Poon Lim spent 133 days on a raft and walked away

Poon Lim, second steward on the British merchant ship Ben Lomond, had been afloat in the South Atlantic for two days when he understood that nobody was coming for him. The German submarine U-172 had sunk his ship on 23 November 1942, some 750 miles east of Brazil, and the Ben Lomond went down in two minutes. Lim climbed onto a wooden raft eight feet to a side, stocked with tins of biscuit, sugar and about forty litres of water, and he stayed there 133 days: the record for surviving alone on a raft, never beaten, and he walked off it.

The astonishing part is the engineering. He took apart the raft's torch to get at the spring and bent the wire into a fish hook; he unravelled the lifeline to braid a fishing line; he used soaked biscuit as bait. When he caught more than he could eat, he dried the fish on a cord tied to the canvas. He caught a seagull that landed on his awning. He collected rain in the sheet and slipped into the water twice a day so as not to lose muscle.

On 5 April 1943 three Brazilian fishermen picked him up off Belém. He had lost nine kilos and reached the shore on his own feet. George VI gave him the British Empire Medal, and the Royal Navy put his tricks into its survival manuals, where they remain.