The Discovery Channel aired a show of his experiences, not-so-surprisingly called Naked and Marooned with Ed Stafford. She eventually moved back to the Arctic where she lived until the age of 85.įormer British Army captain Ed Stafford spent 60 days naked and marooned on a deserted island in the South Pacific armed with only a video camera. Ada, who came along on the trip to help the explorers as a cook and seamstress, managed to stay alive and in August of that year she was rescued by a former colleague of Stefansson's, Harold Noice.ĭubbed the "female Robinson Crusoe," Ada hated the media circus surrounding her and chose to live a quiet life. The men were never seen again and by April 1923 she was left alone after the death of the man in her care. Ada was taught to hunt by the remaining explorer who was to weak to do it himself. Only Ada and an ailing crew member were left behind. Starving and desperate, three expedition members left the camp in January 1923 to travel 700 miles across the frozen Chukchi Sea to Siberia for help and food. They attempted to kill game, but were unsuccessful. Weather conditions were bad upon their arrival and soon rations ran out for the team. On September 16, 1921, Blackjack was one of five settlers who left on the ill-fated expedition across the Chukchi Sea to Russia's Wrangel Island in a speculative attempt to claim the island for Canada by Arctic explorer Vilhjalmur Stefansson. Neale wrote about his experiences on Suwarrow in a memoir called, An Island of One's Own.Īda Blackjack was Iñupiat Inuit woman who was a castaway on uninhabited Wrangel Island in northern Siberia. His grave is in the RSA cemetery on Rarotonga in the Cook Islands opposite the airport. Neale lived on the island until 1977 when cancer forced him to return to the mainland. Occasionally, he welcomed visitors who wanted to meet this real life Robinson Crusoe. Neale adapted to island life fairly easily and lived off of fish, crabs and clams, chicken eggs, coconuts, breadfruit, bananas and wild-grown vegetables. He lived in buildings left behind by the military during WWII. In October 1952, Neale gathered food supplies, tobacco, various tools and two cats and embarked for the island. He knew, once he visited the atoll, he was indeed home. After his military service ended, he worked as shopkeeper on the islands and met writer Robert Dean Frisbie, who fascinated him with stories about Suwarrow. He was first introduced to the Cook Islands at the age of 18 while in the Royal New Zealand Navy. Neale fantasized about his life as a castaway for over 30 years before actual realizing his dream at age 51. New Zealander Tom Neale lived on the coral atoll of Suwarrow in the Cook Islands in the middle of the Pacific Ocean for a total of 16 years in three periods between 19. On July 23, 1972, the family were finally picked up after a Japanese crew spotted their distress flare. She knew the water, which was contaminated by a mix turtle blood and offal, would be poisonous if taken orally, and insisted her family take enemas using tubes from the rung of a ladder. The matriarch of the family, Lyn Robinson, was a nurse and devised a gruesome technique to keep them hydrated with rainwater collected in the boat. When that ran out, the family drank turtle blood to survive.
There was only enough water for 10 days, and the only food on board consisted of a bag of onions, a tin of biscuits, 10 oranges, six lemons, and half a pound of glucose sweets. The family scrambled aboard a leaky raft and when that finally deflated 17 days later, they made for their dinghy, the Ednamair. Their boat was hit by a pod of killer whales and destroyed within minutes. Eighteen months into the trip, they were 200 miles from the Galápagos islands when catastrophe struck. In 1971, the Robertson family boarded their yacht Lucette at Falmouth harbour, Cornwall to sail around the world.