The Boundary of Existence

A TRUE STORY OF SHIPWRECK, SURVIVAL, AND ONE OF THE MOST DESPERATE OPEN-BOAT VOYAGES IN NAVAL HISTORY. After seven months of backbreaking labor dredging a channel through coral, ninety-three men looked toward San Francisco. Lieutenant Commander Montgomery Sicard set a course for Ocean Island, a speck of sand and reef sixty miles to the west, to verify its position and search for castaways from previous wrecks. Before they reached it, darkness hid the jagged teeth of Kure Atoll. At 0300 hours, the Saginaw struck. The reef tore through her hull. The men survived, marooned on a desolate sandbank two thousand miles from the nearest civilization. They clubbed seals for oily, stringy meat and coaxed fresh water from the brine in a distillery rigged from a salvaged boiler. At night, rats overran the camp, skittering across the sleeping men. To save his crew, Sicard ordered the construction of a rescue craft from the ruins of the wreck. Five men volunteered. They took the captain's gig, a twenty-two-foot open boat, and began an 1,800-mile journey across the North Pacific, carrying a crude sextant forged from zinc scraps and a broken mirror, a few days of rations, and the weight of eighty-eight lives. For thirty-one days, they battled storms, starvation, thirst, and exhaustion. When their food spoiled, they survived on whale oil. Their journey remains one of the most extraordinary, and least known, survival stories in United States naval history. Reconstructed from the original 1870 deck logs of the USS Saginaw, the official reports of Lieutenant Commander Sicard, the personal journals of Paymaster George Read, and the first-hand testimony of William Halford. Fans of The Wager, Endurance, and In the Heart of the Sea will find a new epic of survival in the wreck of the Saginaw. Eighty-eight men wait on the sand. Five men row for their lives.