5 Incredible True Stories of Castaways Who Lived to Tell the Tale

Survival stories of castaways have long captivated audiences. Daniel Defoe’s 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe was so successful that it inspired a slew of copycat books (known as Robinsonades), while a little more recently, Tom Hanks’s performance in Cast Away (2000) had audiences crying over Wilson the volleyball.

In real life, those who end up as castaways on deserted islands or drifting at sea sadly don’t often survive to tell the tale, but some people throughout history have managed to beat the odds after being marooned. Here are five such examples—from a man who asked to be left on a desert island to a woman who gave birth while a castaway.

1. Alexander Selkirk
2. Philip Ashton
3. Marguerite de La Rocque
4. The Tongan Castaways
5. Steven Callahan

Alexander Selkirk

Alexander Selkirk was the real-life Robinson Crusoe, with his castaway experience likely serving as the inspiration for Daniel Defoe’s seminal book. But while the fictional character ended up on a desert island because of a storm, the real man actually requested to be left there.

Selkirk was born in Scotland and took to the seas as a buccaneer under Captain William Dampier in 1703. Dampier and his crew were essentially pirates, but they were authorized by the English government to attack Spanish ships.

The Cinque Ports sustained damage during these skirmishes, and Selkirk, doubting the ship’s seaworthiness, asked to be put ashore on the nearest large island in September 1704. That turned out to be one of the Juan Fernández Islands, around 400 miles off the west coast of Chile.

Selkirk regretted his decision soon after the Cinque Ports disappeared over the horizon. Although he had plenty of food and made life easier by taming goats (which he ate and used for clothing) and cats (which kept the rats away), the isolation took a toll on his mental state. According to the account of his eventual rescuer, Captain Woodes Rogers, Selkirk “had much ado to bear up against Melancholy and the Terror from being left alone in such a desolate place.”

Two ships had actually anchored at the island before Captain Rogers arrived, but both were Spanish and so Selkirk—fearing he would be attacked—hid from them. He was finally rescued on February 2, 1709, by Rogers’s Duke, which happened to be piloted by Dampier. Selkirk learned that his suspicions about the Cinque Ports had been correct—it sank not long after he was put ashore, and most of the crew drowned.

Philip Ashton

In the early 1720s, Philip Ashton found himself between a rock and a hard place—or, more specifically, between pirates and a desert island. In June 1722, Ashton had been captured by pirates while working as a fisherman off the coast of Nova Scotia (although he was originally from Massachusetts). After refusing to join the crew, he became the prisoner of notorious pirate Captain Edward Low, who had a reputation for torturing his enemies and captives.

Ashton was always looking for a chance to escape, but the opportunity didn’t present itself until March 1723, when the Rebecca anchored at the then-uninhabited Caribbean island of Roatán.

Once on dry land—and under the guise of collecting freshwater and coconuts—Ashton took off into the trees and hid until the pirates gave up their search and left. He survived on fruit and turtle eggs for the first few months, after which he got some tools—including a knife and flint—from an Englishman who arrived on the island but then promptly disappeared while hunting (he presumably died).

In June 1724, Ashton had human contact again—this time in the form of 18 men from the Gulf of Honduras who were seeking refuge from the Spanish and Native Americans. By this point, island life had turned him into, in his own words, “a Poor, Ragged, Lean, Wan, Forlorn, Wild, Miserable Object.”

It wasn’t until March 1725 that Ashton was finally rescued by the Diamond—a ship which happened to hail from his home state of Massachusetts and delivered him back there safely a little over two years after he arrived on Roatán.

Marguerite de La Rocque

In the spring of 1542, French noblewoman Marguerite de La Rocque set sail aboard the Valentine—one of three colonist ships voyaging to New France (now Canada’s Newfoundland and Nova Scotia). On the journey across the Atlantic, she started a relationship with a fellow passenger (whose identity has never been discovered).

When Jean-François de La Rocque de Roberval, the Lieutenant-General of New France and Marguerite’s relative, found out, he was so angered that he had her, her lover, and her handmaiden marooned on the Isle of Demons in the Gulf of St Lawrence. The trio was only left with a few scant supplies, including a gun and a Bible.

Not long after being left on the uninhabited island, Marguerite discovered that she was pregnant. Sadly, the baby died shortly after being born, and both Marguerite’s lover and handmaiden also met their ends on the island. Two and a half years after being cast ashore, Marguerite was rescued by a group of fishermen, who took her to Newfoundland before she returned to France.

The Tongan Castaways

In the mid-1960s, six teenage boys found themselves living out William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), but instead of turning on each other like the boys in the book, they came together in an effort to survive.

In June 1965, the boys ran away from their boarding school on Tongatapu, with plans to steal a boat and sail to Fiji. They got caught in a storm on their first night at sea, which destroyed the sail and left them drifting southwest. They only had a small supply of raw fish to eat and collected what rainwater they could to drink.

After eight days, they finally spotted the island of ‘Ata, which they reached after a grueling 36-hour swim (with the aid of planks from the rapidly disintegrating boat). The boys survived on a diet of shellfish, papaya, and coconuts, and they managed to build a fire and a palm frond shelter. They also built a raft in an attempt to escape, but it wasn’t seaworthy.

“I tried to not think about how long we were there,” recalled Sione Filipe Totau, who goes by Mano. “I lived in the hope that something would happen; that something good would come tomorrow.”

That day came on September 11, 1966—15 months after the boys arrived on the island. They were spotted by Australian fishermen aboard the Just David and were safely delivered back to their families in Tonga (although they were then briefly arrested for stealing the boat).

Steven Callahan

Although all castaways find themselves in a deeply unfortunate situation, Steven Callahan was particularly unlucky because he didn’t even have an island as a base. On January 29, 1982, the experienced sailor set out for Antigua from the Canary Islands in a vessel of his own making, the Napoleon Solo.

A week into the trip, his boat hit something (he thinks it was a whale or a big shark) in stormy weather and began to sink. Callahan bailed into a six-foot inflatable life raft—with as many supplies as he could grab—and was then cast adrift.

“I spent the next two and a half months learning to live like an aquatic caveman,” he later told People. He used solar stills to gather drinkable water and a spear to hunt the fish that gathered around his boat. It was that ecosystem that ended up saving his life (although it did also attract a few sharks). Callahan had passed many ships, but none of them spotted him.

It wasn’t until two fishermen saw the birds flying above his raft and went to investigate in the hope of finding fish that he was saved. He had drifted 1,800 miles across the sea to the Caribbean island of Marie Galante.

Callahan lost one-third of his body weight over the course of his 76 days at sea, and he was covered in salt sores, but he made a full recovery. The ordeal inspired him to design a better life raft—complete with a sail and rigid exterior—and he also worked as a consultant on Ang Lee’s Life of Pi (2012). 

More History Stories: