It was the ocean of the slave trade routes, across which an estimated twelve and a half million enslaved Africans were transported between the sixteenth and nineteenth centuries, with mortality rates during the Middle Passage that represented one of history’s most extensive episodes of forced human death at sea. It was the ocean of the nineteenth-century whaling industry, whose pursuit of sperm whales and other cetaceans took American and British vessels to its most remote reaches. It was the ocean of the wartime convoys and the U-boat campaign that killed the Benlomond and fifty-three of its crew.
The specific section that Poon Lim drifted through — from the equatorial mid-Atlantic westward to the Brazilian coast — is not a heavily trafficked or historically prominent zone, apart from its role in the wartime Atlantic campaign. The Amazon’s influence on the water chemistry and color of the western edge of this zone is well documented by oceanographers. The fishing grounds of the Brazilian coast, where the fishermen who rescued him worked, are documented in the regional maritime literature. The U-boat patrol routes that brought U-172 to the position of the Benlomond’s sinking are documented in the German naval records.
The raft crossed all of it without stopping. The South Equatorial Current that carried it west was indifferent to the person on it — carrying raft and man alike at the same rate it would have carried any other floating object of similar windage and water resistance. The ocean does not cooperate with survival; it provides the environment within which survival must be accomplished, and the specific environment of the equatorial South Atlantic in the winter and spring of 1942-43 was formidable without being impossible. Poon Lim threaded the specific needle of what that environment made possible, and the fishermen of coastal Pará found him on the other side.