The Legend Of Poon Lim

[FIELD ETHOS]

The legend of Poon Lim | Field Ethos

By Sean Molina Day 87 The heat cooked his sunburned skin. His hands were split from saltwater and…

fieldethos.com

By Sean Molina

Day 87​

The heat cooked his sunburned skin. His hands were split from saltwater and rope. He was dehydrated, starving, and watching a shark circle his raft. Not a big shark. Just big enough to kill him.

A seagull flew overhead. When it came close, he caught it barehanded. He drank its blood, made jerky from the meat, and used the guts for bait. Then he pulled nails from the raft, bent them into hooks, and twisted flashlight wire into a makeshift fishing line, and snagged anything with a pulse.

After 87 days alone at sea, he wasn’t just surviving, he was fighting the ocean to stay alive.

November 23, 1942​

Two and a half months earlier, a German U-boat put a torpedo into the SS Benlomond and sent her under fast. No warning. No mercy. Just smoke, fire, and silence.

The ship split.

Some men went under with the engine room. Some went overboard. But only one made it to a raft.

Poon Lim—a Chinese sailor and British merchant marine steward—kicked through the wreckage and pulled himself onto a square wooden float the size of a pool table. He jimmy rigged a canvas canopy to give him shade and used a tin water jug to fight off sharks.

Lim was lucky enough to find an emergency locker floating from the Benlomond. Inside, a 40-liter tin of water, a tin of biscuits, a few lumps of sugar, some chocolate, a flare gun, and a flashlight—enough to stretch 12 days if you didn’t panic.

Lim didn’t panic.

He did the math, drank slow, chewed slower, and started planning for the long haul.

Day 112​

A shark came after his catch one night. It cut the line and took the whole damn fish. So Lim turned the wire into a snare and waited. The next time the shark showed up, he pulled it aboard and went to war. The blood turned the deck slick. He ate what he could, dried the meat on canvas, and stored the rest under the slats.

And then the storms came.

His raft would rise 10 feet, drop 15, vanish in troughs, and then disappear. So Lim tied himself to the mast with rope he braided from his own clothes, held his breath, and tried not to drown.

And then came the ships.

An American freighter. A Portuguese trawler. Two Navy destroyers. None of them stopped. Maybe they didn’t see him. Maybe they saw him. Maybe they didn’t. Maybe they thought it was a trap—just another decoy in a war full of them.

It didn’t matter. They kept moving. He kept drifting.

He stayed alive out of spite.

Medals Don’t Float​

He was near the mouth of the Amazon when a group of Brazilian fishermen spotted something on the horizon—a man so sunburnt and thin he looked like driftwood wrapped in skin. They pulled him aboard. Lim couldn’t walk. He could barely speak. He was a sunburned bag of bones that barely survived 133 days alone on the sea.

After the fisherman saved him, Lim was brought to life. The British gave him the Empire Medal. The Royal Navy put his survival methods in their manuals. Scientists studied him. Reporters chased him, and America gave him citizenship. But he took none of it like a hero. He just did what he had to.

When they asked him how he survived, he gave the same answer every time:

“I hope no one will ever have to try.”