But the more durable reason, and the more honest one, is what the story reveals about a specific moment in the history of the world and of the specific communities whose stories that moment contains. The SS Benlomond was a British ship carrying Chinese seamen across the wartime Atlantic on unequal wages, in conditions that reflected the racial hierarchy of the British Empire at its late colonial moment. Fifty-three of those seamen died when the ship was torpedoed. One survived. The survival was remarkable; the deaths were part of a pattern of losses among Chinese merchant seamen that has still not received the attention it deserves in the mainstream historiography of the Second World War.
Poon Lim’s story is a thread that connects the wartime Atlantic to the Chinese communities of Hainan and Guangdong, to the discriminatory practices of British merchant shipping employment, to the specific geography of the South Equatorial Current and the fishing grounds of coastal Pará, to the Senate chambers in Washington where Warren Magnuson sponsored an immigration exemption, to a Brooklyn apartment where a retired Chief Steward lived out the later decades of a life that the war had almost ended in 1942.
It matters because it is true, and because the truths it contains extend beyond the remarkable surface of the record itself.
## The Equatorial Zone and Its Specific Dangers
The section of the South Atlantic through which Poon Lim drifted over his four months at sea has specific environmental characteristics that shaped his experience in ways that are not always reflected in the popular accounts of his story. Understanding them adds precision to the account of what he survived.