Drinking turtle blood and punching sharks - heroes who survived being washed up at sea
dailystar.co.ukRadio 4’s legendary show Desert Island Discs - celebrating its 80th anniversary this week – famously imagine which luxury item they’d want with them if they were ever left stranded.Monty Python star John Cleese joked he’d like to take a stuffed Michael Palin, politician Boris Johnson chose French mustard and TV mogul Simon Cowell asked for a mirror!But some folk have become real-life castaways, just like Tom Hanks’ character in the hit 2000 film.
Here James Moore looks at six gripping tales.The author Daniel Defoe is reckoned to have been inspired to write his 1719 novel Robinson Crusoe by the incredible true story of Scottish sailor Alexander Selkirk.Fifteen years earlier he was marooned on the tiny uninhabited island of Mas a Tierra, 400 miles off Chile in the Pacific Ocean after falling out with the captain of the ship he was working on.Selkirk was left with little more than a musket, cooking pot, knife, a flask of rum and a Bible.Yet he managed to survive for four-and-a-half years hunting feral goats and harvesting wild turnips, despite being attacked by rats and once falling off a cliff.Eventually an English ship happened to anchor off the island to find supplies and picked him up.
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