Adrift for 76 Days

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 1 August 2020

⏱️ 50 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Surviving the Atlantic alone in a liferaft, Spain's historic 1960s tourism boom, the death of the infamous Nazi Heinrich Himmler, plus fighting Australia's bushfires and we remember a groundbreaking Latino writer. Photo: Photo: Steve Callahan shows how he hunted fish from his life raft. © Steve Callahan

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me Max Pearson,
0:04.8	the past brought to life by those who were there.
0:07.8	This week the horrors of Bush firefighting in Australia.
0:11.3	We watched everything burn. It was devastating to watch and you
0:15.0	just felt helpless because there was nothing you could do. Plus the death of
0:18.5	Heinrich Himmler drew his head away and clamping down on the doctor's fingers crushed the
0:25.4	file of poison which he had been carried in his mouth for hours.
0:28.7	The groundbreaking 20th century Cuban-American writer Dolores Prita and the role of the bikini in the early development of Spanish tourism.
0:37.0	One of the things I did was to issue a decree allowing the bikini to be worn within the town of Benedon.
0:45.7	This caused a big scandal across Spain and the Bishop of Valencia began the process of excommunicating me.
0:52.4	That's all coming up later in the podcast.
0:54.0	But we begin this week with a remarkable story of survival.
0:57.0	Many of us might be feeling somewhat cast adrift socially or economically
1:01.0	by the events of the current COVID pandemic. But few have ever been so literally all at sea as Stephen Kalahad. In 1982, he was sailing a yacht alone across the Atlantic when one night disaster struck and his boat began to sink.
1:17.0	He found himself adrift in a life raft in the middle of the Atlantic with no prospect of rescue.
1:22.0	Alex Last has been hearing his extraordinary story.
1:25.0	The night I lost the boat, it was blowing up into a gale and finally laid down to actually
1:37.1	get some sleep in about an hour later I was bam on the side of the boat and water just came gushing in and like fire hydrant kind of gushing in.
1:45.8	So I thought the boat was going straight down. The whole forward half of the boat roughly was under water,
1:51.9	but the back was up a little bit and that gave me my only chance of actually getting out of the boat and so I did I got up to the deck and inflated the life raft and floated it off to the side of the boat and jumped in.
2:06.2	Then it became obvious that the boat wasn't going to sink right away at least and
2:12.0	I knew I was virtually in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean with the
	...

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