₦airaland Forum

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.

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

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.

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.

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.

Kachisbarbie: Lol...
Bc I can see you now run an Institute of Woman-wrappering...just kidding.
I have replied you...check.

I've stopped it. @priscaoge arabic is just so fvcking simple mehn, asin when you know its literatures and musical parts mehn!! Try listening to arab musics and see, I can even rap with arabic

Kachisbarbie: Hah...yungchop??
Na you be this
Lol
That chinese go hard well-well. Whenever I watch Chinese films way back without subtitle, I am always Sooooo lost.

you've been ignoring me since 23april 1890

So nairalanders which of em are you fluent in?? Am fluent in Arabic being a muslim and was born in Qatar. Am currently learning german and russian! Russian is so simple but has so many false friends alphabets, just get it right and you're good to go!

Top 1: Chinese
Chinese forms one of the branches of the
Sino-Tibetan language family and over one
billion people can name it as their native
language. The relationship between the
spoken and written Chinese language is
rather complex. Its written form has no
clues as to how it is actually pronounced.
The tone system also is a pain because there
are many homophones in Chinese only
distinguishable by the four tones. Even this
is often not enough unless the actual context
and exact phrase are identified.

Top 2: Greek
As an independent branch of the Indo-
European family of languages, the Greek
language features the longest and most
documented history. It is spoken mainly
across Greece and Cyprus. Along its history,
its syllabic structure has remained constant.
It has a mixed syllable structure, allowing
for relatively complex combinations of
sounds. In addition, Greek possesses an
extensive set of productive derivational
affixes and a rich inflectional system.

Top 3: Arabic
Arabic, belonging to the Afro-Asiatic
language family, includes both the literary
language and varieties of Arabic spoken
across the Middle East, North Africa, and the
Horn of Africa. The language has a complex
and unusual method in constructing words
from a basic root. For instance, nouns in
Literary Arabic have three grammatical
cases, three numbers, two genders and
three "states."

Top 4: Icelandic
Icelandic, a North Germanic language, is the
main language of Iceland. Icelandic is hard
to learn because of its archaic vocabulary
and complex grammar. Icelandic retains
many grammatical features of other ancient
Germanic languages, and modern Icelandic
is still a heavily inflected language.

Top 5: Japanese
Japanese is an East Asian language spoken
primarily in Japan. According to documents,
Chinese had a considerable influence on the
vocabulary and phonology of Old Japanese.
Since 1945, it has borrowed a large number
of words from English, especially vocabulary
relating to technology. One major reason
which makes the language so hard to learn
is that the written code is different from the
spoken code. In addition, Japanese has an
extensive grammatical system to express
politeness and formalities.

Top 6: Finnish
As a language spoken by the majority of the
population in Finland, Finnish is hard to
learn for its extremely complicated
grammar and "endless derivative suffixes."
Finnish employs extensive modifiers to
verbs, nouns, pronouns, adjectives and
numerals, depending on their roles in the
sentence.

Top 7: German
As one of the world's major languages,
German holds the largest number of native
speakers within the European Union. It is a
language which contains several standard
dialects, both in its spoken and written
forms. As an inflected language with three
grammatical genders, it has a large number
of words deriving from the same root.

Top 8: Norwegian
Norwegian is a North Germanic language
spoken primarily in Norway, where it is the
official language. It is among the world's
languages that's the most difficult to learn
how to speak well. No officially sanctioned
standard of spoken Norwegian is in place
and most Norwegians speak their own
dialect at any given time.

Top 9: Danish
Danish is a North Germanic language spoken
by some 6 million people. The sound system
of Danish is in many ways unusual among
the world's languages, which makes it one of
the hardest languages in the world to learn,
as the spoken language usually does not
sound anything like its written version.

Top 10: French
As an official language in 29 countries,
French is a challenging language. However,
it can be seen as both easy and hard,
depending on the learner's native language.
French is a Roman language. If the learner's
grasp of other Roman languages such as
Italian, Portuguese and Spanish is strong,
French will be a very quick and enjoyable
new language to acquire. Otherwise, for
those coming from a completely different
language family, learning French would be
considerably more difficult. Its
pronunciation follows very strict rules based
on the spelling, which is often based more
on history than phonology.

marieolae: no I won't

why have you been ignoring me? Just answer me and I'll stop stalking you

Nobleval: I've heard you. Continue with your fantasies!

the girl drag me for ground sha!

Kachisbarbie: Nne I dey o, body dey do me somehow...very weak and clumsy these days. thanks for your concern...
How far that stuff, did you get them...my mail isn't working,so I wouldn't have gotten any mail, in case you sent one.

greetings!

Nobleval: Guy you are a disgrace to men. Shame on you!

die jor

Am not a son of a billionaire but am a trillionaire in the making, ma bank account currently says 1X0, Bleep, Bleep. Can't wwait to finish school, those lekki houses dey hungry mee die

chimerase2: smh some guys re just pathetic

# gives him a kick on his balls #

And who says I won't be a multimillionaire by the age of 24? Baba God! You must bless me oh!

The everlasting kpekus noni

marieolae: Sorry for u my dear

you removed me on BBM? Why na? #crying

Bigfat what's up man?? I need cheap english speaking universities in germany jare. Undergrad medicine thanks in advance!

Kachisbarbie: happy new month of February...in this September@dp

you get the love and caring to take care of her ba? Issokay
...congrats o...Allah is una strength

oya upload ya pic I said I want to always be seeing ya pics there .

#madeOFbLack!! Guy you know why I like you?? You no dey waste time at all, you graduate last week and you just rush wan go knack kpekus kia kia,, the thing don dey hungry from school?? life is too short no to knack kpekus on time WUHML man!

#madeOFbLack!! Guy you know why I like you?? You no dey waste time at all, you graduate last week and you just rush wan go knack kpekus kia kia,, the thing don dey hungry from school?? life is too short no to knack kpekus on time WUHML man!