A 10,000-foot freefall into the Amazon rainforest, an Oscar-nominated cosmic catastrophe and a barely-believable 438-day odyssey across the Pacific – the world's most remarkable survival stories come with a slice of extraordinary willpower, a helping of excruciating suffering and a large dollop of dumb luck. Life can be taken away in an instant, but it can also cling on over weeks, months and even years in the most relentless conditions. The tales that follow are equal parts uplifting and horrifying – and in some cases require a strong stomach.
If Australian mountaineer Lincoln Hall had died on Mount Everest in May 2006, as everyone involved thought he would, he would hardly have been the first. At least 310 people have perished on the mountain's pitiless slopes since records began in 1920, and when Hall developed cerebral edema (an acute form of altitude sickness) shortly after starting his descent from the summit, he looked doomed. He began to hallucinate and became unresponsive, and with night falling and oxygen supplies dwindling, his sherpa guides were ordered to leave the apparently deceased climber at an altitude of 28,500 feet (8,700m) – comfortably within Everest's famous 'death zone'.
Hall's death was promptly announced to friends and family, but come morning a second team came across the climber – sitting cross-legged and halfway through changing his shirt. "I imagine you're surprised to see me here," he apparently remarked to his flabbergasted rescuers, who noted his lack of hat, gloves, glasses, sleeping bag, oxygen mask and water bottle. Though delusional and badly frostbitten he could walk, and was slowly and carefully coaxed down the mountain by a 12-strong sherpa rescue team. No one had ever survived a night in Everest's death zone before, and all he lost was a frostbitten toe.
Do you think you could survive for 40 days alone in the Amazon jungle? If you think you could, you're almost certainly wrong, but four young children miraculously managed it, the youngest of whom marked his first birthday lost beneath the canopy of the Colombian rainforest. Lesly, Soleiny, Tien Noriel and Cristin (13, nine, four and one) were travelling with their mother when their single-engine plane nose-dived into the jungle, killing all three adult passengers. Rescuers eventually found the plane – along with the body of the children's mother – but the only signs of the children were a tiny pair of abandoned shoes, a baby bottle and footprints leading away from the wreckage.
A massive rescue effort creaked into motion, spanning 130 special forces commandos and Colombia's most experienced Indigenous guides, but it was still more than a month before the children were found, thin but in remarkable health. As members of the Huitoto Indigenous group, the children were well-versed in the lore of the forest; they knew which seeds would sustain them, sheltered under a mosquito net weighed down with banana leaves and, instead of a bottle, used leaves to drip yucca mixture into the baby's mouth. "They know how to survive in the jungle," said General Pedro Sanchez, who led the rescue operation, "how to eat, how to drink...and how to protect from 16 hours a day of rain."
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Most sailors have at some point asked themselves 'what if?' – what if my rudder breaks, my hull implodes and I end up adrift in the open ocean? For veteran seaman Steven Callahan the nightmare became reality in 1981 when his 21-foot (6m) sloop the Napoleon Solo, which he had designed himself, sank in the middle of the Atlantic after some sort of nighttime collision. Callahan retreated to his life raft, but conducted several dives back into his sinking vessel to collect flares, a sleeping bag, navigation charts, a spear gun and a battered copy of Sea Survival, written by fellow former castaway Dougal Robertson. He was 800 miles (1,287km) west of the Canary Islands – and drifting the other way.
He spearfished mahi-mahi and triggerfish, procured water with two solar stills and failed agonisingly to attract the attention of passing cargo ships. He kept a log to safeguard his sanity (the night sky was "a view of heaven from a seat in hell"), lost a third of his body weight and developed painful saltwater sores. After 76 days his solar stills had stopped working, and he was near death when he was finally picked up by fishermen near Guadeloupe. He's since written a best-selling account of his experiences, Adrift: Seventy-six Days Lost at Sea, and was a consultant on the set of Ang Lee's surreal lost-at-sea story Life of Pi.
Oscar-winning 2015 film The Revenant is loosely based on a true story (we repeat, loosely), and although the real Hugh Glass did not end his ordeal punching Tom Hardy in a frozen river, it's true that he was savaged by a grizzly bear before traversing hundreds of miles alone to reach safety. A hardened frontiersman trapping beaver in modern-day South Dakota, Glass and his group had already been ambushed by Arikara warriors before the mauling, which left him with a broken leg, a ripped scalp, a punctured throat and gashes so deep they exposed a rib.
Left for dead by the comrades allotted to guard him, the gravely injured Glass then walked, waded and crawled across the frontier's frozen wastes to reach sanctuary at Fort Kiowa, between 200 and 300 miles (320 and 480km) away. The severity of his ordeal quickly made Glass a folk hero, and since the man himself did not leave any written sources it can be difficult to sort fact from myth. Accounts that he subsisted on buffalo carrion and let maggots eat his rotting flesh to avoid gangrene are impossible to verify, but we know his journey took around two months. Little did Glass know, as he slowly recovered from his wounds, that one day his story would finally win Leo DiCaprio his Oscar.
Juliane Koepcke's survival story stretches across 11 days, but the real miracle is that she survived its first 40 seconds. The daughter of German zoologists who ran a research station deep in the Amazon rainforest, Koepcke was just 17 when she boarded LANSA Flight 508 with her mother on Christmas Eve, 1971. The plane was struck by lightning and disintegrated mid-air, causing Koepcke to plummet 10,000 feet (3,000m) still strapped to her seat. The canopy below staggered her fall, and, when she came to, Koepcke found herself in the heart of the Peruvian jungle with a broken collarbone, cuts and a concussion – the sole survivor of the flight.
For a week and a half she wandered the jungle, stumbling across the bodies of other passengers, freezing through the nights in a torn mini-dress and struggling to see without her glasses. By the 10th day she could barely stand and drifted downriver in a hallucinatory daze, finally coming across a hut used by local fishermen – her first sign of civilisation. She used gasoline to cleanse a wound on her arm that was infested with maggots, and when the fishermen arrived they gave her food and returned her to her father. Her story has since seen several film adaptations, including 1974's Miracles Still Happen (pictured) and Werner Herzog documentary Wings of Hope.
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A notoriously grim tale of human survival against all odds, the passengers of Uruguayan Air Force Flight 571 resorted to cannibalism to survive 72 days stranded in the mountains of western Argentina in 1972, an event nicknamed the Miracle of the Andes. Their plane clipped a mountain after a navigational error, and sent the 45 passengers – 19 of whom were members of a Uruguayan rugby team – spiralling to the foot of a glacier at an altitude of 11,700 feet (3,500m). The group tried to use lipstick to write 'SOS' on the fuselage but could not make the letters visible from above, and rescue aircraft passed overhead three times without spotting the white wreckage against the snow.
At least 16 people died in the crash or shortly after, while on day 17 an avalanche claimed eight more lives, including the demoralising loss of team captain Marcelo Perez. With their meagre rations long gone, the desperate survivors took the collective decision to cannibalise the deceased – fearing damnation as well as revulsion due to their Catholic faith. With the weather improving but hope running out, two men heroically scaled the 15,260-foot (4,650m) mountain without equipment and trekked into Chile in search of help. After 10 days, they found it, and the remaining survivors were helicoptered to safety. It remains one of the most improbable survival stories in human history.
Anyone who completes the Marathon des Sables – a six-day, 160-mile (250km) ultramarathon through the Sahara Desert in which every competitor carries their food and tent on their back – has had a sort-of survival story. None more so than Mauro Prosperi, an Italian policeman and former Olympic pentathlete who kept running through a violent sandstorm on day four even though he'd lost sight of his fellow racers. When the sandstorm abated he was hopelessly lost, and frustration about throwing away a fourth place finish steadily gave way to mortal panic as the endless dunes stretched to the horizon on all sides.
After several days rationing his last half-bottle of water he stumbled across a desert shrine, killed the resident bats and drank their blood. A plane passed overhead, but another sandstorm obscured him and his desolation deepened. Sure he was doomed, he slit his wrists and lay down to die, but dehydration had thickened his blood and it refused to drain. Even his eventual salvation was laboured: after nine days he stumbled into a Tuareg village but found that he'd accidentally crossed the border into Algeria, so was initially arrested and blindfolded by military police on suspicion of spying.
In Herman Melville's masterwork Moby Dick, Captain Ahab and his crew go through hell and high water in their feverish pursuit of the titular whale. But nothing in the book is nearly so nasty as the true story that helped inspire it – that of American whaling ship the Essex and its beleaguered crew. The three-masted vessel set off on its fateful final voyage in 1819 with a crew of 21, restocking at the Galapagos Islands before heading to an extremely remote stretch of the South Pacific. There the ship was rammed and sunk by an agitated sperm whale, leaving the surviving crew adrift more than 4,000 miles (7,400km) from the South American coast in three small vessels with limited provisions.
Each boat was commanded by an officer – Captain Pollard, First Mate Chase (pictured in later life) and Second Mate Joy – and the vessels were separated by storms. Chase's boat lost two sailors to exposure but was found by a British brig after 89 days at sea. Joy's boat had no navigational equipment and was never seen again. Cannibalism occurred on all three boats, but Pollard's remains the most notorious, as the desperate sailors eventually drew lots and a teenage crew member was shot, killed and consumed. Pollard and one surviving comrade were eventually found, delirious, by a fellow whaleship after 92 days adrift. Of the Essex's 21-strong crew, only eight returned to dry land.
A legendary tale of fortitude from the Heroic Age of Antarctic Exploration – you may know this one. Part of a lifelong effort to reach the South Pole, British explorer Ernest Shackleton sailed his ship the Endurance southward over the Weddell Sea in late-1914, but struck disaster when the ship was trapped by pack ice in December. For nearly a year the crew worked to free the stricken vessel, but abandoned ship in October as the Endurance was finally crushed by the shifting ice. Over the following months Shackleton led his men on an epic journey across the treacherous ice pack in three lifeboats in search of land, reaching the uninhabited Elephant Island in April, 1916.
The expedition was documented by photographer Frank Hurley, and images of sailors hacking at the Endurance's hull with pickaxes, catching emperor penguin chicks and playing football on the ice floes remain lodged in popular memory. The worst was yet to come, as Shackleton and five others then sailed one of their tiny vessels 800 miles (1300km) across the brutal seas of the Southern Ocean to South Georgia, before returning on a rescue ship in August. All 28 crew eventually returned to Britain to tell their remarkable tale. Technically, Shackleton's expedition was an abject failure, but in the eyes of the public then, and historians now, it was an astonishing success.
Most survival stories are tales of extreme endurance, but Ada Blackjack did more than endure her environment – she conquered it. Recruited as a seamstress for an appallingly ill-advised and underprepared expedition to Wrangell Island, an uninhabited rock in the Russian Arctic known as 'the polar bear maternity ward', she set sail in 1921 with four male comrades and a cat. Blackjack was an Inupiat woman from the Alaskan north, but she had been raised by Methodist missionaries to cook and sew and had no knowledge of hunting or bushcraft. She had reservations about the mission, but desperately needed the $50 fee to save herself from destitution and her son from tuberculosis.
The group was quickly trapped on the island by ice and soon ran out of provisions. Three of her colleagues set out across the ice pack and were never seen again, leaving her to care for the fourth who eventually died of scurvy. Now alone against the elements, Blackjack suddenly thrived: she taught herself to trap and shoot, reinforced her tent with timber and built a gun rack above her bed to ward off bear attacks. When schooner the Donaldson finally arrived to end her two-year ordeal, Blackjack greeted the crew with a smile in a reindeer-skin coat she'd stitched herself. "Blackjack," they noted, "mastered her environment so far that it seems likely she could have lived there another year."
Four hundred and thirty eight days is an unimaginable amount of time to spend lost at sea – and when shark fisherman Jose Salvador Alvarenga washed ashore on Tile Islet in the Marshall Islands in 2014, there was scepticism that his story could possibly be true. It was only when reporters and scientists dug into his tale – his physical condition, his survival techniques, the witnesses that had seen him cast off – that the world began to come to terms with the extent of his ordeal. He set sail from the west coast of Mexico in 2012 in a 23-foot (7m) vessel expecting a 30-hour shift of deep-sea fishing, and did not see land again for 14 months.
Set adrift by a storm and a broken engine, he survived on fish, turtles, sea birds, rainwater, his own urine and his devout Christian faith. He had one crewmate – Ezequiel Cordoba – who died after around four months after starting to refuse food. Alvarenga contemplated suicide after losing his companion, and had one-sided conversations with his corpse for six days before laying his body overboard. Alvarenga saw several cargo ships during his voyage, but was never sure whether they were hallucinations. Certainly, they didn't rescue him. When he finally swam to shore at Tile Islet he was 6,700 miles (10,782km) from his starting point, and long, long presumed dead.
We've seen impenetrable jungles, empty ocean horizons and the freezing wastes of the Antarctic, but there is no environment on Earth so hostile as the infinite vacuum of space. Astronauts Jim Lovell, Fred Haise and Jack Swigert blasted off on the Apollo 13 mission on April 11, 1970, intending to become the third NASA team to walk on the moon, but their quest became a desperate battle for survival when an oxygen tank exploded two days into their journey. "Houston," said Lovell, famously, "we've had a problem."