‘We pledged not to eat each other’: the family that was shipwrecked for 38 days

It was 10am on a choppy morning at sea when 18-year-old Douglas Robertson heard a bang. Then another. And another. Their 13-metre (43ft) wooden schooner Lucette had been lifted out of the sea. “I thought: What the hell was that? We must have gone aground.” He looked at his father and discovered he was ankle-deep in water. Then he looked over his shoulder to the vastness of the Pacific. “There were three orcas; a daddy, mummy and a baby in between. The daddy’s head was split open and bleeding badly.”

He turned back to his father, who was now knee-deep in water. It was only then that it dawned on him what had happened. The whales had attacked the schooner. “Dougal said: ‘Abandon ship, we’re sinking!’” Douglas, who had a complex relationship with the father he adored and feared, always calls him by his first name. “I said: ‘Abandon ship? We’re not in the marina, we’re in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. Abandon ship to where?’ Dougal said: ‘Over there.’ He pointed to the ocean. And I thought, he means it, he bloody well means it.”

The Robertson family had set sail 17 months earlier. Dougal, a formidable former sea captain and master mariner, had left the merchant navy in the 50s to begin a new life. He bought a dairy farm in the Peak District and raised a family with his wife, Linda. But he had never got the sea out of his system. Twenty years on, he was bored senseless.

Life was slow and dull. The most notable daily occurrence was the milk wagon turning up to take the milk their cows had produced to Manchester. One day, Dougal and Neil (one of Douglas’s younger twin brothers) followed the wagon to the neighbouring farm where it stopped to pick up more milk. Neil asked his father if this was Manchester. “Dougal went: ‘How stupid can my children be?’ That started his belief that his kids were disadvantaged by their rural upbringing.”

Dougal decided there was only one thing for it – flog the farm, buy a yacht, take the kids out of school and circumnavigate the globe to teach them about life. That’s what Dougal told them, anyway. But Douglas is convinced there’s only one reason his father came up with the plan. He simply wanted to do it.

They set off in January 1971. Anne, the oldest of the children, was 18; Douglas was 16; the twins, Neil and Sandy, were 11. The first year was fantastic – England to Portugal, the Canaries, the Caribbean, the Bahamas, Miami, through the Panama Canal and on to the Galápagos Islands. They spent about six months in Miami, working to make money to subsidise the next part of their journey. Anne decided to leave the sailing trip after falling in love, but they picked up a new passenger in Panama – 23-year-old financial analyst Robin Williams, who was hitching his way around the world. He agreed to pay a token rate and teach the children English and maths for his passage.

They were on a 45-day journey to the Marquesas Islands in the South Pacific when they were hit by the whales. Lucette was sinking fast. All they had was their dinghy and a raft given to them by an Icelandic family they had befriended early on in the trip. Dougal, a proud, obdurate man, didn’t want to accept the raft. It was only when their Icelandic friends told him the raft was for his family, not for him, that he agreed to take it.

Dougal told Douglas to throw the dinghy and raft into the sea, which led to another disaster. “Robin, in his eagerness to abandon ship, trod on the gunnel of the dinghy and sank the bloody thing.” They managed to retrieve the dinghy, but it was flooded. For now, they were reliant on the raft for their survival. And Douglas realised they were surrounded by whales – about 20 of them.

He threw the 36kg (80lb) raft into the water, not having a clue if it would work. “There was a loud bang as the inflation cartridge exploded, and the raft started to unfold and inflate like a robot. We all looked at it and thought: ‘Thank God that worked.’” Douglas’s next job was to transfer his family to the raft.

Was he calm? “I was not calm. I was terrified. I thought: ‘This is it, Douglas, this is how you’re going to die. You’re going to be eaten by bloody killer whales.’ I don’t know how I had the courage to do it; I think I was just numb. I stayed in the water and helped everybody on to the raft. I kept feeling for my legs to see if I’d still got them because I’d heard you don’t feel the bite, you just see the blood in the water.”

Douglas was last on to the raft. He felt safe – briefly. “At least I had my legs; I hadn’t been eaten. I’d survived.” The shock of what had happened quickly hit them. “My mum said: ‘Let’s say the Lord’s Prayer.’” My dad and I were atheists. I thought: ‘Bugger it, I’m going to ask God to spare us.’ Dougal said: ‘I don’t believe in God, I’m not saying the Lord’s Prayer.’ I said: ‘Dad couldn’t you just say the Lord’s Prayer, it doesn’t matter if you don’t mean it.’ Dougal said, ‘Don’t you think if there was a God he would know that I didn’t mean it and it wouldn’t count anyway?’ Bloody hell!”

They soon realised how hopeless the situation was. They were hundreds of miles from land with a raft and a flooded dinghy. “We had 10 days’ supply of tinned water and 10 days’ food if we didn’t eat much. It was stowed alongside a manual about how to survive on the raft. On the last page it said: ‘Good luck!’” The trouble was, they weren’t within 10 days of land.

It was Linda who expressed what they were all thinking. “She said: ‘Dougal, be straight with us. Are we going to die or do we stand a chance?’ Dougal didn’t know the answer.” He asked Douglas a terrifying question. If they could get the dinghy in working order, would he agree to row the 250 miles back to the Galápagos Islands and raise the alarm? “For the first time in my life I said: ‘No, Dad.’ I said: ‘That’s 25 miles a day. Can I row 25 miles a day for 10 days, down current and downwind? No, I can’t. It’s a fool’s errand. In any case, I’d rather die out here with you than die alone.’”

The family reassessed the situation. “We made pledges to each other. One was that we would not eat each other. We would die quietly if that’s what it came to, and we would look for a rescue ship. That would be our best chance to get out of this.” In the meantime, they headed for the doldrums, where the northeast and southeast trade winds meet, causing heavy thunderstorms. If they could make it to the doldrums, they believed, they would be sure of finding fresh rainwater.

After six days, the castaways spotted a ship. They had two parachute flares and three hand flares with them. “I said: ‘Dad, fire the flare at the ship, not up in the air. Fire it straight at the bloody ship.’ Dougal said: ‘I can’t do that Douglas, they might have explosives on deck.’ I said: ‘Bugger that, if it blows up they’ll send out an SOS and it can pick us up at the same time.’ Dougal said: ‘I can’t believe how ruthless you’ve become.’” As they argued, the ship receded into the distance. They’d lost their chance of a rescue. “It was devastating, and we cried.” Did Dougal cry? “No. He said: ‘We can’t rely on rescue ships. We’ve got to get to the nearest land which is Costa Rica, and it’s 75 days away. After the doldrums we’re going to sail to Costa Rica.’ I thought: ‘Bloody hell, not a chance of that.’”

They only had four days’ supply of tinned water left and were eking out the remaining food. One day a turtle hopped on the raft. “I said: ‘Dad we can eat these, I read it in a book.’ I didn’t say it was a novel written by Alistair MacLean called South By Java Head!” Killing a turtle proved harder than he had expected. They tried twice and on both occasions the turtles escaped.

By now, the castaways were into their second week and famished. “We thought about nothing but food. All the meals we’d rushed. Why didn’t we take our time to enjoy them? We talked about food all the time. You can’t get away from it. You’ve got bloody fresh fruit salad in your head. Beef stew, roast beef and yorkshire pudding. Yum! ” Fifty years on, Douglas seems to be back on a raft, starving in the Pacific.

When a third turtle came along, they were determined it would not escape. “I tied him up in rope. We hauled him onboard and cut his throat. We bled him out into a cup and Dougal was the first to drink his blood. We looked at him like: ‘Are you going to die?’ And he said: ‘It’s not salty, we can drink this.’ It was strong but sweet. We thought we might be able to live on turtles. It’s red meat, like steak.”

They reached the doldrums after 12 days, and waited for the rain. One day, two days – still nothing. “As the days went by, the raft got worse and worse. The fish had eaten holes in it, and it was leaking. We were covered in boils, and we couldn’t sleep because we were up to our chests in water. There was one dry place on that raft and we had an hour each on that.”

After three days in the doldrums, the skies finally opened. “It rained like you wouldn’t believe. We were so happy. We were singing, collecting rain, filling the containers. The elixir of life. We drank as much as we could. Big thunderstorms in the doldrums. It rained for about two bloody days.”

By now they’d been on the raft for about 17 days. Douglas said they all had roles – his was chief rower. “Dougal was our leader, my mum was our carer. Robin was a non-stop talker. He could talk for bloody England, and when you’re on a raft in the Pacific it’s fantastic to have someone who can just talk. To hear that human noise. He kept everybody’s morale up with his chirpy chitchat.” What role did the twins play? “They kept us honest about rationing food and water. We were doing it for them. Mum and Dad swore they had to get them home.”

With the raft a wreck, they transferred to the tiny dinghy. “It felt like we were in the water, we were so low.” For five days they ran out of water. “We caught dorado and sucked their eyeballs and vertebrae. They were filled with fresh water. We used to eat the contents of their stomachs. It was like cooked food, partly digested.”

They now realised they were being followed by sharks. “We couldn’t see them when we were in the raft, but now we were in the dinghy we could see them swimming around us all the time.”

“We caught a 5ft shark. He was two-thirds the length of the dinghy. Dougal said: ‘Douglas, what do we do now?’ I said: ‘We need to stop him biting us so if one of us sticks a paddle in his mouth, he’ll bite down on that and then we cut his head off. He can’t bite us if he’s not got a head.’”

Or so he thought. “My mother rammed a paddle in his mouth, he bit down on it and I said: ‘Cut his bloody head off, Dad, because he’s going to bite us.’ Dougal cut his head off, thrust it at me and said: ‘Here’s your bloody head.’ And, you know, that damn thing bit me? I’ve still got the marks across my finger. He had no power because he had no body, but his teeth were sharp. We ate him and we felt great. Somehow the Robertsons have caught a shark and killed it. It was a euphoric feeling. We were eating sharks, they weren’t eating us!”

The weeks went by. Three weeks, four weeks, five weeks, and still no hint of a rescue. The family survived off dried shark meat and fresh water from dorado eyeballs and vertebrae. By now, Douglas was permanently naked because his clothes had rotted. (He didn’t realise his mother had stored an outfit for any possible rescue.) “We were talking about what we’d do when we got home. Robin said he’d work in a hotel because he never wanted to be far away from food ever again. I said: ‘I’ll go to sea,’ and my mother said, ‘Well, you are at sea,’ and I said, ‘Yeah, but I’m going to go to sea properly. I’m going to sign up when I get home.’ My mum wanted to return to farming life. Dougal said he’d never do that.”

Were they confident they’d survive? “No. We could be dead on the next wave. The problem was never food, it was water. We never had enough. My mother came up with this plan to absorb dirty water as an enema. So I made an enema out of a tube, my dad tied the funnel on it, and I cut the edges so it didn’t hurt too much, and we took enemas from the dirty water in the bottom of the dinghy. My mum, God bless her, is the author of a survival technique in the SAS bloody survival manual! She’d be really honoured to think of that.”

23 July, 1972. The family was chatting about opening a cafe one day when Dougal shouted: “‘There’s a bloody ship. A bloody ship. A ship. Clear the decks.’ He said: ‘Douglas, trim the boat. We’ve got two flares left. It’s worth a chance. She’s coming really close.’”

The ship was a Japanese fishing trawler, the Toka Maru II, on her way to the Panama Canal. “Dougal lit the flare and held it up until he couldn’t hold it any longer. It was dropping on to his hand, and he threw it into the sea.” Douglas later discovered that the captain saw it and told his crew it was pirates. The lookout said he thought it was a flare, so the captain agreed to alter course by 20 degrees to take a look. Dougal lit the second flare, but it failed. “So that was it. Our last flare had expired. Then the lookout said he could see a woman with two children. He said: ‘They’re not pirates, they’re castaways.’”

Within 10 minutes, the ship was alongside them. “A rope was thrown out. A dirty, oily, smelly rope landed across the bow of the dinghy and I grabbed it. I looked at it and thought: ‘My God, this rope belongs to another world.’ A world we’d forgotten about.” After 38 days, the castaways had been rescued.

The family returned home to the Peak District, where Dougal and Linda’s marriage immediately began to unravel. Within a year, they had divorced.

“Mum and Dad never forgave each other for what they did to the family,” says Douglas. “They felt they’d been negligent in putting us at such risk.”

Dougal wrote a bestselling book about the shipwreck, Survive the Savage Sea, making enough money to buy a yacht for himself and a farm for Linda. He planned to complete his trip around the world, but stopped off in Greece and stayed there, living on his boat.

Robin went on to work in finance (though not in a hotel). The twins struggled to adapt to the mundanity of life back at school. And as for Douglas, within two months he had joined the merchant navy, where he stayed for 10 years before becoming an accountant.

“My brother Neil thinks Dougal was reckless, taking his family on a trip around the world,” Douglas says. “But I am forever grateful Dougal did that, and so is my brother Sandy. I think Dougal was a brave man. He never let us down.”