Five Trivia about Shipwreck Survivors
Learn five things in less than a minute.
We have to start with the most famous castaway of all - Robinson Crusoe, the eponymous protagonist of the novel by Daniel Defoe, first published on 25 April 1719, and is generally seen as a contender for the first English novel. It has gone on to become one of the most widely published books in history, spawning so many imitations, not only in literature but also in film, television, and radio, that its name is used to define a genre, the Robinsonade - a desert island story or a castaway narrative.
(The story has been thought to be based on the life of Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish castaway who lived for four years on a Pacific island called "Más a Tierra" (now part of Chile) which was renamed Robinson Crusoe Island in 1966.)
Gonzalo Guerrero was a Spanish shipwreck survivor who's foundered off the Yucatán peninsula in south-east Mexico, and its 16 survivors became the first Europeans to experience Mayan civilization. He married a high-born Mayan woman, had three children – the first mestizos (persons of mixed Spanish and Amerinidan ancestry) – and integrated into Mayan society, even worshipping their gods. When Cortés attacked the Mayans, Guerrero accepted command of a Mayan army sent to beat them off.
(Guerrero is honoured in Mexico. For centuries, however, he was demonized in Spanish literature as a monster who betrayed his own faith and people.)
Here’s a trivium on the current pop culture shipwreck icon - The Titanic.
Two survivors of previous shipwrecks who decided to sail on the Titanic - Violet Jessop and Ramon Artagaveytia.
Violet Jessop has the dubious honour of being in all the sister ships - Olympic, Britannic and Titanic, when they were shipwrecked. She survived all of them and continued to work on ships.
Ramon Artagaveytia’s is a more sombre story. He survived a fire and sinking of the ship America, about forty years before the Titanic. He hoped that by travelling on the supposedly ‘unsinkable’ Titanic, his nightmares on shipboard travel would cease. His body was never recovered.
The story of the whaling ship Essex is forever immortalized as the true story that partially inspired Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
The Essex and her crew had been experiencing a streak of bad luck. An abnormally large sperm whale attacked the Essex—perhaps the sound of repairs had drawn its attention - ramming the ship two times before swimming away and leaving the crew to their grim fate. The 20 men split across three small whaleboats, only two of which had any navigational instrument. Only eight survived.
The Medusa ran aground on a sandbar 50 km from the west coast of Africa. Unable to free the ship, some people set sail in lifeboats; a few stayed behind, and 146 people were put on a raft. When the raft was found 13 days later, only 15 subjects had survived. Reports of cannibalism and murder were rampant. Of the 17 men who stayed with the ship, only 3 were still alive 56 days later when the captain went back in an unsuccessful attempt to save the cargo.
Gericault immortalized this tragedy in the painting "Le Radeau de la Meduse".
One more thing -
The Island of Dr. Moreau, Castaway, Lifeboat, The Odyssey, The Flying Dutchman, Gulliver’s Travels, The Marie Celeste, USS Indianapolis, The Wellerman etc are just a few topics among the many shipwreck related fiction and non-fiction items, that I could not cover in this article.
Strictly speaking, the title ought to be Five Trivium, but I chose trivia since it is more accessible.
And please DM, mail, chat with me if there are topics that you would like to see.