The shark fin preparation that multiple accounts attribute to him during the survival period is the clearest expression of this: the specific culinary tradition of using dried shark fin, associated with southern Chinese and Hainan cooking, applied to a situation in which the comfort of culturally familiar food preparation was both practically possible and psychologically significant. He was not performing an abstract survival technique. He was doing something that connected him, in however attenuated a form, to the food culture of his home.
## The South Equatorial Current and the Drift
The route that the Carley float traveled from the position of the Benlomond’s sinking to the location of Poon Lim’s rescue near the mouth of the Amazon is not something that can be mapped with precision from the available records. No one was plotting the raft’s position as it drifted; the coordinates of the sinking are documented in naval records, and the coordinates of the rescue are established by the Brazilian accounts, but the specific path between those two points over one hundred and thirty-three days is reconstructed from oceanographic inference rather than direct observation.
What oceanography tells us is that the South Equatorial Current — the major westward-flowing surface current system of the tropical Atlantic — would have been the primary driver of the raft’s movement. This current flows from the coast of Africa toward the coast of South America along approximately the equatorial band, driven by the southeast trade winds and the Coriolis effect of the Earth’s rotation. It divides near the Brazilian coast, with one branch flowing northwest along the coast of South America and eventually contributing to the Gulf Stream system, and another branch flowing south along the Brazilian coast.