ONE British family, who found themselves shipwrecked in the Pacific ocean for 38 days, made a haunting pledge to not eat each other while lost at sea.
Over 50 years ago, the Robertson family opted to ditch Staffordshire to voyage the world.
Ex-naval captain Dougal and his wife Lyn, a former nurse packed up their bags with 18-year-old son Douglas, twin boys Neil and Sandy, 9, and daughter Anne, 17, in 1971.
The couple sold a dairy farm they ran near market town Leek, and used the money to fork out on a 43ft schooner ship named Lucette.
But across the Pacific ocean the Robertsons were struck by a pack of killer whales and shipwrecked at sea, leading them somewhere off the Caribbean.
They were so desperate when their ship sunk that they drank turtle blood when they struggled to catch rainwater.
Before they were eventually whisked away to safety by the Japanese, they made pledges to each other that they “wouldn’t eat each other” under any circumstance.
On January 27, they left from Falmouth, Cornwall and ended up stopping at many ports in the Caribbean.
Over the next year and a half the family travelled across the Atlantic, enjoying time in Jamaica and Panama.
Seasoned sailors, Dougal met Lyn when they were both sailing at the Aberdeen Boat Club in Hong Kong years earlier.
Son Douglas, who is now in his late 60s, told the BBC: “Father’s planning for this journey was zero, we didn’t even have a practice sail around the bay before setting off around the world.”
He spoke of his dad wanting to teach his kids about the “university of life” while voyaging the ocean.
However while sailing across the Pacific ocean, their wooden schooner was hit by a pod of killer whales near the Galapagos Islands, 17 months into their journey.
Douglas said: “The whole boat shook and the keel must’ve cracked. There was a splintering noise of wood cracking, if you can imagine the sound of a tree trunk being snapped in two.”
He said he heard a huge splash and noticed three killer whales tailing the boat.
The panicked teen feared he was going to be “eaten alive”, although wild orcas are not usually dangerous.
The Robertsons, alongside a student hitchhiker they’d picked up launched an inflatable life raft and a dinghy.
Douglas said he had to blow up the ten-man raft himself after the bellows broke.
Dad Dougal had planned on sailing the raft to the Pacific ocean’s centre and safely catch the counter current back to the US.
All they had on them was cans of water and rations, like fruit and biscuits which sustained them for six days.
But when this ran out, they had to catch rainwater in containers to stay hydrated and hunt turtles and fish for food.
Douglas explained: “Turtle was the mainstay of our diet. We drank its blood when we had no water, we dried its meat and rationed it and stored it up.
“We rendered the fat down in the sun to make oil which we rubbed on our skin and drank to keep us warm.”
Their raft became unfit for purpose after 16 days afrift, forcing the family of five and the hitchhiker to cramp into a 10ft long dinghy called the Ednamair.
They took turns sitting on the dry part of the boat.
On July 23, 1972, which marked 38 days of the Robertsons using the small dinghy, a Japanese fishing vessel spotted their distress flare and rescued them.
The family donated the Ednamair to the National Maritime Museum in Falmouth, where they first set off.
They returned to their home in the Peak District but Dougal’s and Linda’s marriage was soon on the rocks. They divorced a year later.
Guilt consumed the couple, Douglas said: “Mum and Dad never forgave themselves for what they did to the family.
“They felt they’d been negligent in putting us at such risk.”
Dougal wrote a bestseller on the infamous shipwreck, named Survive the Savage Sea and ended up living in Greece on a new bought.
Son Robin worked in finance, and Douglas had joined the merchant navy before becoming an accountant and the twin boys struggled to adjust to school following the traumatic shipwreck.
