Incredible things people have done to survive

No one really knows what they are truly capable of until they are put into a situation that forces them to push their limits. After someone realizes their life is in danger and the survival switch has been flicked, normal people in the right situations wouldn’t think twice about eating the dead body of another human or drinking from a puddle that’s quite obviously swarming with germs.

Usually, survival situations involve people finding the strength to carry on when they are exhausted or surviving on a tiny amount of food for days at a time, but every once in a while someone will do something that most other people wouldn’t even be able to think of. Here are a few of the most inventive and incredible things peoples have done to survive.

Bob Bartlett

walked 680 miles across a frozen ocean

In 1914 Captain Bob Bartlett was sailing a ship called the Karluk along the northern coast of Alaska when an iceberg came crashing through the hull creating a 10-foot hole. The crew was forced to abandon the ship but had no option of calling for help, so Captain Bartlett sent out a few men to search for someone to help them. After the men he sent out didn’t return he took his crew on an 80-mile trip to a nearby island where they hoped they could await rescue.

Since it didn’t look like anyone would be passing by any time soon, Bartlett decided to try and make the trip to Siberia to find help, the only problem was that it was a 680-mile trip across a frozen ocean. Over 37 days Bartlett and an Inuit hunter named Kataktovik walked to the Siberian coastline over nothing but endless plains of flat ice. They eventually found someone who could help but by the time rescue came to the island over half the people left there were dead.

Unknown Inuit

Dog rib sled

This one is more of a story than a documented case, but it’s worth a mention just in case it’s true. The story goes that during the 1950’s when the Canadian government was trying to force the native Inuit people into reserves some of them refused to leave the land they had lived on their whole lives. One such unnamed Inuit decided that under no circumstances would he leave his homeland and refused to move.

His family realized they were being forced out and pleaded with him to go with them, even taking away his tools and hunting gear to try and force him to come along. Even after this the man still refused to go and one night made a knife out of his own feces and used it to kill a couple of his dogs. He used the knife to skin them and made their hides into a harness for a sled he made from the animal’s rib cages.

Aron Ralston

Cut off his own arm

One of the most famous survival stories of recent years, the film “127 Hours” is based on the amazing tale of this man. The survival story itself isn’t the most interesting and involves a typical situation, someone got overconfident and didn’t tell anyone where he was going before getting into an accident. After falling to the bottom of a rocky slit canyon and getting his arm crushed under a boulder, Aron found himself with only a 330ml bottle of water and 2 burritos to last him until rescue came.

After five days in the canyon, he was ready to die before having an extreme idea. Since his arm was the only thing keeping him there and he thought he was going to die anyway, he decided to try and cut it off and escape. Using a very cheap pocket knife he managed to cut off his arm and walk to safety. The lack of water was the main reason he survived the amputation as his blood had thickened up to a level that stopped him from bleeding out.

The Donner party

Extreme hunger

Every year during the 1800s before the Panama Canal was built a yearly exodus would take place where people from the East Coast of America would walk all the way to California in a huge caravan chain. The walk would take weeks and people would often take their farm animals along with them, but fortunately, there were forts and trading posts along the way to offer support and navigation. The Donner family was the biggest family in a group of people who were right at the back of the chain and left much later than they should have.

The exodus would happen at the end of summer so everyone could harvest their main crop first, but not so late as to run into the winter snows. Since the Donner party was so far behind they decided to listen to the advice of someone who told them about a shortcut through the mountains. After making very slow progress and getting stuck at every turn, they were eventually cut off deep within the mountain range next to a lake, with their path blocked by heavy snow. The group was forced to survive on next to nothing and after they killed all their farm animals things really got desperate. One family took the skins off the roof of their makeshift hut to cut up and boil into soup, but that’s nothing compared to the others who ended up eating the bodies of the children who died.

José Salvador Alvarenga

Over 1 year alone stranded at sea

This man set the record in 2013 and since then no one has come close to beating it. During a fishing trip off the coast of Mexico in 2012, José found himself caught in a storm and swept well off course into deeper waters. When the storm cleared there was no land in sight and he found himself stuck in a small boat with his fishing buddy. The fuel in the engine quickly ran out and they had no way of signaling for help and only had enough supplies for a couple of days. During the storm, they threw all the fish they caught overboard to lighten the load which turned out to be a bad move as they lost most of their fishing gear shortly after.

His partner died during the next couple of weeks and José found himself alone and lost with no food and no idea where he was. He survived by drinking nothing but a small amount of rainwater each day and eating small fish, turtles, and birds he could catch that landed on his boat, all of which he had no choice but to eat raw. After 14 months at sea he eventually washed up into a river inlet and swam to shore were two locals found him naked and shouting in Spanish. He is the only person in recorded history who has survived alone at sea in a small boat for more than one year.

Peter Freuchen

The poo knife

Freuchen was an explorer who was traveling through some of the more uncharted areas of Greenland during an expedition in 1926. During his one-man journey, he was crossing over a large snow plain when a blizzard hit, and with no cover of any kind in sight, his only option was to hide under his sled until it passed. After a few hours, the storm had finished but Freuchen now found himself buried under several feet of heavy and tightly packed snow.

(Turns out there he didn’t take a picture of his poo knife, so here’s a picture of a confused looking tropical bird instead)

He managed to carve himself a bit of room under the snow with his hands but couldn’t break through to the surface without losing his fingers to frostbite. For the next 30 hours, he remained under the snow slowly freezing to death until he came up with an idea. He grabbed a piece of feces he had passed earlier and chipped at the frozen chunk until it resembled something like a poo knife. He used this to hack blocks of snow away and eventually managed to escape, though not without great cost as most of his toes had frozen and already started to decompose. After getting back to his camp he cut off his own toes to prevent gangrene from spreading by using nothing more than a pair of pliers and a hammer.