The Man Who Stopped Waiting

My ship's home port was Barcelona, and as a young cadet I had far more evenings there than money. On shore leave I walked La Rambla end to end, past the flower stalls, the card tricksters and a human statue painted silver who blinked only when a coin hit his tin. People sat for hours over one small coffee. I could afford to watch them sit.

La Rambla, Barcelona, where a cadet with empty pockets could still buy a front-row seat to the world. Photo: Jorge Láscar, CC BY 2.0, via Wikimedia Commons

Then it was back to the port, up the gangway, and within a day the city lights were gone. At night on deck the sea has no edge. Black water runs into black sky, and the ship feels like the last solid object in the universe.

Every cadet hears a few stories on those night watches, passed down like old photographs in a family album. The one that still raises the hair on my arms is about a ship's steward who could barely swim. He stayed alive on a wooden raft, alone, for one hundred and thirty-three days.

His name was Poon Lim. Born on Hainan island in 1918, he was twenty-four and a second steward on a British merchant ship called the Benlomond. Stewards live near the bottom of a ship's ladder. They carry the plates and keep out of the officers' way. I know the type well. On my first ship, I was the type.

The Benlomond left Cape Town for Surinam on the tenth of November, 1942. Thirteen days later a German submarine, U-172, found her in the South Atlantic. One torpedo was enough, and she went down within minutes. Of the fifty-odd men aboard, one lived.

U-172, the submarine that sank the Benlomond, photographed by a US Navy aircraft on 13 December 1943, the day she herself was sunk. US Navy photo 80-G-208207, public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Poon Lim floated for about two hours in a life jacket before he spotted an empty raft, eight feet square, and hauled himself aboard. Lashed to it were tins of biscuits, a jug of water, a little chocolate, rope, canvas and a flashlight. Far off he saw another raft with a few men on it, waving at him. He had no oars. The current pulled the two rafts apart, and he never saw those men again.

For the first weeks he did what you and I would do. He rationed the biscuits, sipped the water and watched the horizon, certain the navy would come looking for a sunken ship. One freighter passed close enough for him to make out sailors on its deck. It kept going.

Around the fifty-fifth day the biscuits ran out. Fifteen days later, the water followed.

Then the steward stopped waiting. He decided to stay alive for as long as it took, rescue or no rescue.

He pulled the spring out of the flashlight and bent it into a fishhook. He unpicked the rope for a line and used the canvas of his life jacket to catch rain. When seabirds came for the fish drying on his raft, he caught the seabirds. One afternoon a shark took his bait, and he fought it on eight feet of wood with a water jug, then dried its fins in the sun the way the fishermen of Hainan did when he was a boy. He swam twice a day with a rope tied to his waist to keep his legs working. He tied a knot for every day.

Three US Navy airmen beside the rubber raft that carried them for thirty-four days in the Pacific, 1942. A raft looks very small once you have seen one next to a man. Photo: San Diego Air and Space Museum Archives, via Wikimedia Commons

Then a storm washed away his dried fish and his water. He started again.

Near the end the sea changed colour, from deep blue to a muddy green. Rivers do that to an ocean. On the fifth of April, 1943, three Brazilian fishermen found him near the mouth of a river on the coast of Brazil. He was twenty pounds lighter. He walked ashore on his own legs.

King George VI gave him the British Empire Medal, and the Royal Navy wrote his methods into its survival manuals. When a reporter told him nobody had ever lasted that long on a raft, he said he hoped nobody would ever have to break his record. More than eighty years on, nobody has.

I have told this story in rooms full of people, and the part they always remember is the shark. Fair enough. A man fighting a shark with a water jug is hard to forget. The part I keep returning to is quieter, and it happens inside his head. The raft stayed eight feet square for all one hundred and thirty-three days. What changed was the question he woke up with.

For weeks it was, when will they come for me? Every ship that sailed past answered that one cruelly. Later it became, what can I do with this raft today? That question had answers, and every answer was food or water.

Which question did you wake up with this morning?

Admiral James Stockdale spent more than seven years in a prisoner-of-war camp in Hanoi. Years later the writer Jim Collins asked him which prisoners failed to make it home. The optimists, Stockdale told him. They promised themselves they would be out by Christmas. Christmas came and went, and so did Easter, and each broken deadline took a little more out of them.

The men who came home did two things at once. They looked at the worst facts of their situation without flinching, and they kept an unshakeable faith that they would get out in the end. Collins called it the Stockdale Paradox. Poon Lim lived it on a raft decades before anyone gave it a name.

In a laboratory at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s, a scientist named Curt Richter dropped rats into tall jars of water and timed how long they swam. Many gave up within fifteen minutes. Then he changed one detail. Just before a rat went under, he lifted it out, held it for a moment and dropped it back in.

Those rats swam for up to sixty hours.

The water stayed exactly as deep. A few seconds in a warm hand had taught the rat that the struggle could end, and that belief kept its legs moving for days.

The psychologist Julian Rotter had a name for the difference between Poon Lim in week one and Poon Lim in week ten. He called it locus of control. People who feel their lives sit in the hands of luck or a passing ship tend to give up early. People who feel their own hands shape the next hour bounce back faster from almost everything life throws at them.

Poon Lim had zero say over the war or the currents. He took full charge of eight feet of wood, and it was enough.

I wish I had known his story better when my food delivery business was going under. I had built it on a hub-and-spoke model, funded it with a loan and was quietly proud of my spreadsheets. Then demonetisation hit while my partner was fighting battles of his own, and the money ran thin. I spent weeks staring at the horizon. One more loan. One good month. I could see the ships out there, and each one sailed past.

The day I asked what I could still build with what was left was the day the business closed and my real education began. I came out of it fine. My spreadsheets came out of it humbled.

Mind Flow opens your universe to you through your mind. I have said that line on a lot of stages, and a steward on a raft explains it better than I ever have. His universe measured eight feet by eight feet. In the first weeks his mind showed him a waiting room. By the second month the same planks had become a kitchen and a fishing boat, with a swimming pool off the side twice a day.

That is self-authorship. The storm will do whatever storms do. You pick up the pen anyway and write the next line.

You are probably sitting on a raft of your own right now. A job that has gone flat, perhaps, or a loan that keeps you up at night. And if you are anything like me, you are rationing your energy and staring at the horizon, waiting for a ship called promotion or a lucky break.

What can I do with my raft today?

Try his question tomorrow morning, before you touch your phone. Write one answer on paper, however small. A bent spring counts. A single phone call counts. Get it done before noon, and tie your knot.

Ships may still come, and I hope they do. Plenty of them passed Poon Lim. The boat that finally saved him was a small fishing boat near a river mouth, and he only drifted that far because he had spent four months refusing to die politely.

Tonight, look down at the eight feet of wood beneath you. Then bend the wire into a hook, and in the morning tie one more knot.