What is preserved is the practical geography: they were fishing approximately nine nautical miles off the coast near Salinópolis, a town on the coast of Pará state in northeastern Brazil, east of the city of Belém. This area, at the eastern edge of the Amazon delta’s coastal influence, was and is an active small-boat fishing zone. The fishing methods used by Brazilian coastal fishermen in this region in the 1940s were hand-line and net-based, from small wooden vessels that worked relatively close inshore — a context in which spotting a drifting raft carrying an isolated figure was unusual enough to attract investigation.
Belém, the city to which Poon Lim was taken after his rescue on April 8, was the capital of Pará state and the major port city at the mouth of the Amazon system. Founded in 1616 by Portuguese colonists, it had developed into a significant commercial and maritime center, with a working port that connected the Amazon interior to the Atlantic trade. The British Consul in Pará, who filed the report to the Ministry of War Transport on April 10, 1943, was part of the small but active British commercial and diplomatic community that maintained a presence in this port city.
The journey from the rescue point to Belém — approximately three days by the fishing boat’s account — represents the final phase of the displacement that the Benlomond’s sinking had initiated. Poon Lim had begun in Cape Town, had been at the position of the sinking in the mid-Atlantic, had drifted to the coast of Brazil, and had now arrived, by fishing boat, at a port city in the Amazon basin. The geography of his ordeal was the geography of the South Atlantic trade routes, deformed by the current and weather systems of the equatorial zone.