The worst ending survival stories of all time

You’ve probably heard the story of Aron Ralston, the guy who got stuck at the bottom of a slot canyon and had to cut his own arm off. As horrible as his story is it doesn’t even come close to the stories below, and not just because he survived but rather the level of suffering and torment involved isn’t even comparable to the worst tales out there.

The Donner party

One of the most famous survival stories of all time, the tale of the Donner party is so well known due to how gruesome it became. During the mid 1800’s before the Panama canal was built the only way to reach the west coast of American was to either sail all the way round the bottom of south America or walk. The trip by boat was dangerous and also very expensive, something normal families just couldn’t afford, so each year an exodus would be organised at the end of the harvest were a huge chain of people and waggons would walk a set route to the west coast.

The Donner party was the largest family in the group right at the back of the chain, which is why the story is named as such. The group contained a number of other families and individuals who all tried to take a shortcut through a mountain range to save time. After getting snowed in they were forced to camp next to a lake up a mountain in three small huts. When food quickly ran out things got so desperate that one family had to give the cow hides they were using on their roof to another family so they could make soup out of them. A few members of the group managed to slip through the snowed in mountain pass and get help, but when the last group of rescuers came they found the chopped up remains of someones child in a cooking pot of one of the other survivors. Out of the 83 people who left in the Donner party only 45 made it alive to the east coast.

USS Indianapolis

Known as the worst shark attack in history, the story of the USS Indianapolis starts the same way as so many other survival stories of world war 2. The ship was torpedoed by a Japanese submarine and quickly sank, taking around 300 of the 1,195 people on board with it. The remaining crew members managed to escape into the water and had a few rafts and pieces of floating cargo to hold on to, but nothing substantial that could keep them all out the water.

It didn’t take long until all the splashing attracted the attention of a group of sharks who most likely detected some blood in the water. Suddenly one of the sailors was tugged beneath the waves to be replaced a slowly rising pool of blood, an act which triggered all the other sharks to attack. All through the night and into the early hours of the morning the sailors would be attacked and pulled underwater by what has been described as hundreds of sharks. Each crew member had to lay there hanging off the side of some floating cargo for hours knowing that at any second a razor sharp set of teeth could take one of their legs off. Out of the 1,195 people on board the ship, only 316 would be rescued the next day, many of which would later die from their wounds. The captain of the ship was one of the survivors but due to the memories of what happened that night, he shot himself at his home in Connecticut and was found sitting on his porch holding a toy sailor in his hand he received as a child for good luck.

The Titanic

You’d struggle to find someone who hasn’t heard of this ship which gets made even more famous every time a new movie is made about it or an artifact is featured in the news. The story itself is quite straight forward, a ship sails between England and America and hits an iceberg along the way, causing the ship to sink with just over 2,200 people on board. The reason that everything went so wrong was down to a series of human errors and bad judgement. The ship was advertised as unsinkable and had a series of separating walls it could seal if the hull was punctured which was a big selling point for its maiden voyage.

In reality the ship was no were near as safe as people were told, with a series of faults and parts made as cheaply as possible combined with the incompetent captain led to the most famous ship sinking in history. There were only enough life boats for a third of the people on board because more would have made the decks look too cluttered and were left out. After the look outs failed to spot the iceberg and the captain failed to do anything to avoid them in the first place, the ships hull was punctured below the water line and the compartments quickly began to flood. Crew members were sealed into sections to stop the rest from flooding, but due to the ships design it didn’t work as planned. Out of the the roughly 2,200 people on board, only 706 managed to survive in the cold for long enough for rescue to arrive.

James Riley and the Commerce

Captain Riley was in charge of a united states trading vessel called the Commerce, and in 1815 found himself heading across the Atlantic on a trading mission. During the crossing the ship ran into a number of bad storms which caused so much damage to the ship that they were forced to land on the nearest point of land on the other side, which just so happened to be the Sahara desert. After running into a few local tribesmen who killed one of Rileys crew, they jumped back in the ship and sailed down coast knowing that more would show up and attack them. They sailed for miles close to the coast looking for some were they could find some wood to make repairs, but after sailing for as long as they could the ship was in such bad shape they were forced to land permanently.

They came ashore at the bottom of a cliff and climbed up to see what was about. There was nothing in sight but sand and since their water supplies had almost ran out they decided the best option would be to walk inland to try and find some. It didn’t take long before they realised there wasn’t going to be any water and thought the best plan would be to surrender themselves to a local tribe as slaves just to get a drink. Surly enough a large tribe found them and took them as slaves, forcing them to walk many miles across open desert and instead of water they were offered camel urine. Most of the crew were separated and taken in different directions, never to be seen again, but Riley had managed to convince his captor to take him to a city were there would be someone to pay his ransom. After a huge walk through open desert drinking camel urine and getting regular beatings, Riley managed by pure luck to contact a British official who agreed to pay his ransom. Riley and a few others made it back to safety but all the others were never seen again.