Today in History—October 19: Alain Bombard’s Shipwreck Survival Experiment Launches

On this day in 1952, a French doctor began a dangerous experiment. On himself. In an inflatable raft. In the Atlantic Ocean.

Stories of sailors’ deaths during World War II sparked the idea. Or possibly it was a 1951 French trawler accident: The dead were brought to the hospital where junior doctor Alain Bombard was working.

He believed deaths from starvation, exhaustion, and dehydration could be prevented if lifeboats were provisioned differently. He changed the course of his career to prove it.

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He reasoned that if boats had equipment for catching fish and producing drinking water, sailors could hang on until they were rescued. (Or until they washed ashore.)

His list of proposed equipment included fishing nets (obvious), plankton nets (less obvious: for catching vitamin-rich plankton), fishhooks (sure), and fish-squeezing tools (I’m sorry to tell you that this exists, but pressing fish produces a small amount of liquid that, Bombard reasoned, could be used to dilute seawater to make it palatable, and as unappealing as that sounds, it does sound better than death by dehydration).

The idea that shipwreck survivors could safely drink limited quantities of saltwater—long believed to hasten death—was considered unbelievable.

So, Bombard set out from the Canary Islands.

He almost died a few times. He lost consciousness and toenails. He ate plankton, raw fish, and one meal aboard a passing cargo boat (intestinal regret: immediate). He drank seawater and whatever you call fish juice. He faced sharks, storms, and swordfish attacks.

He washed ashore in Barbados on Christmas Eve, some 65 days later, emaciated to the point that his weakened spine would later require bone grafts for support. But his experiment had been mostly a success. He had suffered and survived, and he would spend the rest of his life campaigning for better-equipped lifeboats, including during his brief tenure as environment minister of France and his much longer stint as a member of the European Parliament.

First, though, he had to walk two miles to the nearest police station to report his arrival in Barbados.

There’s now a line of life rafts named after Bombard. They may not carry all the provisions he recommended, but they do often come with solar stills and desalination kits.