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.

In the next seven weeks, he learned that his toughest problem was not food or drink but morale. The first few weeks were not so bad: the wind kept up, pushing him westward day by day, and life on the raft had not yet become grey, leaden monotony. But then the wind died away. For the next 27 days he just drifted, only now & then catching a faint breeze. Cheerful by nature, he often sank into deep troughs of depression as he looked out at the ever-empty horizon. Fortunately, there were daily chores to be done: fishing, keeping the log, plotting his position, measuring and recording his blood pressure and corpuscle counts. Fish were plentiful, especially flying fish, which obligingly got caught in the sail and flopped on to the deck during the night. Bombard tried to pass the time by listening to the radio, gazing at photographs of his wife and chil dren, studying plankton under a microscope, taking notes on marine life, composing music (two concertos and half a symphony, he later reported). After the radio battery petered out in mid-Atlantic, loneliness gripped him hard.

A Beach in Barbados. By the time Bombard met the Guiana-bound Arakaka, the unending calm had almost shattered his morale. But once aboard the ship, he perked up quickly, chattering away happily in French-accented English, delighted to learn that his calculated position was only 20 miles off. He took a fresh-water bath, broke his marine diet by eating an egg and drinking coffee. After an hour and a half, he went back to his raft with some apples and a fresh battery for his radio. Passengers watched and waved until the raft dwindled to a speck on the horizon and disappeared.

A wind blew up soon after Bombard left the Arakaka, and the rest of the voyage was, comparatively speaking, a breeze. For two weeks more he sailed alone. Then he met a small Dutch steamer, spent half an hour aboard. Early one morning last week, 63 days out of the Canaries, he spotted a light flashing ahead. Daylight revealed a brown fishing beach between two weathered, grey cliffs. Bombard had reached Stroud's Bay in the British West Indian island of Barbados. Within a few hours, he sat down to a hearty landsman's meal of grapefruit, bacon & eggs, bread, a pot of jam, coffee.

Bombard felt that he had proved his point. "It was wonderful, terrible and interesting," he said, "but I never want to eat fish again."

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