Survival
The passengers and crew took off from the disaster site in lifeboats, but not without difficulty. All on board, thirty-eight men, eventually evacuated to the shore of Iliamna Bay, however the extremely high surf and frequent ice cakes caused the men to look pessimistically on their docking probabilities. The men would then face the relentless cold, snow, and lack of adequate nutrition for twenty-nine days, before being rescued by the S.S Victoria. They lived off the few provisions that had been saved from the accident, including sails, tarpaulins, passenger baggage and mattresses. They had no artificial source of light, and water had to be acquired by melting snow. The typical meal included raw bacon and frozen bread. Throughout the subsequent days men travelled back to the shipwreck to scavenge for any materials that may prove useful. Consequently several convenience items were haphazardly constructed, including makeshift stoves. As temperatures plummeted to −40 °F (−40 °C), fuel for warmth was generated by driftwood found in the snowy banks of the shore.
Read more about this topic: Farallon Steamship Disaster
Famous quotes containing the word survival:
“However great a man’s fear of life, suicide remains the courageous act, the clear-headed act of a mathematician. The suicide has judged by the laws of chance—so many odds against one that to live will be more miserable than to die. His sense of mathematics is greater than his sense of survival. But think how a sense of survival must clamour to be heard at the last moment, what excuses it must present of a totally unscientific nature.”
—Graham Greene (1904–1991)
“It is almost as if you were frantically constructing another world while the world that you live in dissolves beneath your feet, and that your survival depends on completing this construction at least one second before the old habitation collapses.”
—Tennessee Williams (1914–1983)
“We never stop investigating. We are never satisfied that we know enough to get by. Every question we answer leads on to another question. This has become the greatest survival trick of our species.”
—Desmond Morris (b. 1928)