What would you do if you were stranded on a desert island? Keep calm and wait for Man Friday? Finally decide on those Desert Island Discs? Fashion a boat out of nothing but a washed-up piece of portable toilet and some Hollywood-sized chutzpah a la Tom Hanks in Cast Away? Wish you were as handy, or at least as good looking, as the cast(aways) of Lost? Or would you take a different palm leaf out of the Book of Desert Island Rescue Motifs (one imagines it has a foreward written by Bear Grylls), write HELP in the sand with it, and wait …
This is what the three men who were stranded for three days on a desert island did last week. After their 19ft skiff was tossed in the sea following a storm the men swam to the long deserted Fanadik in the south Pacific (which is where the island in Lost is located). They were rescued by a US navy plane flying overhead whose crew spotted their giant message created with palm fronds on the beach.
Well played. Not only were they rescued, they also pulled off the kind of ironic cultural referencing that is sure to send your island rescue viral on social media – as with the fake news story about a woman who was found thanks to writing an SOS message that was spotted on Google Earth that was widely debunked in 2014.
The Oscar for most iconic rescue tactic has to go to John F Kennedy. In August 1943, while serving in the second world war, the future US president was stranded in the Solomon Islands after his boat was hit by a Japanese destroyer. They survived on an uninhabited island for six days on coconuts, before swimming to another island. Kennedy carved a message on a coconut shell and gave it to two natives to deliver to the base so they would be rescued. He later had the shell encased in wood and used it as a paperweight on his desk in the Oval Office.
When it comes to desert island rescues, the truth can occasionally be stranger than fiction. In 2011, a Scotsman named Daniel Defoe was rescued after he and his girlfriend were marooned by the tide on an uninhabited island in the Firth of Forth. Too close to Robinson Crusoe to be true? Apparently not. An extremely embarrassed Defoe and his partner were picked up from Cramond by a RNLI lifeboat. “Crusoe didn’t have a mobile phone,” the coastguard noted. “This Daniel Defoe did all the right things.”
Sometimes the old ways are the best ways. In 2005, 86 shipwrecked refugees, mostly young people from Ecuador and Peru, were rescued off the coast of Costa Rica after a fisherman found a message in a bottle they had thrown overboard. The group had been abandoned by people smugglers, who stripped the boat of radio and communication equipment. The message they wrote, using a method at least as old as Ancient Greece, simply read “please help us”.
