Of course they would stop!
FYI - Movies are FANTASY MAKE-BELIEVE and have nothing to do with real life!
Same thing happened to us, but fortunately, we were on the way back from Catalina. My buddy and i spotted the yacht waving at us, and told the deckhand. Cost us a couple of hours.
I’m friends with a guy whose brother was on The Pride of Baltimore when it sank.
A relevant quote from a People Magazine story:
I had the thought that this tradition is so much in contrast to mountain climbing, so much so that the slopes of Mount Everest are littered with hundreds of unrecovered corpses.
It’s a tradition anywhere in the outdoors, even Mountain Climbing. But too many guides on Everest are blinded by cash to see the right path.
Mount Everest is different. And in almost all cases people will help you if you’re still alive. But if you’re in the Death Zone on Everest nobody is going to drag your corpse down the mountain. It’s one thing to risk your life for someone in trouble. It’s another to risk your life for a corpse.
You’re not risking your life if it’s on the way up. You’re just risking your money.
There is a very long tradition of sailors helping each other in such situations, but it is now officially part of the Law of the Seas, specifically the 1982 United Nations Convention on the Law of the Seas, article 98. Almost all the flag-of-convenience countries (Panama, Liberia, Marshall Islands, etc) are signatories. The United States is one of the few holdouts.
In the film he was seen because he started a fire. This put an end to his raft of course.
Bringing back 200+ lbs of dead weight is not an easy task.
sometimes you get picked up and when you get back home people thought you were dead and your girlfriend married the guy who did a root canal on you. 
But she still has your Jeep so you get that back and drive to Texas.
Not true if you are in the death zone. Humans are physiologically incapable of adapting to the low oxygen pressure up there. If you go there, you are literally dying slowly for every minute you are there. Your only hope is to get out before your time runs out. A healthy human can survive for 24 hours or so, so many people can make it to the summit and back, but some don’t make it in time.
Sure, so turning back early would be safer, then, yes?
Yes, turning back unencumbered is usually safer than going on.
But turning back at the cost of picking up and carrying a 75kg deadweight is not necessarily going to be safer.
If you’re in trouble, but can still walk, a rescue may be feasible. But if you can’t walk and have to be carried, any rescue attempt is going to put the rescuers in grave danger.
Sailors are also generally guys “doing their job”, they are not voluntarily doing something insanely dangerous for thrills then expecting the rest of the world to save them when stuff goes pear shaped. Sailors may make hundreds of trips without incident, stumbling across someone in distress is extremely rare. On Everest, everyone is in some kind of distress, some just more than others.
A more apt comparison: There are plenty of scenarios where firefighters are unable to execute a rescue of a living person just 10-15 feet away in a fire or structural collapse because it is too dangerous for them to do so, it happens more than you might like to think. The environment is the enemy.
Even another ship is not going to attempt a rescue if it would seriously endanger their own ship in the process.
Turning back without any additional encumberances, yes.
Turning back dragging weight equal to double your current load, you exert yourself harder, go more hypoxic and collapse, now you are another problem.
I was an EMT
I have training in high angle rescue
I took a bunch of additional training in environmental emergencies (cold, heat, immersion, exposure, etc)
I would not attempt a “death zone” rescue.
Even the USCG will suspend SAR operations if they deem them too dangerous.
As UDS & drachillix pointed out, dragging another person in that O[sub]2[/sub]-poor elevation is substantially harder, especially in the more technical sections where you need to climb, not walk.
The same applies at lower elevations; if you sprain your ankle in the woods, I can put your arm over my shoulder & support some of your weight but I can’t help you up/down a ladder or rock wall (w/o extra resources, like ropes)
For the record, a life raft is NOT the same as a life boat. During routine operations on the ocean, there’s probably not more than 2 crewmen on the bridge of a container ship except when the watch is changing. It’s unlikely there’s a crewman scanning the horizon forward, port, and starboard with binoculars.
The standard arrangement is the OOW and a lookout.
The lookout’s job is, uh, to look out. So he should be scanning the horizon. But we all know how the world works of course.
The OOW will typically be monitoring the vessel’s position at regular intervals, making course changes as required and doing other paperwork in between when safe to do so. Plus he is* in theory* supposed to back up the lookout by looking out. When he can. But again, we all know the way the world works.
Right you are: Death in the clouds: The problem with Everest’s 200+ bodies