02 From the Dead | Lost at Sea

Boat Captain Kane: Team, quick safety briefing’s gotta be done. I'm Kane, that's Lily, if you need us sing out . 

Piia Wirsu (VO): I'm sitting strapped into a 40-seater power boat. I've been given a ginger tablet to hold off the sea sickness and am getting full book on the safety briefing from Captain Kane. 

Boat Captain Kane: That's pretty much it, except I have to by law show you how to wear a life jacket. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): We're headed out into the inhospitable ocean around Tasmania. 

Where the sheer rocks at the water's edged are stripped clean of life by the power of the water that claws at the land, like it wants a piece. 

It's daunting out there.  

Piia Wirsu: It is a complete sensory immersion and it is like all your senses are at play. 

And to endure this constant assault on your senses for so long with just the flat horizon, the grey sky, the inky water, and nothing else... 

Piia Wirsu (VO): Out there, with a solid boat underneath me, a warm cuppa just a half hour away, it only emphases the stark reality of ten shipwrecked men, completely alone and sardined in a life raft at the mercy of the wind and currents.  

The shipwrecked crew of the Blythe Star.  

It must have been bloody lonely.  

Mick Doleman: Yep, it is. Because you don't know where you are. You don't know where you're going. And you know you're going in a general direction of south. That's' what he did talk about, oh shit, what are we going to do if we keep going in this direction? We're going to end up freezing.  

Malcolm McCarroll (Archive): The wind didn't seem to be easing down at all, and the general direction it was blowing us we were going to end up in Antarctica. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): Lost. Alone. As hope of rescue washed away.  

I'm Piia Wirsu and this is Episode two, Lost at Sea 

At 8.30 on Saturday October 13th, 1973 the grey, steel freight ship the Blythe Star had sunk beneath the waves off Tasmania's southwest coast. 

Leaving nothing behind but these ten crewmen bobbing in an orange, rubber, emergency life raft. 

And they’d just realised there had been no mayday call before she went down. 

As reality hit, one of the crewmen, Mick Power, vomited up his breakfast.

Captain Cruikshank, the weather-beaten old Scotsman - so fond of whiskey in fact that he was two drinks in by 11am the morning of their departure - he knew, if they ever got out of this questions were going to be asked.  

As the Blythe Star was just touching the bottom of the ocean he was saying, ‘That's the ship gone, the next thing is the inquiry’.

But that's not what was on 18-year-old deckhand Mick Doleman's mind. 

Mick Doleman: They didn't even know where I was at that time, they hadn't heard from me, they didn't know the ship had sunk or disappeared. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): He realised that his new love, Joanie, might never even know what happened to him. 

Mick Doleman: I remember in the life raft thinking that it's her birthday. While I was paddling for my life, they were having a cake fight with cream in their hair. 

Joanie Doleman: Here we were having the best time and not realising that was going on with him. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): As far as the whole world knew? They were happily steaming their way up the coast of Tasmania, with their load of fertiliser and beer bound for King Island.  

Mick Doleman: I didn't get to know the crew like you would on a normal ship. I'm sorry, on a ship that wasn't going to sink on you.  

We were basically thrown straight into survival, with very little warning so you never really got to know each other as shipmates.  

We got to know each other as survivors. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): The men started speculating about what had gone wrong. Had the cargo moved below decks somehow? Was there too much cargo on deck? 

What Mick didn’t know was that the Blythe Star had almost rolled four months earlier, it was suggested the deck cargo never be loaded to the weight it was when he climbed aboard – but an inquiry would later find that the transport commission never got around to putting that in the ship’s instructions.

And then there were those locking bars to keep the hatches closed in case she ever rolled, packed safely away in storage in Melbourne so they could squeeze an extra few tonne of cargo aboard, which meant when she did start to go over the water just flooded in. 

As the hours wore on, their situation sinking in, the cold crept into their bones.  

Mick Doleman: I've never been so cold in my life, anywhere in my life than I was in that life raft. And there's, nothing you can do about it. And the best you got was squeezing up to each other to transfer the body warmth. 

I had a pair of jocks, that was it. Nobody had sufficient warm, dry clothes. You just were constantly wet. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): The crew shared around the few clothes they had.  

Mick Doleman: Even though we had got the news that no mayday had gone off, we accepted that there'll be a few days before they realise that we're not on schedule. 

So, we just said, well, let's plan for the worst.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): The cook, Alf Simpson, took command of the life raft rations - only 72 hours worth - packed away years ago. They were pretty grim.  

Mick Doleman:  We had these biscuits that's supposed to be a protein biscuit of some sort, and some glucose powder and cans of water.  

So that was rationed straight away. We will do that just in case.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): He laid it out, everyone gets one egg-cup full of water a day - more on the days they could collect rain - and a bit of the glucose powder they could pour into their hands and lick from their palms. 

And a couple of 8-year-old, dry, cardboard-y biscuits.

Piia: What was the taste of all of that like?  

Mick Doleman: Pretty ordinary. It wasn't much to chop it on and you wouldn't eat it if you didn't have to. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): Mick Power, a tough fella from Newcastle - who kinda looked like a 70s rock star, handlebar moustache, and wavy dark shoulder-length hair - wretched as he tried to get the biscuits down. 

He and Tas Leary, who'd got the life raft free, just couldn't stomach them.  

And all the rations, everything they had to survive, was packed up in a cardboard box. 

Mick Doleman:  Which lasted about 10 minutes as soon as the water got into the raft and was constantly in water. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): So their supplies, including some sharp fishing hooks, some knives were now just floating around their rubber raft. 

Mick Doleman: We dumped a lot of that stuff because we didn't want anything that's sharp and could destroy the raft. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): All the same, spirits were pretty high – they had just survived a shipwrecking after all.  

But then... 

Malcolm McCarroll (Archive): The second engineer put a bit of a dampner on it. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): That’s second engineer John Sloan, who Malcolm McCarroll recalled had some more bad news.  

Malcolm McCarroll (Archive): He told us that if he wasn't picked up within two or three days he'd be in trouble because he - he didn't forget, he virtually didn't have time to get these pills he had for his thyroid condition that were vital to him. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): Suddenly, there was a timer ticking on their rescue.  

They had a few days at most to be found, or things were going to get really rough for John Sloan, whose medication was now at the bottom of the ocean.  

Sloan grew up in the tough years of the great depression. He was an engineer, but always loved riding horses and farm life. He’d show his prize bulls at agricultural shows, parading them around the showground.

On an oriental cruise ship he met a 24-year-old called Joan – who was kinda from cattle royalty in Western Australia. They fell head over heels, with their shared love of farming and were married just a few months later. 

And, when the shipwrecked crew set up shifts paddling the life raft he'd take the oar just like everyone else, falling back exhausted after but never complaining, sparing his shipmates his agony.

Mick Doleman: You just get on, and you have to get on because the circumstances are so dire that we're on borrowed time quite frankly. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): The Sunday morning after the Blythe Star disappeared under the waves, they spied something jutting out of the water ahead. It was a hulking mass of rocks called Pedra Branca.

And it set a chill in Malcolm McCarroll's heart.  

Malcolm McCarroll (Archive): We looked like we were going to get blown onto her.  

Well, Pedra Branca is the most bleakest, oh, what can I say, the most desolate looking thing I've ever seen in all my life.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): As wide as a footy field, and a bit over twice as long, Pedra Branca rises sheer out of the ocean.  

Forget the Bermuda Triangle, this place was like a magnet for shipwrecks. 

Just months earlier, a Japanese fishing vessel had been destroyed there, and 21 men died. Only one survived by clinging to a rock for 27 hours.

It's not the sort of place you're going to pull up for a picnic.  

Malcolm McCarroll (Archive): There's waves continually breaking on it. And I don't know how high it'd be, roughly, I suppose, 100, 150 feet? 

I'm not much of a judge for distance and that sort of thing, but it was pretty bleak.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): With muscles burning they kept paddling – two at a time - to keep themselves and their precious raft free of the rocks.  

Every time Malcolm McCarroll put the paddle in the water he’d say the name of one of his family or friends.

Now 24 hours without medication, John Sloan was barely in a fit state to paddle.

Mick Doleman: He went crook very quickly. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): They managed to skirt the deadly Pedra Branca rocks, but there was something worse coming.  

The Weather.  

The howling winds of the roaring forties whipping up swells as high as a power pole. 

Mick Doleman: Imagine you're in a raft and there's no light, it's black, and the raft is being hammered by getting picked up by a wave, taken to the peak of the wave, and then smashed back down into the trough of the wave and the two sides of the raft coming together and smashing into each other. 

And we're just getting head butted and thrown into each other's space because we had no way to secure ourselves in the raft. And it was horrific. 

In addition to doing that, you've got to bail water out at the same time. And there was nothing you could do to alleviate it.  

The biggest fear I had in those circumstances was the bottom of the raft coming apart and us falling through it to our death. 

Piia Wirsu: How long would that last for? How long would you be doing that sort of being thrown into each other, trying to bail?  

Mick Doleman: You could get that for two or three days.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): The men were basically like socks in a washing machine.  

Only socks don't have bones to break.  

Piia Wirsu: Did you feel inconsequential in the face of nature?  

Mick Doleman: I was mindful of nature and nature's ability to kill me. And I'm hoping that it ain't gonna happen, it certainly won't happen with my assistance. I will do anything and everything to save my life and my fellow seafarers. 

I was never gonna give up. I was never gonna lie down and let it happen. No way.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): As the days rolled on, the men's existence shrank to rolling waves, a grey horizon and this small circle of rubber that was their lifeline.  

Mick Doleman: The only time we had was day and night. Our whole existence was about time and saving ourselves, saving our life.  

If it wasn't bad weather, it would be something else. If it wasn't the wind and the current blowing us away to Bilyeo, it'd be something else. There was never a dull moment, quite frankly. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): Something I can’t stop thinking about, is what if on day one of a new job I was thrown into an extreme survival situation with my new colleagues. 

People I don’t know. People I might not necessarily warm to. Who I now couldn’t escape. Being literally thrown together. 

In this tiny raft packed full of men, Captain Cruikshank became almost semi-comatose - unable to help paddle for three days.

He sat, hunched over and silent.  

And some of the crew were pretty riled at this. He was their captain. Their leader. And they'd never needed one more. 

Mick Doleman:  He was a disappointing person and when I asked him in the raft, did you get a mayday out? 

I'm 18, he's the captain.  

Piia Wirsu: What was your reaction when he said no?  

Mick Doleman: Absolutely surprised. And probably a bit angry actually, because he wasn't on the bridge. And had he been on the bridge, there's every chance he could have got a mayday away. 

If we'd had a mayday go off, or had got a message off before we sunk, we would have all got off and out. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): Even after months of trying to find out everything I can about this ship and her crew, Captain George Cruikshank still feels like something of an enigma to me. 

He’d first hit the decks of a ship as a 17-year-old – not dissimilar to Mick.

George Cruikshank (Archive): It can be treacherous, and it can be good.  

Reporter (Archive): Is the sea a friend of yours?  

George Cruikshank (Archive): Oh no, I wouldn't say that. It's my life, that's all. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): And now, as a seasoned captain, he ultimately was responsible for getting the Blythe Star, her cargo and crew safely to King Island. 

But, instead of overseeing the loading of cargo, making sure it was secure and the ship stable, he was fussing over new stationary in his cabin.

Some swear he was three sheets to the wind when the ship sailed, others reckon he’d only had a few.

Everyone agrees he wasn't on the bridge as he should have been when the ship started her death roll, but some are sure they heard him say he was in his cabin having a cup of tea - or maybe it was water.

Either way, a long shot from scrambling to get a mayday signal away.  

And then, after the Blythe Star went down, Captain Cruikshank seems to have just... fallen apart.

Reporter (Archive): Captain Cruickshank had failed to live up to the standards expected of a qualified master. 

He had failed to take adequate responsibility for the stability of his ship, had failed to send out distress signals when the ship got into trouble, and totally failed to assume command when it became necessary to abandon ship. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): There's no doubt he loved a drink, and that he didn't oversee as the ship was loaded up to a fatal level.

But, I do wonder, after the ship went down maybe he was just a man who wasn't up to the moment. Disappointing maybe, but also just human. 

Do any of us really know who we’d be in that situation?  

Maybe, like Cruikshank, we’d forever be judged badly for how we behaved in the worst moments of our lives. 

Dr Nicole Anderson: Disasters don't follow any rule books. We've got a brain that can act in some very strange ways. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): Dr Nicole Anderson specialises in expedition and wilderness medicine and understanding what extreme environments do to a person. As well as working in some pretty wild situations herself. 

Dr Nicole Anderson: It's one of those things that unless you're in that situation at the time, it's going to be very hard to make a judgement. We just don't know what these people were going through. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): I drove an hour to meet her. I wanted to find out more about what the men were going through, and why when some defined themselves by their resilience others really struggled. 

Dr Nicole Anderson: People may well be familiar with what we call the fight, flight and freeze. When we're in a situation where there's no training or there's no resources and the thing happens, the flight and fight can look like denial.  

What your body is trying to do is recognise what's in the environment hat's a dangerous thing, and then prepare to get out of it to a place of safety. 

Piia Wirsu: What happens in a situation like this where there actually is no safety to be had? 

Dr Nicole Anderson: It becomes a chronic stress response. Once you combine acute, becoming chronic, stress response, plus hypothermia, plus dehydration, you're starting to fight a losing battle. 

Piia Wirsu: What's happening to your body?  

Dr Nicole Anderson: It's awful. When people are cold, your peripheral circulation shuts down. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): In non-doctor speak - the blood rushes from your extremities like hands and feet into your torso and head.  

Dr Nicole Anderson: The body doesn't expect to be this cold for that long. The physical response is to try and keep blood going to the heart, to the lungs, to the brain. However, it can come with some very bad side effects. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): Basically? All this extra blood flowing to your core overloads the kidneys, which are then like 'Evacuate, evacuate' and start to release the extra fluid as urine.  

Dr Nicole Anderson: It's called a cold diuresis. You literally pee, you can pee out lots.  

So, people who are suffering from prolonged exposure to cold and are becoming hypothermic will also become dehydrated. So this is a double whammy on this poor brain, which is already suffering from just stress.  

It can certainly start a slower deterioration in mental capacity.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): In the total absence of leadership from Captain Cruikshank, First Mate Ken Jones stepped in to fill the breach. 

Mick Doleman: He climbed into the raft after escaping out of his cabin, from potential death, and just led. Just took the leadership, instilled confidence in us.  

He was a natural leader, absolute natural leader.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): Originally from Liverpool in England, Ken cut quite a figure in his seaman's uniform. To be honest, forget John Sloan’s romantic cruise, Ken sounds like a bit of a heart breaker.  

Reading some of his old letters, I've got to admit I can see why everyone fell in love with him.  

Ken Jones (Actor): My Darling Fran,  

We're just getting ready to set sail, but have a few minutes thought I'd get one up on you. I love you, and miss you already, as if you were miles away.  

I've got that empty feeling again, and if I didn't love you so much, I'd say it was a horrible feeling, but really it's just a part of having you.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): Tell me you're not a little in love after hearing that?  

Anyway, Ken became the glue that kept the crew together. 

As John Sloan deteriorated in front of his shipmates’ eyes, Ken gave them hope. 

Mick Doleman: We were wet, cold, desperately unhappy because we had to keep bailing water out of the raft, beshevelled, and cuddling up to each other.  

Piia Wirsu: During those days when you were at sea in the life raft, was there any kind of structure in the day at all?  

Mick Doleman: Well, yes, we always made sure that the raft was clean - it was everybody's responsibility.  

And of course we always had lookouts to keep looking for any possible search or rescue vessels, all to no avail.  

When we started drifting south to Macquarie Island and further afield, that wasn't nice because there was no birds, couldn't see a seagull anywhere. And that's a sure sign that we were a fair way from land.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): It was now Tuesday, and you know how pruny your fingers get after an hour-long bath? Well, just imagine the state of the skin that'd been permanently wet in salt water sloshing around in the raft for four days.  

Mick Doleman: I was pretty crusty and uncomfortable. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): The lack of water or food were taking their toll. They'd sleep 10 to 12 hours a day, their bodies running on empty.

The captain was still in a state of almost semi-coma, but the men refused to give voice to the deepest fears that hid in the night.  

Instead, they told each other about what they were going home to.  

Mick Doleman: We used to have good conversations and conversations were big and everybody talked about their family. 

I spoke about my new girlfriend, and here I am stuck in a life raft with ugly blokes and I've just met the most beautiful woman in the world. What, what did I do to deserve this?  

Anyway, so there was a bit of humour, a bit of joke here and there, but you're never far away from the serious things. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): Thursday the 18th dawned over the raft, high winds tearing at the orange canopy.

The soggy, and frozen men started to find signs of frostbite on their hands and feet.

The chief engineer, John Sloan, into his sixth day without medication no longer knew what was going on around him.

Even though his water rations had been increased in a desperate effort to keep him alive, his body shook constantly as he mumbled to himself - seemingly running through his life story.

18-year-old Mick Doleman had never sat next to a dying man before.  

Mick Doleman: He just became super quiet, didn't talk, didn't do much. He was really... You could, you could tell he wasn't well. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): As night crept over them, John Sloan grew quiet. 

The next morning, in the dim half-light that precedes dawn, Mick realised that Sloan was deathly still. Ken Jones checked his pulse. Nothing.

Mick Doleman: And I, I, I knew the bloke for two or three days. But he was a shipmate. And I, I mourned for him. I mourned for his family. I didn't even know how many kids or wife or whatever. 

But he didn't deserve to die on this raft.  

It was confronting, but you grow very quickly and you become a bit hardened about your environment and what you've got to do. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): As daylight seeped into the corners, the men covered him as best they could with some plastic from the raft's floor and discussed what they should do.

Mick Doleman: We came to the conclusion that we'll keep him on board in the hope that there'll be a rescue in due course.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): As the hours wore on, the men sat there trying to keep themselves upright, their shipmate's body inescapably close.  

After 12 hours, they realised their rescue might not be coming.

Mick Doleman: We had to give him a seafarer's burial. 

 I took his socks and I said, uh, uh, I'm sure he would not begrudge me his socks, uh, and, uh, everybody was, uh, it was fine.  

Captain said some nice words. You've been a good seafarer. You've been a good shipmate.  

And, um, so we slipped him over the side.  

We had to lift his body up and take him to the side of the raft and, um, and then let him, let him go. 

And I'd never seen a dead person in my life, um, never buried a dead person in my life. And, um, that was our first casualty. And, um, we hardly spoke. 

It knocked us all over, because the same could happen to any one of us in this unknown event that we are in.  

It took a long time to get functioning, um, normally, if you call getting around in a life raft normal. 

Piia Wirsu: Did it change how you were thinking about what you were going through?  

Mick Doleman: It made me think that I could be a better person. 

If I can get out of this, basically unscathed, I can do anything. I can be anything I want, but I've got to make sure that I'm the man that can do it.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): The death of John was something of a turning point for the men.  

The combined pressure of the physical and psychological stress, dehydration and exposure, and now loss put them right on the edge.  

Mick Doleman: One night all of us had the same madness. I don't know what it was, what it is, but we had tins of water, our last water, and we opened all the tins and drank all the water. All the water, none, none left.  

We all thought that there was a Norwegian vessel’s crew in the raft and we're all drinking beer. And every one of us had the same imagination or the same event. 

Piia Wirsu: Was it like you were all in the pub? Like, were you laughing and joking? Like, what, what actually happened?  

Mick Doleman: Exactly like that. It was, we're sitting in the raft and we're at sea and it was just like dementia of some sort.  

You know, we just laughed and drank until we ran out of water, or beer or whatever we thought it was, and then fell asleep.  

The next morning, we said to everybody, what the hell went on here? 

Piia Wirsu: What was that realisation like the next day that you'd drunk all your water? 

Mick Doleman:  Oh, we were all in shock, actually. All feeling somewhat guilty and yet we're all party to it.  It was just crazy  

Piia Wirsu (VO): Nine men, in a raft, with no water. Shit just got real, on a whole other level.  

Mick Doleman: I don't know what it was, why we did it. 

Dr Nicole Anderson: It seems to me to be almost a sensed presence effect. People whose brains are not working very well, particularly in the context of a cold environment, dehydration adding to the stress and where there was a lack of sensory input because they're in a raft, it's dark, their brains are trying to make sense of this situation. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): Our survival expert Dr Nicole Anderson says this kind of delusion isn't unheard of when someone is pushed right to the edge, both physically and mentally.  

Dr Nicole Anderson: When you deprive people of sensory input, your brain will make up things.  

There's a lot of literature that deals with people seeing people, hearing people, feeling people, called the sensed presence. 

And it's very common in people who are in extreme and unusual environments who are pushed to physical extremes. To have a moral injury happen with somebody dying - again, it's another body and mind blow. 

So it's no surprise that the group of them then suffered what appeared to be a delusional incident.  

Piia Wirsu (VO): By Saturday the 20th, the men had been blown right around the southern tip of Tasmania, now hundreds of ks from where they started. 

Mick had got to know these men, who had been strangers just seven days before, in a way few people ever get to know one another.  

And the nine remaining men were in a very real race. They were one man down, and all at the end of endurance. 

And, after more than a week at sea, apparently on their own.  

Mick Doleman: I all the time we were in that raft, we seen no sign of a search and rescue, no sign of a plane.  

I think we'd all come to the conclusion that we've got to save ourselves. There's nobody's going to come to get us. 

Piia Wirsu (VO): Where the hell was the search party? 

This is season two of ABC’s Expanse Podcast, From the Dead...  hosted by me, Piia Wirsu on the land of the Stoney Creek Nations. My producer and sound engineer on Awabakal land is the wonderful Grant Wolter. Executive producer is Blythe Moore, senior producer is me. With thanks to Liz Gwynn and Helen Shield for additional production and research.  

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