Left For Dead Pete Nelson
Left for Dead
By Pete Nelson
It took only twelve minutes. Shorter than halftime at a football game, but enough time to kill about 300 men and put the rest in the water, roughly 880 men scattered 250 miles north of the Palau Islands, the closest land.
Twelve minutes.
Because the ship kept moving forward as she sank, the distance between the first man to go into the water and the last was about three miles. Men were burned and bleeding, in agony from scorched lungs, broken limbs and cuts, and dazed from cracked skulls and concussions. About half of the 880 men in the water had life jackets.
A southwesterly wind carried them away. Men in life rafts blew farther in the wind than men submerged in the water.
"Tomorrow. They'll come and get us tomorrow."
"It's gonna be all right," Jack Miner told the others. "We sent the SOS."
"You sure?" someone asked.
"I'm sure, he said. "It went out. Now all we gotta do is hang on." He knew the message had gone out, but no proof the message had been heard.
And the sharks came. One man swam off to retrieve what looked like a crate of potatoes, maybe sixty feet out, but the sharks got him before he got halfway there. They heard the scream.
By the second day, men began to hallucinate, seeing ships that weren't there, seeing drinking fountains, islands. Squabbles broke out.
Alliances formed. Some men were turning violent. As a precaution,
Twible gave the command that everybody disarm. Some did, some didn't. The sharks came in great numbers from all directions that afternoon. Perhaps there men who dropped their knives who wished
p.71
they still had them, but it wouldn't have made any difference. First one man screamed, then another. The sharks seemed to be attacking the men who'd drifted loose from the nets. The men closed ranks. It didn't help. Men were pulled under, and then their bodies bobbed back to the surface, minus an appendage, only to disappear again.
Twible set up shark watches,
By Pete Nelson
It took only twelve minutes. Shorter than halftime at a football game, but enough time to kill about 300 men and put the rest in the water, roughly 880 men scattered 250 miles north of the Palau Islands, the closest land.
Twelve minutes.
Because the ship kept moving forward as she sank, the distance between the first man to go into the water and the last was about three miles. Men were burned and bleeding, in agony from scorched lungs, broken limbs and cuts, and dazed from cracked skulls and concussions. About half of the 880 men in the water had life jackets.
A southwesterly wind carried them away. Men in life rafts blew farther in the wind than men submerged in the water.
"Tomorrow. They'll come and get us tomorrow."
"It's gonna be all right," Jack Miner told the others. "We sent the SOS."
"You sure?" someone asked.
"I'm sure, he said. "It went out. Now all we gotta do is hang on." He knew the message had gone out, but no proof the message had been heard.
And the sharks came. One man swam off to retrieve what looked like a crate of potatoes, maybe sixty feet out, but the sharks got him before he got halfway there. They heard the scream.
By the second day, men began to hallucinate, seeing ships that weren't there, seeing drinking fountains, islands. Squabbles broke out.
Alliances formed. Some men were turning violent. As a precaution,
Twible gave the command that everybody disarm. Some did, some didn't. The sharks came in great numbers from all directions that afternoon. Perhaps there men who dropped their knives who wished
p.71
they still had them, but it wouldn't have made any difference. First one man screamed, then another. The sharks seemed to be attacking the men who'd drifted loose from the nets. The men closed ranks. It didn't help. Men were pulled under, and then their bodies bobbed back to the surface, minus an appendage, only to disappear again.
Twible set up shark watches,