inside the flashlight into a fishhook. He unraveled rope fibers and braided them into a fishing line. He used the small fish he caught as bait for bigger ones. He collected rainwater in a container fashioned from the biscuit tin. He learned to catch seabirds that landed on the raft with his bare hands. At one point, he even managed to lure a small shark to the raft using bird remains as bait — and overpowered it.
To keep his muscles from wasting away, he performed swimming motions at the edge of the raft twice a day. Instead of carving notches to count days, he tracked the phases of the moon.
During those months, a cargo ship, US Navy planes, and a patrol all spotted him — yet for various reasons, none rescued him. In April 1943, as he drifted near the coast of Brazil, local fishermen finally found him. He walked ashore on his own two feet; he had lost about 20 pounds, but his health was remarkably good.
The King of England awarded him a medal. His survival techniques were incorporated into naval training manuals. And when asked how he felt about his record, his answer became legendary: “I hope no one ever has to break it.”
