When his British merchant ship SS Benlomond was torpedoed and sunk by a German U-boat in the Atlantic Ocean, Chinese sailor Poon Lim became the sole survivor by leaping into the water and swimming to an uncovered eight-foot wooden life raft. For an astonishing 133 days, Poon Lim drifted completely alone across the open ocean, enduring severe sunburns, salt spray sores, and violent tropical storms. He kept himself alive by using a wire from a flashlight to catch fish, catching seabirds by baiting them with fish innards, and collecting rainwater in a canvas jacket, demonstrating an unparalleled individual capacity for physical ingenuity and psychological resilience until he drifted near the coast of Brazil.

Poon Lim's survival set a world record for individual open-ocean endurance on a raft, and his narrative was immediately incorporated into Royal Navy survival manuals and popular non-fiction literature. His historic ordeal provided mid-century maritime writers and poets with a profound real-world example of solitary stoicism, expanding the literary discourse surrounding individual human capability when stripped of all institutional support in the face of nature.