10 Epic Tales Of Survival Against All Odds

To be trapped in an impossible situation, alone at the mercy of nature, cut off from human company and society—it’s a primal fear, born out of a sense that we would be helpless without the protection of civilization. The truth is that none of us really know how we would respond to such a situation. But, as it turns out, the human spirit can be a surprisingly tough thing.

10 Robert McLaren Removed His Own Appendix In The Jungle

By 1942, Robert “Jock” McLaren had already escaped from a prison camp in Singapore, fought for weeks with local guerrillas, been betrayed to the Japanese by a double-crossing comrade, and been interned in a high-security prison camp in Borneo. Books have been written about less. But McLaren was just getting started.

McLaren had been a teenage cavalryman during the First World War, before immigrating to Australia and settling down to a quiet life in Queensland. When the Second World War broke out, the middle-aged veterinarian was one of the first to sign up. Captured by the Japanese after the Fall of Malaya, McLaren staged his first breakout from Singapore’s notorious Changi prison. His recapture didn’t dent his determination to escape. The move to Borneo just meant he was that much closer to home. He quickly teamed up with someone as determined to escape as he was—a local Chinese man known as Johnny Funk, who had been brutally tortured by the Japanese.

Together, Jock and Johnny broke out of prison and trekked to the coast. They then island-hopped for 430 kilometers (270 mi) across the Pacific in a hollowed-out log, fighting running battles with the Japanese along the way, before landing safely on the Philippine island of Mindanao. Unfortunately, the island had already fallen to the Japanese. And McLaren had developed appendicitis.

Hunted by the Japanese and with no way to reach a doctor, McLaren had to make a desperate decision. He had a mirror, a sharp pocketknife, some jungle fibers to stitch the wound, and absolutely no anesthetic. He was going to have to take the appendix out himself.

The operation took four and a half hours. Years later, when receiving the Military Cross, McLaren was asked about the operation. His answer was predictably laconic. “It was hell,” he said, “but I came through all right.”

Two days after the surgery, McLaren was on his feet fleeing the Japanese again. He spent the rest of the war as a guerrilla in the Philippines, most of it in command of an old whaling boat called The Bastard. He packed the boat full of mortars and machine guns and used it to sail into heavily guarded Japanese ports, spray bullets everywhere, and then run for it before anyone could work out what was going on. Despite a huge reward, he was never caught, possibly because everyone was terrified of the notorious rebel leader known to leave severed appendixes in his wake.

9 Doug Scott Crawled Down A Mountain On Broken Legs

As one of the true legends of mountaineering, Doug Scott has turned surviving impossible conditions into an art form. In 1975, for example, he and a colleague, Dougal Haston, became the first men to spend the night below the summit of Mount Everest. Unfortunately, they did this by accident, after their climb to the peak took longer than expected. As a result, they had no tent or oxygen and only fairly light clothing. At night the temperature dropped to –30 degrees Celsius (–22 °F). Scott and Haston survived by digging a hole in the snow for shelter. They didn’t even get frostbite.

But even that pales in comparison to Scott’s incredible descent of Baintha Brakk, a notorious Pakistani mountain known as “the Ogre.” In 1977, almost 25 years after the first conquest of Everest, nobody had ever been able to reach the Ogre’s rocky summit. Scott was determined that he would be the first. The expedition he led was so cash-strapped that it had to hire physically disabled porters. Nonetheless, on July 13, Scott and his climbing partner, Chris Bonington, scaled the 250-meter (820 ft) pinnacle of rock that stood at the Ogre’s peak.

Since it was already late, they decided to speed up their descent by abseiling back down the rock face. This was not a good decision. As he tried to rappel down, a sudden gust of wind swung Scott violently into the cliff, shattering both his legs. Since only his lower legs were broken, Scott managed to abseil the rest of the way down using his knees to push off from the rock.

Fortunately, the pair was soon joined by two other members of the expedition. Unfortunately, they were still over 2,000 meters (6,500 ft) from their base camp. And then a blizzard forced them to shelter in a cave for two days, where they ate the last of their rations. Since the rough terrain made it impossible for the other climbers to carry Scott (especially after Bonington broke two of his ribs in a separate fall), he know there was only one path to survival—he was going to have to crawl down the mountain.

He crawled for seven days, on his hands and knees, down one of the highest mountains in the world. By the end, he had worn through four layers of clothes, and his knees were a bloody pulp. He did it all with two untreated broken legs and on starvation rations, and he still moved so fast that he sometimes ended up ahead of the other three.

When the four climbers reached the site of their base camp, they found it empty—they had been gone for so long that their support team had assumed they were dead. Scott was eventually flown off for emergency medical treatment. The helicopter crashed at the hospital, but it shouldn’t surprise anyone to learn that he crawled away without a scratch.

8 Gareth Wood Fought A Seal In Antarctica

In 1984, Gareth Wood, Robert Swan, and Roger Mear set off to walk to the South Pole. Their journey was soon dubbed the “Footsteps of Scott Expedition” since it aimed to retrace the famous journey to the pole of Robert Falcon Scott. Given that Scott’s entire party famously died of starvation, exhaustion, and cold on the way back from the Pole, this seemed something of an odd decision. Furthermore, only two previous expeditions had reached the Pole overland—Scott and his great rival Roald Amundsen. To succeed, Wood’s team would have to make the longest unsupported trek in history.

Surprisingly, the journey largely went off without a hitch—until it was time to go home, when the support ship Southern Quest was crushed by ice and sank before it could reach the expedition. The crew had to be rescued from nearby ice floes. Meanwhile, Wood was far away, hiking across the frozen Backdoor Bay. The ice was thin in places, so Wood moved carefully, testing the surface one foot at a time. Then, as he made his way over the frigid depths, something huge came up through the ice.

Wood later described the surface “exploding” as a fully grown leopard seal burst through the thin ice and clamped its teeth around Wood’s leg, slicing through the thick polar gear and into his flesh. The seal then tried to drag Wood back through the hole in the ice and into the freezing water—a death sentence in more ways than one. Only a crampon secured to the ice stood between the explorer and death. Somehow, he managed to struggle with the creature until his companions arrived and began kicking the seal in the head. Still, it refused to release its grip on Wood, until, defeated, it finally sank back beneath the ice. Wood’s relieved companions pulled him back from the edge.

Then the seal leaped through the ice again, sank its teeth into the same leg as before, and the whole thing began anew.

Wood could count himself lucky that he did eventually escape. In 2003, a leopard seal dragged a British biologist underwater to her death, the first recorded case of a seal killing a human.

Read the rest of the article