FAMOUS CASTAWAYS
G'day folks,
Maritime
lore is filled with tales of sailors who found themselves stranded on deserted
islands with seemingly no hope of rescue. Most were survivors of shipwrecks or
other disasters, but a few were intentionally marooned on island prisons as
punishment for crimes. In each case, these castaways faced a constant fight for
survival against hunger, wild animals, severe weather and sheer loneliness.
Explore six incredible stories of people who were stranded in unforgiving
territory and lived to tell the tale.
1. Alexander Selkirk
Selkirk may have believed that a passing ship would pick him up in a matter of weeks, but he would eventually spend more than four years and four months alone on the island. He passed the time by notching the days and months on a tree, reading his Bible and chasing goats—first for food, and then merely to have something to do. All the while, he kept his eyes peeled for signs of rescue, but the few ships he saw flew the Spanish flag. On one occasion, he was even forced to hide in a tree when Spanish mariners landed on the island to resupply. Selkirk was finally rescued in February 1709, when a band of privateers led by Captain Woodes Rogers stopped at his island. The wild-haired and bearded castaway initially had trouble remembering how to speak, but he went on to become a minor celebrity in 18th century England, and was likely the inspiration for the title character in Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel “Robinson Crusoe.”
2. Marguerite de la Rocque
Little is
known about the life of Marguerite de la Rocque, a 16th century French
noblewoman who spent two years marooned on an island off the coast of Quebec.
According to most accounts, her ordeal began in 1542, when she accompanied a
relative on an expedition to establish a colony in Canada. During the long
crossing of the Atlantic, the young and unmarried Marguerite sparked a scandal
when she took a fellow passenger as her lover. The tryst outraged the ship’s
devout captain, and De La Rocque, her lover and her servant were subsequently
banished to the remote Isle of Demons near the Gulf of Saint Lawrence.
The trio
built a small hut to protect against the blistering cold, and used muskets and
rocks to scare off bears and wolves. They soon faced more serious problems when
De La Rocque discovered she was pregnant. Amazingly, the young castaway managed
to survive the birth of the baby, but after some sixteen months on the island,
both her lover and servant had perished. Her young child would follow soon
after, yet De La Rocque continued to survive alone until late 1544, when she
was rescued by a group of fisherman and ferried back to Europe.
3. Fernão Lopes
St.
Helena is perhaps best known as the place where Napoleon Bonaparte was banished
after his famous defeat at 1815’s Battle of Waterloo. But some 300 years before
the French emperor arrived, this remote island in the southern Atlantic was
home to one of history’s most unusual castaways. Fernão Lopes was a Portuguese
soldier who had turned against his homeland and sided with Muslim natives
during a conflict in India. When his former brothers in arms captured him, they
punished him by lopping off his right hand, ears and nose. Deformed and
disgraced, Lopes stowed away aboard a ship bound for Portugal in 1516. When it
stopped at the uninhabited isle of St. Helena, he slipped away and hid in the
forest.
Lopes
would live on the island in self-imposed exile for the next several years,
totally alone save for a rooster he turned into a pet. Though he refused to
come out of hiding to meet visitors, he eventually became something of a legend
among Portuguese mariners, who would leave offerings of food and clothing for
the “Hermit of St. Helena” whenever they dropped anchor at his island. As his
celebrity grew, Lopes was persuaded to travel to Europe, where he received a
pardon from the King of Portugal and absolution from the Pope. The disfigured
castaway was offered a place in a monastery, but chose to return to St. Helena,
where he continued to live alone until his death around 1545. By that time,
Lopes had spent some 30 years on the island, nearly all of it in complete
solitude.
4. Philip Ashton
Though stranded with no food or tools, Ashton managed to construct a crude shelter and ate fruit and raw turtle eggs to ward off starvation. He wasted away on his island alone until November 1723, when he encountered a British man who had escaped the Spanish. The fellow castaway disappeared after only a few days, but left behind a knife and other supplies that Ashton used to continue surviving. He would eventually spend another seven months enduring extreme heat, insects, snakes, hunger, a near-deadly fever and even an attack by the Spanish before he was rescued by a British ship in June 1724. Ashton later wrote a popular book detailing his terrifying days in the company of Low’s pirates and his 16-month stint as a castaway.
5. Juana Maria
Juana Maria was the name given to the famous “Lone Woman of San Nicholas,” a Native American who spent nearly two decades stranded on an island off the coast of California. Juana Maria had grown up on San Nicholas, but most of her tribe was slaughtered in the early 1800s by hostile hunters. Missionaries evacuated the few remaining survivors in 1835, but Juana Maria was left behind when she ran back to the island to locate her missing infant. She never found the child, but when attempts to rescue her stalled, she was forgotten and left to survive on San Nicholas in complete isolation.
Juana
Maria spent the next 18 years taking shelter in a cave and fishing with hooks
made from seashells. She captured sea birds and seals and fashioned their
feathers and skins into dresses, and passed the time weaving baskets and bowls
from grasses. Her solitude finally came to an end in 1853, when Captain George
Nidever discovered her on San Nicholas. Nidever took Juana Maria to Santa
Barbara a few weeks later, and though no one could speak her language, she used
hand gestures to relate the astonishing story of her survival. Sadly, she was
unable to adjust to the diet of the mainland, and died of dysentery only two
months after leaving her island. Her story was later fictionalized in the
popular children’s novel “Island of the Blue Dolphins.”
6. The Ross Sea Party
The crew of the Ross Sea party docked near McMurdo Sound in January 1915 and began the slow, excruciating task of placing supply depots every 60 miles. Disaster struck that May, when the team’s ship was torn from its moorings and blown out to sea by ferocious winds. Despite being stranded at the edge of the world with dwindling resources, the ten castaways continued their mission and successfully laid the necessary supply caches, losing three men in the process. The survivors then spent almost a year confined to a small hut before they were rescued in January 1917. Only then did they learn their deadly ordeal had been in vain—Shackleton’s team had also lost their ship and never started the transcontinental crossing. Speaking of the Ross Sea party’s commitment to his doomed mission, Shackleton would later write, “No more remarkable story of human endeavor has been revealed than the tale of that long march.”
Clancy's comment: Wow. How would you handle such situations?
I'm ...
Think about this!
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