U-172 surfaced nearby. There is testimony, incorporated into the accounts of Poon Lim’s story, that the U-boat’s crew saw him in the water and that they laughed and waved before leaving. This account has been repeated in multiple sources, though it derives ultimately from Poon Lim’s own testimony about what he observed while in the water in the immediate aftermath of the sinking. The German records of the sinking indicate that the crew did question survivors before leaving the area. What the U-boat’s crew saw, what they did, and what their intentions were in leaving a surviving Chinese merchant sailor in the water are matters reconstructed from a single perspective under conditions of extreme stress.
Poon Lim floated in the South Atlantic for approximately two hours.
After those two hours, he saw something on the water’s surface among the debris from the sinking: a wooden life raft, floating empty.
He swam to it.
## The Raft
The raft that Poon Lim boarded was a Carley float — a standard piece of merchant navy liferaft equipment in the wartime period, designed not as a lifeboat but as a survival platform. It was approximately eight feet by eight feet, made of wood, with a slatted wooden deck and a partial canvas canopy providing some shelter from sun and rain. It was not a large vessel. It was not motorized. It had no sail, no oars capable of meaningful propulsion against ocean currents, and no navigational equipment.
What it did have was a store of emergency supplies, as required by the regulations governing British merchant vessels of the period. The accounts of Poon Lim’s own descriptions of the raft’s initial contents vary slightly between sources — the common factor of small discrepancies across multiple tellings of a four-month ordeal — but the general inventory was: approximately ten to ten and a half imperial gallons of fresh water; a supply of hardtack biscuits and tinned pemmican; chocolate; evaporated milk; lime juice; sugar; flares; a pair of smoke pots; a flashlight; and a canvas cover that could be rigged to collect rainwater.