I was recently thinking about the movie Castaway starring Tom Hanks. In case you didn’t see it; the movie is about a Fedex employee whose plane goes down in the South Pacific and ends up stranded on a small island.
Anyway, that movie got me thinking about whether or not there are currently any real life castaways who are sitting on deserted islands somewhere on Earth because of plane crashes or shipwrecks. Of course no one knows for sure (if we did, we’d go pick them up, right?). However, I was wondering what the odds were that there is someone in that prediciment right now. Of course, there would be numerous variables to take into account (health, access to food/water, shelter, climate, etc.), but I was wondering if someone with more knowledge than I could give a better breakdown on the odds.
This was a similiar situtation without the island - There was a guy who was stuck on his sailboat drifting at sea for about 6 months - he was picked up by the Navy last year. He had planned a short trip but somehow the boat had problems and he could not get back to land. The boat was in such bad shape the Navy sank it but that left him homeless since the boat was where he lived. I guess he had enough food since the boat was his home and he probably caught rain to drink.
There’s a man called Tom Leopard who lives on an island of the coast of Scotland in a shelter which he built himself he is the most tatoo’d man in the world IIRC. he only leaves the island to get food from the local town which is on the mainland. ill be back with a cite soon.
Sorry i meant to add: he is not a castaway per se but his situation although self-imposed is semi-castawayish. also his name is spelt Leppard sorry. This is about his tattoos. and this mentions more about his way of life. And finally this is an Observer article about him.
Eh, that guy is hardly the most tattooed man in the world. There’s this fellow from Germany that has his entire body (head to toe, even his genitals) tattooed completely with black ink.
I would find it very hard to believe that any tropical island that was large enough, had enough food, enough fresh water, that no one else would already be living on it, and own it, that the government would not be stopping by each year to get the property taxes on it, or that no people in sailboats would not be stopping in such a place at least several times a year.
I used to read Cruising World magazine. It is a yachting magazine, but the title alone makes it worth buying.
Anyway, and with no cite, there was a story some twenty years ago about a (French?) kid making his third round-the-world solo. He was unmasted and overturned in sudden storm. So fast in fact all his electronics were destroyed.
Annoying Nitpick: The name of the movie is Cast Away. It’s not a noun saying what he is (a castaway), it’s describing what happened to him (he was cast away.)
Steven Callahan survived at sea in an inflatable lifeboat for 67 days before being picked up. The Bailey family were adrift for 118 days before being found. They weren’t on land but still.
There are other survival tales with similar feel such as the young woman (can’t remember her name) who survived the plane she was on breaking up in the air. She fell god knows how far and walked out of the jungle on a broken leg.
Well I’m sure that island countries like Indonesia or The Phillipines that comprise thousands of islands, include many tiny, uninhabited islets that are seldom if ever visited, least of all by tax collectors. Just because an island falls within a governmental jurisdiction doesn’t mean you couldn’t still be marooned on it.
There is another movie called Castaway, where a man and woman go live a castaway like existence for a year on an island, near, I believe Austrailia. It was a planned castaway though. Based on a true story, IIRC.
