They had a little bait on the raft, probably the remains of their last bird. Phil hung it on a fishhook and strung it into the water at one end of the raft. At the other end, Louie knelt, facing the water. Smelling the bait, the shark swam toward Phil, orienting itself so that its tail was under Louie. Louie leaned as far overboard as he could without losing his balance, plunged both hands into the water, and grabbed the tail. The shark took off. Louie, gripping the tail, flew out of the raft and crashed into the water, sending a large serving of the Pacific up his nose. The shark whipped its tail and flung Louie off. Louie bolted back onto the raft so quickly that he later had no memory of how he had done it.
Soaking and embarrassed, Louie rethought his plan. His first error had been one of appraisal: Sharks were stronger than they looked. His second had been to fail to brace himself properly. His third had been to allow the shark’s tail to stay in the water, giving the animal something to push against. He settled in to wait for a smaller shark.
In time, a smaller one, perhaps four feet long, arrived. Louie knelt at the raft’s side, tipping his weight backward and keeping his knees far apart to brace himself. Phil dangled a baited hook in the water.
The shark swam for the bait. Louie clapped his hands around the tail and heaved it out of the water. The shark thrashed, but could neither get free nor pull Louie into the water. Louie dragged the animal onto the raft. The shark twisted and snapped, and Phil grabbed a flare cartridge and jammed it into the shark’s mouth. Pinning the shark down, Louie took the pliers and stabbed the screwdriver end of the handle through the animal’s eye. The shark died instantly.
In his Honolulu survival course, Louie had been told that the liver was the only part of a shark that was edible. Getting at it was no mean feat. Even with a knife, sharkskin is about as easy to cut as a coat of mail; with only the edge of a mirror to cut with, the labor was draining. After much sawing, Louie managed to break the skin. The flesh underneath stank of ammonia. Louie cut the liver out, and it was sizable. They ate it eagerly, giving Mac a larger portion, and for the first time since breakfast on May 27, they were all full. The rest of the shark reeked, so they threw it overboard. Later, using the same technique, they caught a second shark and again ate the liver.
Among the sharks, word seemed to get around; no more small sharks came near. Large sharks, some as long as twelve feet, lumbered alongside the raft, but Louie thought better of taking them on. The men’s stomachs were soon empty again.
Mac was in a sharp downward spiral. He rarely moved. All three men had lost a staggering amount of weight, but Mac had shriveled the most. His eyes, sunken in their sockets, stared out lifelessly.
——
It was nightfall somewhere around the thirtieth day. The men went through their usual routine, bailing water into the raft and entwining themselves for warmth. The sky was clear and starry, and the moon shone on the water. The men fell asleep.
Louie woke to a tremendous crash, stinging pain, and the sensation of weightlessness. His eyes snapped open and he realized that he, Mac, and Phil were airborne. They flopped down together onto the raft and twisted about in confusion. Something had struck the bottom of the raft with awesome power. The garden-variety sharks that made up their entourage weren’t large enough to hit them with such force, and had never behaved in this way.
Looking over the side of the raft, they saw it. Swelling up from under the water came a leviathan: a vast white mouth, a broad back parting the surface, and a long dorsal fin, ghostly in the moonlight. The animal was some twenty feet long, more than three times the length of the raft. Louie recognized its features from his survival school training. It was a great white shark.
As the castaways watched in terrified silence, the shark swam the length of one side of the raft, then bent around to the other side, exploring it. Pausing on the surface, it swished its tail away, then slapped it into the raft, sending the raft skidding sideways and splashing a wave of water into the men. Louie, Mac, and Phil came up on their knees in the center of the raft and clung to one another. The shark began to swim around to the other side. Louie whispered, “
Around and around the shark went, drenching the raft with each pass. It seemed to be playing with the raft. With every pass, the men cringed and waited to be capsized. Finally, the great back slid under, and the sea smoothed behind it. It did not surface again.
Louie, Phil, and Mac lay down again. The water around them was now cold, and none of them could sleep.
——
The next morning, Mac could no longer sit up. He lay on the floor of the raft, little more than a wrinkled mummy, his gaze fixed far away.
One last albatross landed. Louie caught it, wrenched its head off, and handed it to Phil. Phil turned it upside down over Mac and let the blood flow into his mouth. As Louie and Phil ate the meat, dipping it into the ocean to give it flavor, they fed bits to Mac, but it didn’t revive him.
In subsequent days, Mac became a faint whisper of a man. His water tins ran dry. When Phil opened his tin and took a sip of the little he had left, Mac asked if he could drink from it. For Phil, thirst had been the cruelest trial, and he knew that the water left in his tin, essential to his own survival, couldn’t save Mac. He gently told Mac that he didn’t have enough left to share. Louie was sympathetic to Phil, but he couldn’t bring himself to refuse Mac. He gave him a small sip of his own water.
That evening, Phil heard a small voice. It was Mac, asking Louie if he was going to die. Louie looked over at Mac, who was watching him. Louie thought it would be disrespectful to lie to Mac, who might have something that he needed to say or do before life left him. Louie told him that he thought he’d die that night. Mac had no reaction. Phil and Louie lay down, put their arms around Mac, and went to sleep.
Sometime that night, Louie was lifted from sleep by a breathy sound, a deep outrushing of air, slow and final. He knew what it was.
Francis McNamara on May 26, 1943, the day before the crash.
——
Sergeant Francis McNamara had begun his last journey with a panicked act, consuming the rafts’ precious food stores, and in doing so, he had placed himself and his raftmates in the deepest jeopardy. But in the last days of his life, in the struggle against the deflating raft and the jumping sharks, he had given all he had left. It wasn’t enough
