133 Days Adrift

The ocean was calm, blue and endless in every direction. In the middle of it floated a small wooden raft, a square of planks and floats only a few steps across.

On the raft sat a young man, alone. There was no land in sight, no ship, no plane. Only the sun, the water, and the slow rocking of the waves.

His name was Poon Lim. He would live on that raft for 133 days.

The Ben Lomond

Poon Lim was born on the island of Hainan, in southern China. As a young man he went to sea, and during the Second World War he was working as a steward on a British merchant ship, the Ben Lomond.

In November 1942, the Ben Lomond was crossing the Atlantic Ocean, sailing from South Africa towards South America. It was wartime, and German submarines hunted the cargo ships that crossed the ocean.

On 23 November, a German submarine fired torpedoes at the Ben Lomond. The ship sank within minutes.

Poon Lim put on a life jacket and jumped into the sea. He swam and floated in the water for some time. Then he saw a life raft drifting nearby, and pulled himself onto it. As far as anyone knows, he was the only member of the crew to survive.

Alone on the raft

The raft was small, roughly two and a half metres on each side. It had been stocked with some emergency supplies: tins of biscuits, a large jug of fresh water, some chocolate, a few flares and a torch.

Poon Lim was a practical man. He worked out how long his food and water might last, and rationed them carefully, a few biscuits and a few swallows of water each day.

He knew that rationing would only buy time. Sooner or later, the supplies would run out. He would have to find his own food and water from the sea and the sky.

Living from the sea

Poon Lim used the canvas of his life jacket to catch rainwater when storms passed over, and stored it in the jug and the empty tins.

To catch fish, he made his own tools. He pulled a wire out of the torch and bent it into a hook. He unpicked fibres from a rope to make a fishing line. Using a little biscuit as bait, he caught small fish, then used those to catch bigger ones. He cut the fish into strips and dried them in the sun on the ropes of the raft.

Seabirds sometimes landed on the raft, and he learned to catch them too. Once, he even caught a small shark, and had to fight it on the tiny raft until he won.

To keep his body strong, he swam around the raft twice a day when the sea was calm, always keeping a line tied to himself so it could not drift away. He kept count of the days by cutting notches into the wood, until the number grew so large that he began counting the full moons instead.

Ships that did not stop

Twice, Poon Lim thought he was saved.

Early in his time at sea, a cargo ship passed close by. He waved and shouted, but it sailed on without stopping. Later, some aircraft flew overhead, and one seemed to see him and drop something into the sea nearby. But a storm blew in, and he lost sight of them. No one came.

Many people would have given up. Poon Lim did not. He kept fishing, kept collecting rainwater, kept counting the days.

Land at last

As the weeks went by, the colour of the water began to change. Seaweed floated past, and more birds appeared. He was drifting towards land.

On 5 April 1943, after 133 days alone at sea, Poon Lim was spotted by three Brazilian fishermen near the coast of Brazil. They took him aboard their boat and carried him to land.

He was thin and weak, but to the amazement of the doctors, he was able to walk unaided. He had survived longer alone on a raft than anyone known before him.

When his story became known, King George VI awarded Poon Lim the British Empire Medal. The Royal Navy studied the methods he had used, and his story was included in advice on how to survive at sea.

Poon Lim later moved to the United States, where he lived the rest of his life. He died in 1991.

He had no special training and no plan for being shipwrecked. What he had was patience, a clever pair of hands, and a stubborn refusal to stop trying. With those, a young steward turned a few planks of wood into a home, and kept himself alive for more than four months on the open sea.

Want to read more?

Ruthanne Lum McCunn's Sole Survivor tells Poon Lim's story in full, based on her conversations with him.