10. Pedro de Serrano
Pedro de Serrano is considered the OG of
castaway survival. It’s not clear how the
Spaniard’s ship sank or how he alone ended up
on an island in the Caribbean, but he did. He
made it ashore with only the knife in his mouth
and the shirt on his back.
The island was little more than a large strip of
sand, nearly devoid of flora and shade. Also,
this was still the New World, only about 50
years removed from Columbus getting lost
there. Ships weren’t exactly popping up on the
horizon on the regular and Serrano knew it.
Serrano’s physical survival depended on turtles.
He killed the reptiles, ate their meat, and used
the shells to collect water. With no other
animals on the island, Serrano was unable to
clothe himself when his clothing fell to rags.
Serrano’s only relief from the sun was a dip in
the ocean.
Three years went by before Serrano spotted a
ship, which wrecked, dashing Serrano’s hopes
of rescue. A single sailor survived and the
current deposited him on Serrano’s island.
Serrano—more beast than man—initially
terrified the beleaguered sailor, but eventually
the two were able to cooperate and preserved
their sanity by observing a strict schedule each
day.
Of course, sharing a strip of sand as one eats
nothing but turtle meat and the sun boils one’s
skin tends to make a person a little irritable. At
some point during their four years together,
Serrano and the other sailor split the island over
an argument, each keeping half until another
ship drew past, stopped, and rescued the two
men after the survivors first attested they were
not devils.

9. Jeronimus Cornelisz
Unlike most shipwrecked castaways, isolation
wasn’t the problem after The Batavia ran
aground in 1629. Hundreds of people made it
to an island off the west coast of Australia, but
the wreck was just the beginning of the ill-fated
spice run’s troubles.
Cornelisz, one of the ship’s officers, had tried
starting a mutiny when the Dutch East India
Trading Company vessel wrecked. Afterward,
the ship’s captain took a dinghy and 40 men to
sail for Java, promising to come back to rescue
the 300 survivors. With the captain gone,
Cornelisz became the ranking officer. He had
two worries: running out of supplies and being
arrested for attempted mutiny if rescuers
arrived.
Cornelisz began his reign of terror by hoarding
all the salvaged provisions from The Batavia.
Sailors loyal to him guarded the stockpile round
the clock. To cull the survivors, Cornelisz and
his men used the lifeboat and dropped groups
off to search for water on other islands believed
barren—and by “search,” Cornelisz meant
“die,” because he had no intention of returning
for any search party. Cornelisz planned on
hijacking the rescue ship and wanted to
eliminate any opposition on the island. He and
his men executed survivors for minor offenses
or none at all.
During the killing spree, a gathering party
signaled that it had successfully found food and
water on another island. Unfortunately for
Cornelisz, that party was led by a soldier named
Wiebbe Hayes, who had figured out Cornelisz’s
deadly plan. Hayes’s 45 men defeated their
heavily armed attackers with slingshots and
pikes and imprisoned Cornelisz in a pit on the
beach. Undaunted, surviving mutineers started
bombarding Hayes’s position with cannon fire
just as the promised rescue ship appeared on
the horizon. Several months had passed and
over 100 people had died at Cornelisz’s behest
before the rescue ended the mutineers’ reign of
terror.

8. Robert Drury
Drury was an English sailor on The Degrave in
1703. After the ship was damaged, the crew,
including Drury, was forced to abandon it near
Madagascar. However, making it to shore was
the start of Drury’s problems. Remember the
scene in Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s
Chest in which Jack Sparrow is chased by an
entire army of natives? It was kind of like that
for Drury, only there was no ship to escape to.
Drury and the rest of the crew spent their first
four days on Madagascar trying to evade some
2,000 Tandroy warriors. When the Tandroy
finally caught the crew, they executed every
man, but Drury and three other boys were
spared— and then enslaved. Drury spent eight
years as a royal manservant and worked hard
enough to gain some manner of respect,
eventually battling alongside his Tandroy
captors. As a result, the Tandroy eventually
granted Drury a degree of freedom, and he was
allowed to marry a fellow captive and raise
cattle of his own.
After almost 15 years as a slave, Drury escaped
Madagascar alone, aboard an English slave
ship. Drury’s wife refused to leave, fearing the
Tandroy myth which promised an unnatural
death to any slave who escaped. Drury
struggled to find a place in English society, and
in a bizarre twist, actually returned to Africa,
but this time as a slaver.

7. Philip Ashton
Philip Ashton was minding his own business
working on a fishing boat off the coast of Nova
Scotia in 1723 when he and his fellow sailors
were captured by pirates. The pirate captain,
Ned Low, gave the men a choice—become
pirates or die. Philip Ashton was 19. He chose
“pirate.”
Ashton wanted no part of the cruelty and
barbarism which now surrounded him, nor did
he want to be executed for piracy when
Captain Low’s luck finally ran out. Eight months
into his pirate career, Ashton found his chance
to escape. Low anchored off the coast of an
island near Honduras and sent men, including
Ashton, ashore to attain freshwater. As the men
finished filling the ship’s casks with water from
a stream, Ashton innocently strolled away.
When his fellow pirates asked him what he was
doing, Ashton yelled “Coconuts!” and took off
into the jungle. A week later, the search for
Ashton was over and he was alone. The island
was plentiful with fruit and tortoise eggs, which
was good, since Ashton was barefoot and
empty-handed when he escaped.
That changed after nine months of isolation
when a Spanish trader in a canoe stopped at
the island. He promised to send help to
Ashton’s island after he left. In the meantime,
he left Ashton with a knife and flint, which
allowed him to hunt and cook for the first time
since being marooned. It was seven more
months before another group of sailors would
rescue Ashton

6. The Crew Of The Peggy
American sloop The Peggy was returning to
New York in 1765 after trading in the Azores.
For almost the entire month of November, The
Peggy struggled to cross the Atlantic as one
storm after another pounded the ship. The
mast, sails, and rigging were all damaged. The
ship was adrift and it’s hull was leaking badly.
What few provisions survived the storms were
quickly exhausted as the crew worked
desperately to keep The Peggy afloat. It was
obvious the men of The Peggy would starve
long before reaching land, even after the ship’s
cat was killed and eaten. Their only hope was
the unlikely chance another ship might pass
nearby.
Initial talk of cannibalism among the crew was
shut down by the captain, David Harrison, but
it was futile. By mid-January, the crew had
eaten all the leather and candles aboard the
ship, and with Captain Harrison bedridden, the
crew resorted to cannibalism. The customary
lottery was mere pretense—it seems the crew
had already decided Harrison’s black
manservant should be the one to make the
ultimate “sacrifice.”
At the end of January, the body of the servant
was gone and the captain clung to life on a
mixture of water and rum rather than take part
in the cannibalistic proceedings. A second
lottery was conducted, but the victim, David
Flatt, was granted a night’s reprieve to pray
thanks to the pleas of a haggard Captain
Harrison. Miraculously, a London-bound ship
brought salvation to all aboard The Peggy—
including Flatt—the next morning. The crew of
The Peggy had been preparing a fire to cook
the next victim when the captain of The Susan
provided the starving sailors with food, tackle,
and escort to London.

5. Robert Jeffery
Robert Jeffery was a young sailor in the Royal
Navy in 1807. While aboard the HMS Recruit,
he sneaked an extra drink of beer. The captain,
who may have been drunk himself, responded
to the offense by marooning the 18-year-old on
the next island the ship passed. Jeffery was left
on a rocky outcropping with no food or water as
the crew begged their captain to reconsider.
Jeffery’s story would have ended soon after,
had an American ship not rescued him just nine
days later. In fact, the “case” of Robert Jeffery
was just beginning.
The public was outraged by the Captain’s
behavior and court martial followed. In 1810,
when the missing Robert Jeffery was found
living in Massachusetts working as a
blacksmith, another public fervor erupted.
Jeffery’s mother was still alive and well in
England and the British citizenry demanded
they be reunited. A Royal Navy vessel was
dispatched and the public waited in suspense
for its—and Jeffery’s—return.
When Robert Jeffery finally arrived back in his
hometown in England, church bells and waiting
crowds greeted him. The press and public
watched as mother and son reunited in
heartfelt excitement. One last public outcry
served to help Robert Jeffery—the captain who
had marooned Jeffery three years earlier was
found and compelled to pay his former
crewman reparations for having nearly killed
him.

4. Charles Barnard
Captain Charles Barnard spotted smoke while
on a sealing expedition near the Falklands in
1812. When he investigated, he found 45
shipwrecked British sailors. Barnard promised to
deliver them to the nearest South American
port so long as they promised not to hijack the
ship, since the War of 1812 was raging up
north. Proof that no good deed goes
unpunished, when Barnard stopped at another
island and went ashore in a small boat to hunt
pigs to feed everyone aboard, the Brits he
rescued from certain death sailed away in his
ship. What Barnard likely never imagined was
that the British would leave three of their own
to die with him.
Barnard, his one fellow American, and the three
British sailors survived for 18 months on various
islands and in their rowboat until a British ship
rescued them in 1814. Barnard and his
companions, now all “Americans,” asked to be
put ashore in his boat off the coast of Peru, only
to be identified and imprisoned as Englishmen
by the Spaniards. It took months for Barnard to
clear his name, but he found passage again on
a British ship and again asked to be cut loose in
his little seal boat, this time to do some sealing.
Barnard didn’t find the seals he’d hoped for,
but he did find an American ship which offered
him passage. Barnard accepted and sailed to
China and the Sandwich islands before
returning to America in 1816

3. The Crew Of The Essex
The accounts of the whaleboat The Essex
directly inspired Herman Melville to write Moby
Dick, as The Essex was to the “19th century
what the Titanic was to the 20th.”
In 1819, The Essex left Nantucket for what was
expected to be a two-and-a-half-year whaling
expedition. On the second day of the voyage,
strong storms seriously damaged the ship and
threatened to sink it, but the ship was refitted
and pressed onward. Several months later and
a thousand miles from land, an enormous whale
rammed the ship. As the crew started to assess
the damage, the whale struck the ship again,
holing the ship so viciously, the men aboard
hurriedly lowered the boats and grabbed a few
provisions.
The 20 men, spread across three boats,
decided to head south for fear of cannibals on
the nearest land, the Marquesas Islands. It was
a fateful decision. Within weeks, the boats were
leaky and the food stores were gone. The first
man who died was immediately consumed.
Three more sailors died and each was cooked
and eaten. One of the three boats disappeared,
never to be heard from again. The other two
boats, one led by Captain Pollard and the other
headed by First Mate Owen Chase, became
separated.
After 89 days at sea, the three men on Chase’s
boat were rescued by an English ship. Aboard
Pollard’s boat, the men drew lots and Pollard’s
younger cousin was next eaten, though Pollard
asked to take his place. A week after Chase was
rescued, an American ship found Pollard and
another crewman gnawing on the bones of
their shipmates, still crazed with hunger.
Decades later, Melville met the captain who
inspired his fiction, but only exchanged
pleasantries out of respect for Pollard’s ordeal.

2.The Other Survivors Of
The Essex
Not long after the crew in their whaleboats
departed the foundering Essex, they spotted
what is now Henderson Island. The men went
ashore thinking of salvation, only to find a
barren wasteland. Despite the island’s lack of
freshwater and food, three men chose to
chance it and stay behind. At the very least,
the three boats’ meager supplies might go a
little farther that way.
It proved a comparatively good choice, though
the situation was almost always desperate.
Rainwater which collected in rock pools around
the island helped slake the men’s thirst, but
food was difficult to come by. They lacked the
equipment to fish and quickly devoured the
crabs that inhabited the small island. The trio
was reduced to drinking the blood of whatever
birds they could catch and found a poignant
portend of their likely future when they
stumbled across the skeletons of several
previous castaways.
Nearly every resource on the island had been
exhausted during the 111 days the men spent
there. Were it not for Owen Chase beckoning
his rescuers to search the Pitcairn Islands, the
three crew members left behind on Henderson
would almost certainly have died of thirst, as
the previous castaways to find themselves on
the island did.

1. Bernard Carnot
Not much is known about Bernard Carnot. All
that is know for certain is that he was the son
of a New Orleans innkeeper, and through a
series of misunderstandings, he was convicted
of a murder he did not commit and sent to
Devil’s Island in 1922 part of the French penal
colony system off the coast French Guiana.
Devil’s Island, as the name suggests, is hell on
earth. It’s a rocky jungle of an island, rife with
tropical disease, mosquitoes, and prisoner-on-
prisoner violence. It was surrounded by sharks,
as well as currents that had a tendency to dash
one against the rocks which surround Devil’s
island.
After sixteen years, almost all record and trace
of Carnot had disappeared—that is, until an
American Don Quixote, William Willis, met
Carnot’s mother in New York. Hearing Carnot’s
mother’s tale, Willis traveled to South America
and enlisted the help of ex-convicts and current
prisoners within the penal colony to find Carnot
and help the him escape. When Carnot was
found, he was barely alive and wearing nothing
but rags. Willis provided him with a fake
passport, money, and clothing, then smuggled
Carnot aboard a supply ship which took him to
Brazil. As if he hadn’t suffered enough, it’s
believed that Carnot may have been killed in
action after joining the French forces under
Charles de Gaulle during World War II.

Yungchoooppp
Since you gave up woman-wrappering, your inspiration is flowing well!
I enjoyed this!!
My favorite is Robert Drury and the other survivors of Essex...
As much as I enjoyed reading this, I don't enjoy those Pirate movies.

Lemme buy this land before I read so I can sell it for 200m since nigeria will soon be borning millionaires anyhow anyhow

Kachisbarbie: Yungchoooppp
Since you gave up woman-wrappering, your inspiration is flowing well!
I enjoyed this!!
My favorite is Robert Drury and the other survivors of Essex...
As much as I enjoyed reading this, I don't enjoy those Pirate movies.

mine is robert drury too! The nigga got balls mehn

Very inspirational, never say die