Are there actual cases of castaways rescued from deserted islands?

Dear Cecil:

With shows like Lost and Gilligan's Island, movies like Cast Away and Swiss Family Robinson, and books like Robinson Crusoe, I've been wondering: Are there documented cases of a person or persons being shipwrecked on an uncharted, deserted isle and surviving for some length of time only to be rescued later? Are there a lot of large, uninhabited islands in the South Pacific that could sustain a person indefinitely?

Cecil replies:

As usual, D., first we have to straighten out your question. The answer to the one you asked is is none too surprising: Yeah, lots of folks have survived shipwrecks, and some spent time on deserted islands in the process. To cite a well-known example, U.S. Navy lieutenant John F. Kennedy and the crew of PT-109 were rescued after several days on an island following the destruction of their boat in a nighttime collision with a Japanese warship in 1943.

But that’s not what you’re after. What you want to know is whether you can survive the classic Robinson Crusoe scenario, to my mind depicted in purest form in the Tom Hanks movie Cast Away (2000), which features a (1) solitary (2) product of civilization who is (3) unexpectedly marooned on (4) a deserted island for (5) a year or more with (6) only such resources as you’d reasonably expect to find, i.e., naturally occurring food, water, and so on plus a modicum of junk washing up on the beach.

Has anyone really endured such an ordeal? With one possible exception, no — even the fictional Crusoe caught some breaks. Here’s my list of top contenders (I’ve discounted poorly documented tales plus episodes of less than a year):

  • Alexander Selkirk. Published in 1719, Robinson Crusoe is widely accounted the first true English novel, one of the greatest adventure stories ever written, blah blah blah. Read it, though, and you realize our hero Rob has it plenty soft. His wrecked ship snags just off the island where he washes ashore; he spends 24 days scavenging tools, weapons, money, food, boards, rope, etc., eventually cobbling together digs that compare favorably with a Holiday Inn. As everyone knows, the real-life inspiration for Crusoe was Alexander Selkirk, who lived a solitary existence on Mas a Tierra Island, about 400 miles off the coast of Chile, from September 1704 to February 1709. What people don’t know is that (a) Selkirk wasn’t shipwrecked — he asked to be put ashore because he feared, correctly, that his creaky ship was doomed; (b) while he didn’t have the army-navy store’s worth of stuff that Crusoe did, he had his sea chest, a musket and ammo, flint and steel, a hatchet, a knife, a kettle, and so on; and (c) as desert islands go, Mas a Tierra was pretty plush, with a gentle climate, fresh water, and abundant shellfish and other edibles. Selkirk basically vegged on the beach for the first 18 months, although he did stir himself to Crusoe-like feats of industry thereafter.

As to whether the South Pacific has a lot of large, uninhabited islands that could sustain a person indefinitely — who cares? As Tom Neale showed, all you need is one.

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