In the autumn of 1952, a small black rubber dinghy drifted out of the Canaries and into the immensity of the Atlantic Ocean. Its lone occupant was a doctor, Alain Bombard, a young French biologist determined to answer a deadly question. Every year, thousands of seafarers perished after shipwrecks, often within sight of potential salvation. Was it inevitable? Or could a human being, properly instructed and equipped with nothing but the sea around him, survive for weeks on end?
Bombard intended to prove the latter, and he was willing to risk his life to do it. His vessel, a 15-foot inflatable boat christened L’Hérétique, was loaded with the absolute minimum: a sextant, a few emergency tools, and books. What he refused to carry was the most shocking part—no food, no fresh water, and no full sails or engine to ease the journey. The point was not simply to cross the Atlantic. The point was to simulate a shipwreck, to live exactly as a castaway might, and to see if nature could supply what the body needed.
Alain Bombard on his raft.
Origins of a Radical Idea
Bombard’s experiment did not emerge from idle curiosity. In 1951, while working as a junior doctor at the hospital in Boulogne, a trawler sank in bad weather outside the harbour, and 43 bodies were brought to the hospital. “In spite of all our efforts we failed to revive a single one,” he wrote. “At that moment the full measure of the tragedy conjured up by the word ‘shipwreck’ was brought home to me.”
Bombard moved to the Oceanographic Institute, Monaco, to research the nutritional properties of marine creatures. Bombard believed the human body was far more resilient than commonly assumed. What doomed castaways, he argued, was ignorance of how to use the ocean’s resources.
His controversial theory held that a shipwrecked sailor should be able to survive indefinitely without supplies by drinking seawater, consuming raw fish for both food and fluids, and harvesting plankton for vitamins. The only way to prove this, he decided, was to undertake the ordeal himself.
The Voyage of L’Hérétique
Bombard began with a series of coastal trials in 1952, deliberately casting himself adrift in the Mediterranean. Satisfied with the results, he set off from Tenerife on October 19. For the next 65 days, Bombard lived at the mercy of the waves.
He allowed himself no freshwater stores and no food, and he drank from the sea—about a pint-and-half (about 700 ml) of seawater every day, supplemented by water squeezed from caught fish and the occasional rainwater. To ensure he did not fall victim to scurvy, Bombard towed a very fine silk net with which he managed to catch a fair amount of plankton as well as fish. One or two teaspoonful of this tiny organism a day provided him with the necessary vitamins. The meagre diet kept him alive, though at a cost: he lost more than 25 kilograms, suffered constant hunger, and endured painful sores.
Almost at the start of his voyage, a storm nearly wrecked his tiny craft. His sail was ripped and his spare was torn away, so that he had to repair the original with a needle and thread. Once, when his inflatable cushion fell aboard, Bombard dived in the waters to retrieve it and was horrified to discover that his sea anchor, a parachute-type canvas gadget used to slow down the boat, had fouled up the trailing ropes and the dinghy began to drift away. Only training as an accomplished swimmer (Bombard had swum across the English Channel in 1951, swimming 21 hours) enabled him to return to the dinghy safely.
Although Bombard was a great swimmer, he wasn’t much of a sailor. He carried a sextant but lacked the skills of a navigator. On his 53rd day at sea, he encountered a British freight liner, the Arakaka, whose crew informed him that he was still over 1,000 kilometers (620 miles) short of his goal. He thought of giving up and even accepted a meal from the crew. Bombard later wrote, the "fried egg, a little piece of liver, a spoonful of cabbage and some fruit... gave me the worst stomach trouble of the whole voyage." One thing the meal did, however, was to revive his sprits and he decided to continue with his journey.
At last, on December 23, 1952, L’Hérétique and her gaunt captain washed ashore in Barbados. Bombard had crossed more than 2,700 miles of ocean alone, alive, and triumphant.
Bombard's experiment was critically examined by the French and Taiwanese navies, both of which concurred with his findings. His ideas also attracted the attention of a German physician, Hannes Lindemann, who undertook two short Atlantic crossings of his own in an effort to test Bombard’s survival methods, especially the use of seawater. His feet and legs swelled dangerously. In his 1958 book Alone at Sea, he not only questioned the notion that seawater could sustain a castaway but went further, accusing Bombard of secretly carrying extra provisions.
Bombard, for his part, had never claimed that survival depended on drinking seawater alone. He consistently argued that only small, carefully limited quantities could be tolerated, and then only when combined, particularly in the absence of rainwater, with the fluids obtained from raw fish. Bombard argued that many castaways, once adrift and with all fresh water exhausted, turn to seawater (or even urine) only in a state of acute desperation. By now severely dehydrated, the kidneys can’t handle the sudden accumulation of salts and an agonising death soon follows, supporting the mariner’s lore that drinking seawater was fatal. According to Bombard the key was to drink early but drink little.
If there is nothing to drink, the body’s water content will decline steadily until death by dehydration occurs on about the tenth day.
Any supply of water or fresh liquid which becomes available at a late stage of this process, needs to exceed the day’s basic requirement, if it is to restore the body to a normal condition. The survivor has to ‘catchup’ on his body’s water content, and not just satisfy his day-to-day needs. The essential thing, therefore, is to maintain the body’s water content at its proper level during those first few days before fish can be caught. The only solution is to drink sea-water.
In 1958, while continuing his research into survival techniques, Bombard and six companions were testing a rubber dinghy in rough seas off the coast of Étel in Brittany when a powerful wave overturned the craft. A rescue team attempted to reach them, but the lifeboat itself was capsized by another massive wave, throwing nine of the fourteen rescuers into the water. In the end, only Bombard and four others survived the tragedy.
The route of Alain Bombard's oceanic voyage. Credit: Alain Bombard
Toward the end of the decade, Bombard established a floating marine laboratory named Coryphène, but the venture soon faced serious financial difficulties. He was eventually rescued—not by the sea this time, but by Paul Ricard, the pastis magnate, who offered support and later appointed Bombard director of his new Oceanographic Institute in 1966.
In 1974, Bombard joined the Socialist Party and became involved in an environmental advocacy group created by the polar explorer Paul-Émile Victor. Among its members were his close friends Jacques-Yves Cousteau and the volcanologist Haroun Tazieff. Bombard later entered local politics, and in May 1981 was appointed Minister of the Environment. His tenure was barely a month—cut short when his uncompromising views on hunting provoked opposition in influential circles.
That same year, however, he was elected to the European Parliament. From 1981 to 1994 he proved a forceful and persistent campaigner on environmental issues, speaking out on everything from nuclear power to the culling of baby seals. His strong opposition to the force-feeding of geese for pâté de foie gras even resulted in death threats against him and his family.
Alain Bombard died in 2005.
References:
# “Alain Bombard, 80, Dies; Sailed the Atlantic Alone”, The New York Times
# “Alain Bombard”, Times Online
# “The incredible story of the man who crossed the Atlantic in an inflatable boat without water”, Vela
# Alain Bombard, “The Bombard Story”
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