He was alive. He was thin. He was somewhere he had not been one hundred and thirty-three days earlier: close enough to land that the ocean itself was different.
## The Fishermen
On April 5, 1943, three Brazilian fishermen working approximately nine nautical miles off the coast near Salinópolis, east of the city of Belém in the state of Pará, saw the raft.
They came alongside. They helped Poon Lim aboard their vessel. He was, by the accounts given in the sources consulted, able to walk — barely, but without requiring being carried. He had lost approximately twenty pounds from his pre-sinking weight. He could stand.
The Brazilian fishing boat landed at Belém. He arrived on April 8, 1943 — three days after his rescue, covering the distance between the rescue point and port. The British Consul in Pará reported the situation to the British Ministry of War Transport on April 10, 1943.
Poon Lim had been alone on a Carley float in the South Atlantic for one hundred and thirty-three days. He was the sole survivor of fifty-four people aboard the SS Benlomond: Captain John Maul, forty-three crew members, and all eight gunners had died when the ship went down or in the water afterward. Of the crew total, a significant portion were his fellow Chinese seamen — men recruited through the same channels, from the same provinces, on the same unequal economic terms as Poon Lim himself.
He was twenty-five years old.
## Recovery in Belém
The hospital in Belém received a patient who was, in physical terms, far better than a hundred and thirty-three days alone at sea might have suggested. The active survival strategy that Poon Lim had maintained throughout his ordeal — the fishing, the swimming, the deliberate physical maintenance — had preserved more of his physical condition than a passive ordeal would have. He had lost twenty pounds, which is significant but not extreme relative to the duration of his deprivation. He was weak, but he was functional.