Lost?

November 10, 2005 10:28 AM

I don't watch Lost, but I was wondering: Has anything comparable ever actually happened? Has there ever been a historical instance where several people were stranded in the wilderness for a long and indeterminate period of time and had to make do? The more recent the better, but I'm interested in anything (I've already heard the story of Andrew Selkirk, the "real life" Robinson Crusoe).
posted by borkingchikapa to society & culture (36 comments total)

The Alive guys?
posted by loquax at 10:29 AM on November 10, 2005

Not stranded in the wilderness, but at sea (in 2001) -- Shipwreck survivors alive after 6 months at sea.
posted by ericb at 10:34 AM on November 10, 2005

The story of the mutiny on the Bounty includes several such stories, including the mutineers' eventual settling on Pitcairn Island, and Lieutenant (not Captain) Bligh's trip back to England.
posted by cerebus19 at 10:39 AM on November 10, 2005

Or almost two years on ice....
posted by starman at 10:39 AM on November 10, 2005

Desperate Journeys, Abandoned Souls : True Stories of Castaways and Other Survivors.
posted by ericb at 10:41 AM on November 10, 2005

Donner party (1846-47) and the Andes plane crash (1972).
posted by strikhedonia at 10:42 AM on November 10, 2005

It's been at the back of my mind to research the facts behind a vaguely remembered book I once read about a German couple who weren't shipwrecked but set up home on a pacific? island along with a few carefully selected couples. Supplies stopped arriving, murder, mayhem and insanity ensued but I can't remember much more than that. I'm off to spend some time with a quality search engine...
posted by ceri richard at 10:45 AM on November 10, 2005

Or almost two years on ice....

Endurance: Shackleton's Incredible Voyage -- by Alfred Lansing

Ice Story: Shackleton's Lost Expedition -- by Elizabeth Cody Kimmel

Shipwreck at the Bottom of the World -- by Jennifer Armstrong
posted by ericb at 10:45 AM on November 10, 2005

The European explorers and conquerors that came to the Americas were pretty much in this category. They had to make do with what they had (or what they could eventually get from the locals) for months if not years.

Cortez burned his ships before he headed inland to Mexico and took on a million Aztecs. The Roanoke colony was left to fend for themselves from 1587 until the first resupply ship returned in 1591, of course we know by then there was no one to supply.
posted by Pollomacho at 11:10 AM on November 10, 2005

Batavia's Graveyard
posted by bobot at 11:22 AM on November 10, 2005

There are many instances of this occurring. Those stories that survive are great fun (in retrospect), and make up one of my favorite genres of fiction/non-fiction: survival tales. Not surprisingly, many of these are sea-stories. These sorts of scenarios also happened often in the United States during the age of expansion and settlement, and probably in other colonial situations throughout the world.

As loquax notes, Alive tells a riveting story of being stranded in the Andes. Touching the Void is similar, though less prolonged and on a smaller scale.

Others have already noted the Bounty story (and if you haven't read the trilogy by Nordhoff and Hall, you really should — they're fantastic books) and Shackleton's expedition. I suspect that arctic voyages often generated "lost" people due to the extreme challenges involved. I haven't read Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World, but it is an account by the only survivor of Scott's ill-fated antarctic expedition. Admiral Anson's mid-eighteenth-century circumnavigation lost a number of vessels along the way, including the Wager, which was wrecked off the coast of Chile. Patrick O'Brian's The Unknown Shore is a pre-Aubrey/Maturin fictional account of what some of these shipwreck survivors might have faced.

There are other stories of being stranded in deserts, in forests, on mountains, in caves.

Don't discount people who become "voluntarily stranded". They face similar hardships. Check out One Man's Wilderness, An Island to Oneself, Kon-Tiki, Into the Wild, and Walden. (Ha! That last is a joke. I crack myself up.)

In researching the above links, I also found Castaway in Paradise: The Incredible True-Life Adventures of Robinson Crusoes, which recounts tales of several castaways, including Selkirk.

Check out the adventure fiction (or non-fiction) genre for more of this type of story.
posted by jdroth at 11:26 AM on November 10, 2005

There was a navy guy who fell off an aircraft carrier and spent days at sea. Apparently they teach you in the navy to take off your pants, tie knots in the legs, then 'flop' the pants into the air to force air down into the legs. The end result is a semi-floatation device.

The story was on Dateline or some such evening news magazine show about 5 years ago.
posted by Wild_Eep at 11:27 AM on November 10, 2005

I watched a documentary about the person Robinson Crusoe was based on who spent a good long time alone on an island. He apparently went a little batshit insane, had sex with goats, but marked them by trimming ears so that he didn't eat the ones he was screwing.
posted by Kickstart70 at 11:51 AM on November 10, 2005

There was a programme on TV, here in the UK, a couple of years ago about a couple who went to live on a tiny Caribbean (I think) island with their (well hers actually) two kids. They sold all of their possessions, including their house, to buy the island. The plan was to build an exclusive toruist resort. It went very badly.

They ended up living in a shed on the island, bickering constantly, mainly about the wife's insistence that everything had to be painted pink. They got kidnapped by pirates, and (again I think) the husband got badly burned in their escape. The wife was shagging the handyman, whilst the husband spent most of his time trying to build somewhere for the tourists to stay, out of trees he had to cut down himself, and worrying about how to pay for food to be delivered. In the end, the husband got a terrible disease, wasted away in some horrible Middle American hospital, and died. The final scenes were of the most horrible (open casket) funeral anybody could ever imagine, followed by the multiply-adulterous wife talking about how it wasn't really so bad.

Terribly funny, but terribly tragic because it was all real life. Imagine The Office, but set on a desert island, and for real.
posted by veedubya at 11:59 AM on November 10, 2005

I would very much like to watch this programme.
posted by agregoli at 12:15 PM on November 10, 2005

Apparently they teach you in the navy to take off your pants, tie knots in the legs, then 'flop' the pants into the air to force air down into the legs.

Pukes don't wear bell bottoms because it makes their thighs look good. Their seat cushion can become a floatation device!
posted by Pollomacho at 12:15 PM on November 10, 2005

There's an article in December's (yes, it's out already) Marie Claire about a group of people who were living in the jungle in Cambodia for generations. I can't seem to find any info about them on the web... my searching skills aren't up to par today.
posted by INTPLibrarian at 12:22 PM on November 10, 2005

I learned the pants-as-flotation-devices trick in swimming lessons when I was 13. If you are wearing a button down shirt, you can button it all the way up to your neck then blow air into the shirt. A bubble will form at the back of your neck, helping to keep you afloat. Then you might survive long enough to have someone indirectly ask a question about you on AskMeFi.
posted by clh at 12:46 PM on November 10, 2005

There was Shoichi Yokoi, a Japanese soldier who lived in the jungles of Guam for 28 years after WWII ended.
posted by MsMolly at 12:51 PM on November 10, 2005

In 1782, a number of ships were lost while navigating the southeast coast of Africa.

One of those was the Grosvenor, owned by the East India Company.
Her passengers and crew had only just been celebrating the fact that they were half way home to London, when disaster happened, and they hit the rocks on the notorious “wild coast” of South Africa.

Miraculously, most of the crew and all but one of the passengers survived the initial shipwreck, but it’s what happened afterwards that reveals a story of helplessness, endurance, and betrayal.

More on The Late Night Live website (my favourite radio programme)

BTW, if you don't watch Lost, you are missing out, really. It's outstanding.
posted by grahamwell at 1:25 PM on November 10, 2005

I haven't read Apsley Cherry-Garrard's The Worst Journey in the World, but it is an account by the only survivor of Scott's ill-fated antarctic expedition.

"The Worst Journey in the World" is definitely a good adventure tale of survival in extreme conditions, but it is about the mid-winter expedition to the emperor penguin rookeries at Cape Crozier, not the trip to the Pole. Cherry-Garrard was one of nineteen survivors of the Terra Nova expedition; it was only the five members of the polar party who died (including, of course, Scott himself).
posted by Mars Saxman at 1:39 PM on November 10, 2005

More on the Grosvenor here. It's an uncomfortable tale.

There was a curious lack of heroism among the men who made it to shore as they scrambled to save themselves, ignoring the plight of those less able. At no time did they look to the care of those who were wounded or otherwise unable to fend for themselves. Society as they knew it all but disappeared, as people of quality were reduced to the same desperate straights as the common folk.
posted by grahamwell at 1:40 PM on November 10, 2005

I recently watched the DVD "The Snow Walker" about a bush pilot's and his passenger's struggle for survival after crashing in the Arctic tundra. Enjoyable film.

I also enjoyed the DVD "The Endurance - Shackleton's Legendary Antarctic Expedition" and NOVA's "Shackleton's Voyage of Endurance."
posted by ericb at 1:57 PM on November 10, 2005

I would very much like to watch this programme.

The programme was No Going Back and is shown on Channel 4 and the Discovery Travel & Leisure channel in the UK. There's a review here and you can lots of stuff on Google about the family and the island (which she renamed Janique...after herself).
posted by speranza at 2:30 PM on November 10, 2005

The book ceri richard alluded to, Floreana, is (as he mentioned) not about a shipwreck per se, but close enough: the isolation of the Galapagos in the 30's brought out each settler's resourcefulness and/or island fever-type madness in a very Lost-esque way.
posted by ellanea at 2:35 PM on November 10, 2005

Thank you ellanea, that is indeed the book!
posted by ceri richard at 3:29 PM on November 10, 2005

The Raft of the Medusa also found it's way from history and scandal into arts and culture.
posted by gimonca at 4:54 PM on November 10, 2005

s/it's/its/
posted by gimonca at 4:55 PM on November 10, 2005

There's already a ton of great stuff here. But I read a book as a kid (10/11?) that I loved.

Adrift is the story of a guy who's sailboat capsizes, and the dude inflates his life raft, and lives on the fucker for 75 days. The first few days are ok, but then the food and water run out. And then the speargun breaks, etc., etc. The book has illustrations of evaporative water purification that I remember to this day.
posted by zpousman at 5:38 PM on November 10, 2005

Back From Tuichi
posted by euphorb at 6:39 PM on November 10, 2005

The following was ripped from this Wikipedia entry:

The whaling ship Essex left Nantucket, Massachusetts in 1819 on a two-and-a-half-year voyage in the whaling grounds of the South Pacific to hunt sperm whales. On November 20, 1820, the Essex was struck by a sperm whale and sunk, 2,000 miles (3,700 km) off South America. The twenty sailors set out in three small whaleboats, with wholly inadequate supplies of food and water.

Excessive sodium in the sailors’ diets and malnutrition led to diarrhea, blackouts, enfeeblement, boils, edema, and magnesium deficiency which caused bizarre and violent behavior. Furthermore, sailors suffered withdrawal from severe tobacco addiction. As conditions worsened the sailors resorted to drinking their own urine, stealing and mismanaging their food. Faced with no more rations, sailors were forced to eat those sailors who had died in the boats. By the time the last of the eight survivors were rescued on 5 April 1821, seven sailors had been eaten.

The first mate, Owen Chase, wrote an account of the disaster, the Narrative of the Most Extraordinary and Distressing Shipwreck of the Whale-Ship Essex; this was used by Herman Melville as the one of the inspirations for his novel Moby-Dick. The cabin boy, Thomas Nickerson, wrote another account, not published until 1984.
posted by Alt F4 at 10:35 PM on November 10, 2005

Has anything comparable ever actually happened? Has there ever been a historical instance where several people were stranded in the wilderness for a long and indeterminate period of time and had to make do?

Not to be rude, but are you fucking kidding? There were not always jetplanes and satphones. Surely the thread has told you that by now -- but I hope you understand how narrow that kind of statement sounds. Now.

But for most of man's existence, getting lost wasn't a matter of making a wrong turn on the way to the supermarket -- it was a matter of life and limb, in a strange land, with no civilization or services nearby. Lost was very nearly close to dead, for all practical purposes, unless you were exceptionally lucky or resourceful.

On the other hand, the "savages" people worried about weren't always a problem -- there are numerous stories of settlers, shipwrecks, and castaways finding helpful and friendly natives. We tended to kill more of them than vice versa, if only because of the bugs we brought.

A few stories that haven't been mentioned here yet:
The Franklin Expedition, a lost probe for the Northwest Passage, was an enduring mystery; modern theories are that the men could have survived if their welded food tins had not failed, or the tins had not been contaminated with botulin toxin. (On an earlier expedition, Franklin became famous as the man who ate his own shoes -- for the nutritional content of the leather.)

Ferdinand Magellan was not lost, but his circumnavigation certainly had its share of misfortune -- only one of his five ships made it back to Europe. Relevant to this discussion, after a near-mutiny (perhaps related to Spanish/Portguese rivalry), he stranded one of his captains on the coast of then-wild South America. Nothing was ever heard of him again.

Cabeza de Vaca was a conquistador stranded in what is now Texas. After a few years uncomfortably living among Indians, de Vaca set out -- with two other survivors -- for Spanish colonies on the west coast of Mexico. They made it. There's a great, mystical Spanish-language movie about this.

And you can't mention the Whaleship Essex without mentioning Dudley and Stephens, where two of four shipwreck survivors killed one of the others, and all three ate him. It set a famous legal precedent.
posted by dhartung at 1:59 AM on November 11, 2005

dhartung: you tone is unnecessarily abrasive and doesn't add anything to the discussion. I hope you understand that. Now.

I think it is quite clear that he is talking about modern travelers, people who would be completely unprepared for suddenly finding themselves in a strange land with no supplies.

Comparing Lost to de Vaca is just absurd.
posted by Ynoxas at 6:57 PM on November 15, 2005

Has anything comparable ever actually happened? Has there ever been a historical instance where several people were stranded in the wilderness for a long and indeterminate period of time and had to make do? The more recent the better, but I'm interested in anything (I've already heard the story of Andrew Selkirk, the "real life" Robinson Crusoe).
posted by borkingchikapa to society & culture at 10:28 AM PST

I agree that dhartung's tone is abrasive, but I think that you misrepresent the question yourself, Ynoxas. Flag & move on?
posted by dash_slot- at 9:00 AM on November 19, 2005

Alexander Selkirk
posted by scarabic at 5:43 PM on December 1, 2005

I know this question is well off the front page by now, but The Straight Dope today weighed in on the matter, if it's of interest to anyone.
posted by SuperNova at 3:32 PM on December 2, 2005