Random Survival facts from history

Long before the days of freeze-dried food and mobile phones, people had to use all kinds of crazy survival techniques just to make it through the day. Here’s a few of the survival methods people had to use on a regular basis that most people today have never heard off:

Pirates and Sailors

• During the 1500s, the rations for someone in the British navy was one pound of hard tack and one gallon of small beer each day. That’s about 1000 calories worth of rock hard bread and 2% beer everyday on a voyage that could last for weeks.

• There used to be a species of huge turtle that lived on the Galápagos Islands that has been made extinct by early sailors. When the only way to preserve food was to dry or salt it, people at sea didn’t have any options for red meat, until someone discovered you can eat turtles. They were captured and put on board the ship to walk around as they please, perhaps with some hay on-hand if they were lucky. This particular species of turtle can stay alive for a very long time without food, and were butchered every so often on long voyages to provide a source of fresh meat. The species was called the Pinta Island tortoise (Chelonoidis abingdonii).

• Wooden ships have been waterproofed the same way for over 2000 years using pine trees, oil and wax. The wooden planks that make up the ship would swell when they soaked up enough water and create holes in the hull, so to waterproof them, people would heat up pieces of pine wood in an enclosed container with a tap at the bottom. The tar would seep out and could be brushed on to the wood like paint. You can see how much tar a pine tree contains by looking at the old wooded telegraph poles, which all seem to have a small trickle of tar that has run out on a hot day. Sails also needed to be treated so they didn’t rot from getting constantly sprayed with salt water. To do this they would dip the sail in something called slack-wax, which was a mixture of wax and some kind of plant oil, usually linseed or sunflower.

(People often picture something like this as the landscape during an ice age, but half the planet remained unfrozen and warm enough to support life)

Living in the Ice age

• Even though there has been evidence of people staying in caves for long periods of time, this was rarely the case for a permanent home. People who lived during the ice age were usually nomadic, making shelter wherever they needed to go to find food.

• The global population of the human race at the end of the ice age (10,000 BCE), was around 5 million people, with the highest estimates reaching up to 15 million.

• Only the Northern Hemisphere was frozen solid, with glaciers up to 2 miles thick over countries like Canada and Russia. This meant the southern half was quite warm, and Antarctica was once just another place to live, complete with forests and farmland.

• The end of the last ice age was only the end of the last glacial period, and we are technically still in one today. During an ice age the planet will go through several cold periods that heat up in-between, these inter-glacial periods can last for thousands of years, but always end up going into another freeze. The most common estimate for how much time we have left before it freezes again is around 1,500 years.

(Some home-made pemmican bars. Made by mixing dried and ground meat in a 50/50 ratio with rendered fat and formed into small bars. It’ll last for years if kept away from the air)

Food and Drink

• It was the Native Americans who invented a product that is widely recognized as the ultimate survival food, and was one of the most commonly traded items. Pemmican is a mixture of dried and ground meat, combined with rendered fat from the same animal, which was almost always bison. When made properly and kept away from the air, it can be safe to eat for years.

• Hard tack is another one that can last for years, but isn’t quite as easy to eat. It’s basically just very dense bread that has been baked for a long time to remove all the moisture. This makes it last for years, but also turns it into a hard block that can’t be eaten without dipping it in water or milk. They were also called ship’s biscuits because they were the most commonly eaten foods aboard ships for European sailors.

• Ships would often leave port without a single barrel of water on board, and would carry barrels of small beer instead. The problem with water in a barrel at sea is that it only take a single insect or problem with the wood to spoil the water, but the low alcohol content of small beer stops bacteria from forming as easily. It has a low enough alcohol content to not make people dehydrated, but just enough so that it stops the liquid from going bad.

People who survived impossible things

• Hugh Glass crawled for 200 miles after almost being killed by a grizzly bear. He had many deep cuts, but managed to stop infection by letting maggots eat the dead flesh. He crawled and walked through forests and across plains to the nearest fort, where the people who left him after thinking he was dead were very surprised to see him.

• Vesna Vulović fell 33,330 ft without a parachute and survived. In 1972, Vesna was working as a flight attendant on a plane that blew up mid-flight due to a bomb in a suitcase. The plane split in half and Vesna fell inside the tail section of the plane, trapped by a food cart before being thrown out to free fall the rest of the way. She hit the ground and suffered numerous broken bones and internal bleeding, but ultimately survived and made a recovery. She still holds the record to this day for the longest survived fall without a parachute.

• Jean Hilliard was frozen for several hours to the point her skin was too hard to get a needle through. After getting her car stuck in a ditch late at night, she decided to walk the rest of the way to her friend’s house in -30 °C weather but collapsed from exhaustion in the driveway. She lay there for several hours until her friend found her and took her to the hospital. The medical staff thought she was already dead, and they couldn’t get a needle through her skin because it was frozen solid. Somehow, she regained consciousness later that evening and slowly made a full recovery. Her story should be impossible because she didn’t even lose a single finger to frostbite, and managed to make a full recovery.