The Young Man & the Sea

THE WEST INDIES The Young Man & the Sea

The young man had sailed alone on his raft for 51 days. When he boarded the British freighter Arakaka in the Atlantic three weeks ago, he had a thick, dark beard, and his rotted clothing was caked with salt and fish blood. He was a Frenchman named Alain Louis Bombard, 28, he told open-mouthed passengers and crewmen. He had set out on the raft from Las Palmas in the Canary Islands in mid-October. Since then, he had lived solely on food and drink gathered at sea: fish, sea birds, barnacles, plankton (minute animal and vegetable life floating at the surface), sea water, rain and dew. He had endured his epic voyage, he said, to prove his theory that victims of shipwreck can survive at sea indefinitely if they have the necessary knowledge and equipment, and do not fall into panic or despair.

Channel Storm. A plump, eupeptic medical doctor, Bombard began developing his theory in 1951, when he and a friend were caught in a storm while venturing across the English Channel in a small rubber boat. The craft tossed about for five days, and in that time Bombard and his companion had nothing to eat except half a kilo of butter they had brought along as a gift for a friend in England. This experience would have soured most men on seafaring for life, but in Bombard it kindled a consuming interest in the techniques of survival. Bombard persuaded a Dutch manufacturer of lifeboat and liferaft equipment to finance his research.

After six months of studying and experimenting at Monte Carlo's world-famed Oceanographic Institute, Bombard concluded that limited quantities of sea water (not more than a quart a day) plus fluids pressed from raw fish can supply the body's need for water without harm to the system. He also concluded that fish contain all the nutrients necessary to health except vitamin C, which can be obtained from plankton. Bombard saw no reason why a man equipped with fishing tackle and fine-mesh nets for gathering plankton could not obtain from the sea enough food and water to stay alive—and even healthy —for weeks at a time. Determined to prove his theory, he set out from Tangier one morning last August, alone aboard a 15-ft. raft buoyed up by rubberized-fabric pontoons, and christened L'Heretique.

Alone on a Wide, Wide Sea. After eight days at sea, Bombard turned up at Casablanca, 200 miles south of Tangier on the African coast. From Casablanca he sailed to the Canaries. Leaving L'Heretique at Las Palmas, he flew to Paris to see his wife and their newborn daughter. At last, in October, he hoisted his small, triangular sail, set out again from Las Palmas on the long voyage across the Atlantic.