20 Historical Survival Stories So Extreme They Seem Impossible

On August 6, 1945, a Japanese engineer named Tsutomu Yamaguchi happened to be in Hiroshima for work. Yamaguchi was very close to the blast that destroyed the city, leaving him burned and with ruptured eardrums. He took shelter for the night and returned home to Nagasaki the following day. Three days later, as he told his boss about the first bomb, the second dropped. Miraculously, Yamaguchi survived both bombings and lived a long life. The Japanese government eventually declared him the sole officially recognized double survivor of the two blasts.

Louis Zamperini, who had previously competed in the Olympics before joining the Army Air Forces as a bombardier, survived when his B-24 crashed into the central Pacific, killing most of the crew. Drifting on a raft with his pilot, Russell Allen Phillips, and a tail gunner, Zamperini used oars to ward off sharks and ate raw fish until the gunner died. They were picked up after 47 days and approximately 2,000 miles in the Marshall Islands by Japanese authorities, who subsequently imprisoned them for two more years.

In 1823, Hugh Glass, an American fur trapper, was attacked by a grizzly bear along the banks of South Dakota’s Grand River. The animal tore off much of his flesh and broke his leg, and two other members of his party, assuming he would die, abandoned him unarmed and without provisions. Glass made his way back, covering approximately 200 miles over the course of six weeks. He subsisted on berries and roots, and scavenged wolf kills. When he eventually tracked down the men who deserted him, he forgave them both.

After the Endurance was crushed by Antarctic pack ice in 1915, 28 men were stranded on uninhabited Elephant Island. For 16 days, Ernest Shackleton and five men, including navigator Frank Worsley, rowed and sailed a small open boat, the James Caird, for 800 miles over the Southern Ocean to South Georgia Island in treacherous conditions. Afterward, they hiked across the unknown mountains of the island until they reached a whaling station. From there, Shackleton managed to organize the rescue of every man he had left behind.

During World War II, the Navy cruiser USS Indianapolis, which had just delivered parts for the atomic bomb, was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and sank within minutes in the Philippine Sea. About 900 of its crew went into the water with few rafts. Because mismanaged communications delayed any rescue effort, the survivors waited four days in the water for rescue, suffering from dehydration, exposure, and repeated shark attacks. They were finally found by a patrol plane that happened to fly overhead, and only 316 survived.

In 1704, Alexander Selkirk, a Scottish sailing master, requested that he be left on a deserted Pacific island off the coast of Chile following an argument with his captain over the condition of the vessel, which was suffering from a rotting hull. He spent the first few weeks in deep depression with just a musket, a hatchet, and a Bible. Eventually, he adapted to his situation, catching wild goats and building huts for shelter. He remained on the island for over four years until a passing ship rescued him. His story later inspired Daniel Defoe’s classic novel, Robinson Crusoe.

Jan Baalsrud, a Norwegian commando trained by British intelligence, was the sole survivor when German forces ambushed his sabotage team in 1943. He swam barefoot through freezing fjords, then ran through snow-blindness in subzero temperatures in the mountains near Troms, Norway, and survived an avalanche. He even cut off nine of his own frostbitten toes with a pocketknife when gangrene set in. More than 70 Norwegians risked their lives to hide him and guide him along, until Sami reindeer herders carried him across the border into Sweden.

Poon Lim was a steward in the British Merchant Navy whose ship had been torpedoed by a U-boat in the South Atlantic, leaving him floating on an eight-foot wooden life raft. When his food ran out, he fashioned a hook out of the wire from a flashlight, fished for seabirds, drank rainwater, and wrestled a small shark onto the raft to eat it. Brazilian fishermen rescued him 133 days later. It remains the longest confirmed survival on a raft.

Juana Maria was the last remaining member of California’s indigenous Nicoleño tribe, whose members had been decimated by otter hunters. After the other survivors were evacuated in 1835, she lived alone on San Nicolas Island for the next 18 years. She made a house out of whale bones, and wove fishing line from seal sinew. In 1853, she was discovered by George Nidever, another hunter. He took her to the mainland, but she fell ill and died seven weeks later. Her life later formed the basis for the book Island of the Blue Dolphins.

In 1943, Władysław Szpilman, a Polish-Jewish pianist in Warsaw, Poland, escaped the Warsaw Ghetto after his family had been shipped off to the Treblinka death camp. He lived in safe houses, and after the Warsaw Uprising in 1944, he took refuge in abandoned, freezing-cold, bombed-out attics, subsisting on scraps of food. A German officer named Wilm Hosenfeld discovered him there. Rather than killing him, the officer brought him food and clothing when he heard him play the piano. Szpilman survived until Soviet troops liberated the city in 1945.

In 1912, the Australian geologist Douglas Mawson was in the field with a three-man sledging party. One of his men, Belgrave Ninnis, fell into a crevasse. Mawson and his last man, Xavier Mertz, ate all their remaining dogs to keep themselves alive on the return journey. Mertz succumbed to starvation, hypothermia and likely dog-liver poisoning. Mawson carried on alone. He survived frostbite and a crevasse fall, and reached his base camp just in time to see the relief ship depart. The next season Mawson would have to spend another winter at the base.

The 14-year-old French sailor Narcisse Pelletier was left behind on the Cape York Peninsula in northern Australia in 1858, after their ship went aground there during a search for fresh water. When he was found by the local Indigenous Uutaalnganu people, they nursed him back to health, and he was adopted into their tribe as Ampo. He lived with them for 17 years, hunting and receiving tribal markings. A passing pearl-shelling crew later spotted him and forced him to return to France with them, though historical records show he was deeply reluctant to leave his adoptive family.

In 1542, a wealthy French noblewoman named Marguerite de La Rocque was stranded, along with her lover, her maid, and the baby she had with him, on a desolate island in the Gulf of St. Lawrence as punishment for an illicit romance during the trip to New France. Her relative, Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval, who commanded the expedition, provided her only a musket. Marguerite’s lover, maid, and baby perished in the frigid weather, while Marguerite survived for over two years, hunting animals until she was picked up by Basque fishermen.

In March of 1791, Mary Bryant, a 26-year-old convict at the penal colony of Port Jackson, Australia, decided to escape starvation. Along with her husband, William, their young daughter and son, and another seven convicts, she made off with the governor’s open six-oared boat. For 66 days they battled reefs and starvation while navigating thousands of miles of unknown coast until they arrived at Timor, posing as shipwrecked sailors. Although they were soon exposed, the public was in favor of Mary, and she was pardoned by the King. Her husband and children died of fever en route back to England.

John Colter, a former member of the Lewis and Clark Expedition turned fur trapper, was ambushed by Blackfeet near Montana’s Jefferson River in about 1808. The warriors stripped him naked, killed his trapping partner for fighting back, and gave Colter a head start in a footrace. After running five miles, Colter disarmed and killed the only warrior who had managed to catch up to him, and made his way into an underwater beaver lodge. From there he walked nearly 300 miles, still naked, to reach the nearest fort.

In 1528, Álvar Núñez Cabeza de Vaca, a Spanish nobleman acting as treasurer for a colony expedition that went awry, washed ashore near Galveston Island after disease and storms wiped out most of his 300-man crew. For the next eight years, he and three other survivors, including an enslaved Moroccan man known as Estevanico, wandered around Texas and the American Southwest, trading with Native Americans, learning their language, and gaining renown as healers. Eventually, all four men made it to Spanish troops outside Sinaloa, Mexico.

In 1883, Gloucester, Massachusetts, fisherman Howard Blackburn found himself separated from his schooner in a blizzard off Newfoundland with only his dorymate, Thomas Welch. When he lost his mittens, Blackburn had to let his bare hands freeze around the oars so he could keep rowing even after he could no longer feel them. Welch froze to death the next day, but Blackburn managed to row for five more days before reaching a sparsely populated settlement. In time, he would sail the Atlantic alone, twice.

After Fletcher Christian, an officer on HMS Bounty, led a mutiny in 1789, he threw Captain William Bligh and a handful of loyal seamen into the open boat, which was virtually bare of supplies or charts. Bligh measured out minuscule amounts of bread with coconut-shell scoops, and navigated by pocket watch through tempests and dangerous currents. In a packed vessel, they sailed 3,618 nautical miles, eventually finding refuge in Timor. Only one man died, killed by islanders early on. Every other man survived thanks to Bligh’s rationing and navigation.

In 1935, Antoine de Saint-Exupéry, a French pilot and author, was competing in an air race from Paris to Saigon when his plane crashed into the side of a sand ridge close to Wadi Natrun, Egypt. His mechanic, André Prévost, and he were not injured but had no means of communication and few provisions, just a thermos of coffee, a small bottle of wine, and some fruit. Lost, thirsty, and hallucinating from dehydration, they tramped around in the Sahara for four days until a Bedouin on a camel found them and gave them a drink. They survived. He recounts the experience in Wind, Sand and Stars.

Ada Blackjack was an Inupiaq seamstress from Nome, Alaska, who had never gone hunting or trapping when she signed up for an Arctic expedition to Wrangel Island. When supply ships couldn’t break through the ice, the others set out across it and vanished, leaving Ada behind to nurse a sick crewmate, Lorne Knight. Knight, too, died of scurvy. Left entirely alone, Ada spent the following eight months teaching herself how to trap and shoot. She hunted seals and polar bears, and survived.

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