He survived because of who he was before the ship went down, not because of who the survival made him.
## Final Account
The record stands: one hundred and thirty-three days, alone, on a Carley float in the South Atlantic, between November 23, 1942 and April 5, 1943.
The person who set it was Poon Lim, born March 8, 1918, in Qishan village, Wenchang County, Hainan, China. He was the son of a martial arts teacher and the product of a coastal maritime community. He was trained as a merchant sailor in British Hong Kong. He was a Second Mess Steward on a British cargo vessel. He was twenty-four years old when the ship went down.
He was rescued by three Brazilian fishermen working the coastal waters of Pará state, in the delta of the Amazon. He was twenty-five years old.
He received the British Empire Medal from King George VI. He worked for United States Lines for decades and retired as Chief Steward. He became an American citizen in 1952 and married the daughter of a former shipmate. He had three daughters and a son. He lived in Brooklyn.
He died on January 4, 1991, at the age of seventy-two.
When the news of the record was conveyed to him in New York in 1943, he said: “I hope no one will ever have to break that record.”
No one has.
## The Long Aftermath: Memory, Recognition, and the Passage of Time
There is a particular kind of historical memory that attaches to extraordinary survival stories: a quality of increasing legend, in which the specific facts of an ordeal are progressively simplified, romanticized, or inflated until the person at the center becomes more symbol than individual. The survival of Poon Lim has not entirely escaped this tendency. In the decades since his death in 1991, the accounts that circulate online and in popular media have sometimes added details that the documented record does not support, or have presented uncertain reconstructions as established fact, or have reduced the complex context of his story — the wartime merchant navy, the Chinese seamen, the structural inequalities of British maritime employment — to a brief background note before moving to the more cinematically compelling details of improvised fishing and shark encounters.