How a baker survived the Titanic by getting drunk (2022)
nationalpost.com
nationalpost.com
I was very lucky and made it the first time. When I got my head above the water, I was so exhausted I stayed there for a few minutes before climbing out of the water. Over the years, I've thought about this many times and, after a many years, came to the conclusion that calming myself after the initial terror probably saved my life. The calming came, I believe, because I was tired and stopped moving.
A really startling story. That is one of my nightmares as a parent. I really need to learn my kids to swim soon.
I wonder if you could actually stand on the bottom with your head over water if you tried? Like it is really hard to "jump" under water. And you don't really sink until your lungs are filled with water (I believe?).
That depends on how fat you are. And if there's any salt on the water.
For high school wrestling we got body fat analysis done. The, fit and healthy, women on the team were in the %30s while men down to the single digit %.
Fit women (just regularly fit, not even athletes) have body fat percentages in the 20s.
And unless all of you had been cutting for an event (in which case, why weren't the girls also doing that?), I highly doubt all the boys on your team had body fat percentages in the single digits. See e.g. this random sampling of NCAA wrestlers[0] with an average of ~14% body fat even excluding heavyweights.
Not to mention that describing high school students as "men" and "women" casts a fair bit of doubt on this story ever actually happening.
0. https://www.levelchanger.com/blog/2020/3/24/how-fat-are-coll...
My wife has low density fat, and she can't sink or dive for love or money.
Swimming as competitive sports never interested me at all, and unfortunately the training aspect of swimming is way too often hardlinked with it. And many other sports hobbies suffer from the same "this is a pipeline to create professional athletes from children" mentality.
I agree with what I think your basic point is. Swim well enough and comfortable enough so you probably won't drown in a trivial water situation or even doing stuff like canoeing/kayaking and that goes a long way.
Maybe it's my background but you end up in a river or a lake sooner or later. Or you step off into something that's a bit deeper than you expected. It seems pretty stupid to not be prepared for something that seems basically normal life for a lot of people that doesn't actually require a huge amount of work.
I taught/got my daughter to swim at an early age (4-5) for the safety benefit. I'd just take her to the pool once a week and we'd hang out and play, and over a year or two she just learnt to swim from being in the water!
Scroobius Pip talked about something similar in 1000 Words as well: https://youtu.be/7mrSi1DgCcI?t=69
After that day, I swore to be more careful next time!
I honestly cannot understand how a sane person can enter the water knowing that any problem, a hole, a higher wave is an almost certain death sentence.
Could it be that in addition to teaching us to swim, our parents taught us to fear and respect the sea? And that this simple precaution "is out of fashion"?
> Immediately after hearing the collision with an iceberg, the chief baker leapt out of his bunk and began dispatching his staff to stock the lifeboats with bread and biscuits ... Not only did Joughin refuse his own place in a boat, but he and a few other men began forcibly chucking reluctant women into empty seats, likely saving their lives ... while scholars have obsessed about the boozy reputation of Charles Joughin, beneath it all might simply have been a man unwilling to die. “It’s impossible for scientists to predict who will perform and respond well to extreme situations,” noted Cheung. “Some people give up very quickly, others you just cannot seem to kill.”
So, I'm not optimistic about my own chances in those situations.
https://homedialysis.org/news-and-research/blog/528-lifesavi....
Biscuits and water, but they were in locked boxes on the deck "for fear of theft" so that wasn't reliably transferred to the boats in the chaos
Alcohol really is a miraculous substance
“You have a defence if you can convince the court that you drank the alcohol in question after you had driven and that you were not over the limit whilst you were driving.”[1]
With that said, your BAC can be estimated from whatever you prove you drank after the accident, which would reveal a discrepancy. Not a reliable way to get away with a terrible crime.
[1] https://www.pattersonlaw.co.uk/faqs/drink-driving-leaving-sc...
One famous strategy is the pile and pertex combination. Where you have a thin basically windproof but not waterproof shell made typically from Pertex, and then fake fur from polyster on the inside.
These jackets are used to (might still be) be worn by law enforcement to old school rock climbers for it's ability to keep you warm and damp for hours.
There are videos of people submerging in ice cold water and "walking it off" until they are damp but warm again.
Another saying is "cotton kills", because it does not provide warmth when wet and also sucks up insane amounts of water for its weight, so it bascially never dries out.
I've been doing some cold plunges recently and the difference between still and moving water is staggering, as you quickly get a thermal layer around you. Surely clothes would help with that.
Statistically on a sinking ship a sailor who couldn’t swim had better chance of surviving than a sailor who was a good swimmer. In a cold Atlantic water the former had been expending less energy then the later, so he would last longer until being rescued.
I don't know about the statistics, but I'm descended from a small Scottish fishing village and remember being told that sailors didn't lean to swim. The logic was if you went overboard you were dead, the non swimmer would suffer less as they'd drown sooner.
I'm not sure how much truth is in that, and I doubt it applies these days as it was probably from the days of sail when a ship couldn't just stop & turn around.
Not the worst maritime disaster by loss of life (90K in Second Punic War storm; 100K in Mongol naval invasion typhoon disaster). Not even the worst of peacetime maritime accidents in the 20th century (Dona Paz, 1987, in the Philippines -- 4386 deaths). [0] There are easily forty WWII sinkings with greater loss of life. [1]
[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maritime_disasters [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_maritime_disasters_in_...
Eating fat during a ship sinking accident is probably better, but alcohol has more calories than sugar and having enough energy to survive in the cold is important.
We went out for drinks and then to recharge we walked to a pizzeria (I assume 24 hours) to get a few bites.
While I don’t normally drink I found I can hold my own with whiskey and I must’ve had about 10 (expensive!!) double shots over the course of 2 hours. Needless to say I was pretty buzzed.
Anyway, another group picked a fight with one of my friends; a hot pizza was thrown at the instigator’s face and a small brawl ensued. While I’m. it physical, when one of my friends tripped I weighed out how to help (mostly made them pause, so friend didn’t get stomped); then shortly after NYPD showed up.
Held hand up to show that I wasn’t a threat; saw the pepper spray out and the officer’s panicked face; and I closed my eyes because I knew what would happen.
After running away as a group—thankfully the witnesses pointed out the instigators and some sympathetic bouncers let us cut through another club—I also had the presence of mind to buy a quart of milk—reasoning the fat and cool liquid would help—to ready myself against the burn.
The point: Some individuals can be pretty trashed but still retain planning skills, concerns of responsibility.
The baker clearly fell into this category.
Sidenote: I’m glad it didn’t get into my eyes, but wow did the spray burn…even with milk.
I have no military background but do have (and teach) a couple of outdoor hobbies that have on three occasions caused me to think that there was a high chance I would not survive. I still sporadically wake up with nightmares of them years later.
Interestingly at each time my initial overwhelming thought was "I'm an idiot for letting this happen" while without really thinking I took action as I teach my students. In two cases I had a large dog with me and that was probably decisive. In all cases I was alone (not with other people, just the dog) which is also a massive risk factor. Obviously irrelevant to the Titanic case.
Booze didn’t protect Joughin from the cold that night, but it did give him just enough false hope and inflated confidence to think that he could doggy paddle his way out of history’s worst maritime disaster. And in this one case, that turned out to be true."
So, there's the Bear Grylls and Wim Hof and Les Stroud (etc.) survival methods -- do everything you can to survive -- but now there's also apparently the Charles Joughin survival method -- just get completely sh-tfaced drunk! Get completely hammered, get completely sloshed!
And well, that's it!
There's nothing more to do!
Let nature (or in this case, the sinking Titanic!) take care of itself!
All you gotta do is find some (well, technically a lot of) alcohol -- and imbibe it!
And well, that's it!
There's no survival techniques, no preparedness checks, no physical and mental strengthening beforehand, no grit, no training, no exercise, no survival will, no special survial equipment, no nothing required -- just booze!
And the guy actually survived! :-) <g> :-)
Amazing!
(Reminds me of two things: Jackie Chan in "Drunken Master", and the Hitchhiker Guide To The Galaxy's "Don't Panic" advice...
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0080179/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Phrases_from_The_Hitchhiker%27... )
Also, I vote that this is the funniest story that I've read on HN in a long time! <g> :-) <g>
If you ever have to take a cold shower, and aren't the sort for them normally, hold your arm in for a good long while before jumping in.
It's still going to be cold, but it's much less shocking than jumping in, between giving your brain time to get used to the idea and giving your body time to cut circulation to your skin and extremities.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Guðlaugur_Friðþórsson
His story was made into the movie The Deep (Djúpið). Although he wasn’t drunk.
Let's never find out.
I live in Canada on the coast and there are many news articles of people drowning after falling into cold water. And those people were in modern cold weather clothing.
Hof claims his high cold tolerance is due to exercise and lifestyle, but his identical twin brother has similar cold tolerance without having done the things Wim attributes his to suggesting its genetic.
That fits what scientists who have studied Hof found. They found that (1) he really does have very high cold tolerance, and (2) this are not attributable to the specific exercise and lifestyle choices he thinks it is.
I googled around a bit and did find some evidence that this actually happened but not that he did this regularly. I read it in an NRC or Volkskrant (Dutch papers) article if I remember correctly.
Even today, the myth persists that the human body cannot withstand more than a few minutes in the ocean. Thus, many people thrown into the sea assume that cold shock is the icy grip of death closing around them. In reality, the cold shock ends after 90 seconds. Even in the winter waters of the North Atlantic, an average-sized adult still has 10 minutes before going numb, and at least an hour before the heart stops.“The average adult is a big chunk of meat and it takes a lot of energy to cool it off”
Apparently most people die because they panic due to the cold shock or just kinda give up.
Yes, the worst could be worse if you got panic.
I live in a cold Canadian city that has a substantial population with drug addictions.
I was talking to a cop one night (he was off duty) and he was telling me about how you eventually learn some of the regular offenders names and stories. He told me how tough some of these guys are. How he'd pick one up for stealing and he's out in -30C with ganggreen on his leg.
"Cockroach energy" he called it.
First, he delayed immersion; among those who went into the water that night, Joughin was the absolute last to get wet.
Second — and most important — he managed to stay calm and strategize a way out of the water. """
I'll consider this next time I'm in a shipwreck.
This is wrong, it was worse, there was no room for him so he hung on the side in the water
2:20 Titanic sunk. Sunrise was around 5:10am and he found the lifeboat to hang onto, then half a hour later another life boat arrived. So three hours.
You can read his account here -
My understanding is they are usually using high carb low alcohol beer, so it’s more of a liquid only low fat diet than an alcohol diet.
He had a life belt on, so he wouldn't have drowned. Being drunk might've prevented a heart attack brought on by cold water shock.