A madman on a rubber boat proved that human will is stronger than the elements of the sea. Biography Who is Alain Bombard

Just a little over sixty years ago, doctor Alain Bombard crossed the Atlantic Ocean alone in a small rubber boat. It took him sixty-five days to do this. He drank sea ​​water and ate what he caught in the ocean. He wanted to prove that shipwreck victims had a chance of survival. And he proved it.

Alain Bombard - overboard of his own free will

Rubber boat Heretic - on it Alain Bombard went to conquer the ocean

Bombar kept a diary. He wrote everything down there. For example:

“Eating raw fish makes a person very susceptible to infection. The slightest wound opens.” He threw antibiotics overboard - what if disaster victims didn't have them?
He found out that you need to drink sea water in small portions, and then your kidneys can handle it, but you can only drink this for six days - then you have to catch fish and squeeze out its juice. The skin of the fish is cut, and lymph is released from it, so they drink it. Or they chop the fish into small pieces, and then wrap it in cloth and squeeze it out. They drink fish juice for a day, and then you can drink sea water again.”

Incredible journey route

A book by Alpina Publisher about the journey of Alan Bombard"

“About half a liter of water can be collected in the morning - dew will fall. It covers the entire boat and can be picked up with a sponge.
To reduce thirst, you need to wet any rag and place it on your face.
If you throw a tied sock overboard, within an hour it will fill with plankton. A tablespoon a day satisfies the need for vitamin C. There is no need to take off your clothes, even if they are wet. Clothes keep you warm."

What Bombar has not experienced. It experienced storms, calm, and scorching heat. The skin on my legs came off in shreds, my fingernails grew into the flesh, and everything on my legs came off. He developed bloody diarrhea, and at times it was difficult to keep his psyche within normal limits. He was talking to a doll. The little doll was given to him by friends. And Bombar won. Sixty-five days later he landed on the island of Barbados.

“To achieve victory, you must believe in it!” - he wrote in a note to his friend Jack, who abandoned him just before the start of this voyage. After this, Bombar set off across the ocean alone.
He won because he knew: a person dies primarily from fear. This is how Titanic passengers died in lifeboats. This is how many shipwreck victims died.

Bombar gave them a chance. He proved: a person can do anything. In the summer of 2005, Alain Bombard, a man of insane courage, passed away. He was 81 years old.

Overboard at will

This book is dedicated

To three men:

Dr. Furnestin

Admiral Sol

Captain Carter

and three women:

my wife

my mother

Casablanca

Birth of an idea

Spring 1951. Early morning. I sleep peacefully in my room at the hospital in Boulogne. Suddenly the phone rings:

Duty intern?

Yes. What's happened?

Shipwreck at the Carnot Pier!

I'm going now.

Still not suspecting the full tragedy of the disaster, I, cursing, pull on my clothes and hastily go down to the emergency room. There's no one here yet. The porter tells me that the trawler Notre-Dame de Peyrags, from the small port of Equiem, got lost in the fog and collided with the end of the Carnot pier.

It's quite cold outside, but the sea is very calm and so I don't feel too worried. Mol Carnot is one of the outermost structures of the port. During strong winds it is very dangerous, but when the sea is calm, climbing it is not difficult, since on its outer side, facing the sea, there are stairs every twenty meters.

A car horn is heard: it's a rescue vehicle. The double doors swing wide open and, very proud of my role, I step forward... I will never forget this sight! Forty-three people, piled on top of each other like torn marionettes, lay in front of me - all barefoot and all in life belts. Our efforts came to nothing: we were unable to bring a single one back to life. An insignificant miscalculation, and as a result - forty-three corpses and seventy-eight orphans.

It seems to me that it was then that I fully realized the tragedy of the crash at sea and that it was this incident that gave rise to the idea in me, which later led to the expedition on the Heretic ["L" Heretique].

Shipwreck! For me, this word has become synonymous with the gravest human suffering, a synonym for despair, hunger and thirst. Boulogne alone loses annually from one hundred to one hundred and fifty of its citizens at sea, and later I learned that throughout the entire globe in peacetime about two hundred thousand people die in the same way every year. About one-fourth of these victims do not go down at the same time as the ship and are put into lifeboats and the like. But soon they too die a painful death.

I have long been interested in the question: how long can a person withstand all kinds of hardships, what is the limit of endurance of the human body? And I came to the conviction that in some cases a person can step over all the norms determined by physiology, and still remain alive.

For a long time I studied materials about prisoners, exiles and other groups of the population living from hand to mouth. But more often than not, such theoretical research ended with me asking myself: “Why do I need all this?” Because with my lack of education or my medical education - it’s the same thing - knowledge remained a dead letter for me until I found practical application for it.

But to a number of similar problems was added the problem of shipwrecked people. Its peculiarity was that external factors causes of human suffering do not depend, as in the case of prisoners, on the ill will of people or, as in the case of famine in India, on a sudden severe drought when nothing can be changed. Vice versa! A shipwrecked person finds himself in a natural environment, of course not safe, but at the same time extremely rich in everything that is necessary in order to live, or at least survive, get to land or wait for help to arrive. After all, one cubic meter of sea water contains two hundred times more nutrients than a cubic meter of land!

In short, I thought that although the sea poses an eternal threat to the castaway, it is not merciless, and most importantly, it is not barren. You just need to overcome your fear of the sea and get food from it. There was nothing insurmountable in this problem. This is how I thought about the environment into which a castaway finds himself.

As for the human body, which is forced to fight the sea elements and at the same time draw vitality from it, I have come to the conviction that physiologists for the most part underestimate the importance of the mind and its influence on the body. I studied the most famous cases where people survived in the most desperate conditions. The influence of the mind on the entire body has been proven by Gandhi's hunger strikes, the polar expeditions of Scott and Amundsen, and the voyage of Captain Bligh, whom the mutinous crew abandoned in the open sea on a boat with an eight-day supply of water and food: the thirst for revenge helped him hold out at sea for more than forty days and survive! So there was clearly a misunderstanding here. It was impossible to say: “In such and such physical conditions you can survive." It would be more correct to say, using the favorite formulation of mathematicians, that “all other things being equal (and this includes the influence of reason, by which I mean courage and hope for life), it is quite possible to survive if such and such physical conditions exist.”

Going from this, I returned to statistics. Every year, fifty thousand people die while already in rescue ships. Is there really nothing that can be done to save them? And if possible, then what?

I began to re-read the legendary tales of the castaways, but from them all struggle seemed hopeless and all hope meaningless.

On July 2, 1816, the frigate Medusa beached itself on a sandbank one hundred and eighty kilometers off the African coast. One hundred and forty-nine people - passengers, soldiers and several officers - were placed on a hastily constructed raft, which was towed by boats. Under mysterious circumstances, the towing rope broke and the raft was carried out into the open ocean. On the raft there were six barrels of wine and two barrels of fresh water. The raft was found just twelve days later, but only fifteen people remained alive on it. Ten of them were near death and died immediately after they were taken on board.

On April 14, 1912, the transatlantic passenger ship Titanic collided with an iceberg. A few hours later, the Titanic sank. The first ships approached the scene of the disaster just three hours after the ship disappeared under water, but there were already many dead and crazy people in the lifeboats. It is significant that among those who paid with madness for their panic fear or death for madness, there was not a single child under ten years of age. These kids were still at a fairly reasonable age.

Alain Bombard - French biologist, doctor, politician.

Alain was born in Paris on October 27, 1924. As a practicing doctor in a seaside hospital, Alain Bombard was literally shocked by the fact that tens and even hundreds of thousands of people die at sea every year! And at the same time, a significant part of them died not from drowning, cold or hunger, but from fear, they died only because they believed in the inevitability of their death.

They were killed by despair, lack of will, and seeming aimlessness to fight for their lives and the lives of their comrades in misfortune. “Victims of legendary shipwrecks who died prematurely, I know: it was not the sea that killed you, it was not hunger that killed you, it was not thirst that killed you! Rocking on the waves to the plaintive cries of the seagulls, you died of fear,” Bombar firmly stated, deciding to prove it with his own experience the power of courage and self-confidence.

As a doctor who knows the reserves of the human body well, Alain Bombard was sure that many people who, for one reason or another, were forced to part with the comfort of the ship and escape on boats, rafts or other available means, died long before their left physical strength: Despair killed them.

Wanting to force unprepared people to believe in himself, in the ability to overcome both the forces of the elements and his apparent weakness, Alain Bombard is not a St. John's wort and not a sailor, but an ordinary doctor decided to set off on a voyage across the Atlantic Ocean in an ordinary inflatable boat.

Bombard spent about a year preparing for the voyage, both theoretically and psychologically. There were many friends who warmly supported Bombar’s idea and provided all kinds of assistance, but there were also skeptics and ill-wishers, and even simply hostile people. Not everyone understood the humanity of the idea; they even called it a heresy, and the author himself a heretic. As if in defiance of all his skeptics, Bombar named his boat "Heretic".

Alain Bombard proved that a person can do a lot if he really wants to and does not lose willpower. He is able to survive in the most difficult conditions in which he may accidentally find himself.

The voyage on the Heretic and the publication of the book Overboard at Will were Bombard's finest hour. It was thanks to him that in 1960 the London Maritime Safety Conference decided to equip ships with life rafts. Subsequently, he made more than one voyage for a variety of purposes, studied seasickness and the bactericidal properties of water, and fought pollution in the Mediterranean Sea.

But the main result of Bombar’s life remains the ten thousand people who wrote to him: “If it weren’t for your example, we would have died!”

It is not the harsh elements of the sea that kill shipwrecked people, but their own fears and weaknesses. To prove this, French doctor Alain Bombard crossed the Atlantic in an inflatable boat, without food or water.

In May 1951, the French trawler Notre-Dame de Peyrags set sail from the port of Equiem. At night, the ship lost its course and was thrown onto the ledge of the Carnot Pier by the waves. The ship sank, but almost the entire crew managed to put on vests and leave the ship. The sailors had to swim a short distance to get to the stairs on the wall of the pier. Imagine the surprise of the port doctor Alain Bombard when in the morning rescuers pulled 43 corpses ashore! People who found themselves in the water simply saw no point in fighting the elements and drowned while remaining afloat.

Stock of knowledge

The sea wolves only laughed at the arguments of yesterday’s student. “Boy, you’ve only seen the sea from the pier, and yet you’re interfering with serious issues,” the ship’s doctors arrogantly declared. And then Bombar decided to experimentally prove that he was right. He conceived a voyage as close as possible to the conditions of a sea disaster.

Before trying his hand, Alain decided to stock up on knowledge. The Frenchman spent six months, from October 1951 to March 1952, in the laboratories of the Oceanographic Museum of Monaco.

Alain Bombard with a hand press, which he used to squeeze the juice out of fish

He studied the chemical composition of sea water, types of plankton, and the structure of marine fish. The Frenchman learned that sea fish are more than half fresh water. And fish meat contains less salt than beef. This means, Bombar decided, you can quench your thirst with juice squeezed out of fish. He also found out that sea water is also suitable for drinking. True, in small doses. And the plankton that whales feed on is quite edible.

One on one with the ocean

Rubber boat “Heretic” - on it Alain Bombard went to conquer the elements

The boat itself was a tightly inflated rubber horseshoe, the ends of which were connected by a wooden stern. The bottom, on which the light wooden flooring (elani) lay, was also made of rubber. There were four inflatable floats on the sides. The boat was supposed to be accelerated by a quadrangular sail with an area of ​​three square meters. The name of the ship was a match for the navigator himself - “Heretic”.
Bombard later wrote that the reason for choosing the name was that most people considered his idea “heresy”, not believing in the possibility of surviving by eating only seafood and salt water.

However, Bombar did take some things into the boat: a compass, a sextant, navigation books and photographic equipment. On board there was also a first aid kit, a box with water and food, which were sealed to prevent temptation. They were intended for the most extreme cases.

Alain's partner was to be the English yachtsman Jack Palmer. Together with him, Bombard made a test voyage on the Heretic from Monaco to the island of Minorca lasting seventeen days. The experimenters recalled that already on that voyage they experienced a deep sense of fear and helplessness in front of the elements. But everyone assessed the result of the campaign in their own way. Bombard was inspired by the victory of his will over the sea, and Palmer decided that he would not tempt fate twice. At the appointed time of departure, Palmer simply did not show up at the port, and Bomb Bar had to go to the Atlantic alone.

On October 19, 1952, a motor yacht towed the Heretic from the port of Puerto de la Luz in the Canary Islands to the ocean and unhooked the cable. The northeast trade wind blew into the small sail, and the Heretic set off towards the unknown.

It is worth noting that Bombard made the experiment more difficult by choosing voyages from Europe to America. In the middle of the 20th century, ocean routes lay hundreds of miles from Bombard’s path, and he simply did not have a chance to feed himself at the expense of good sailors.

Against nature

A week later, the wind tore the sail that was moving the boat. Bombar installed a new one, but half an hour later the wind blew it away into the waves. Alen had to repair the old one, and he floated under it for two months.

The traveler obtained food as he had planned. He tied a knife to a stick and with this “harpoon” killed his first prey - a sea bream fish. From her bones he built fishing hooks. In the open ocean, the fish were unafraid and grabbed everything that fell into the water. The flying fish even flew into the boat itself, killing itself when it hit the sail. By morning, the Frenchman found up to fifteen dead fish in the boat.

Bombar's other "delicacy" was plankton, which tasted like krill paste but was unsightly. Occasionally birds were caught on the hook. The traveler ate them raw, throwing only feathers and bones overboard.

During the voyage, Alen drank sea water for seven days, and the rest of the time he squeezed the “juice” out of fish. It was also possible to collect the dew that settled on the sail in the morning. After almost a month of sailing, a gift from heaven awaited him - a downpour that gave fifteen liters of fresh water.

The extreme hike was difficult for him. The sun, salt and rough food led to the fact that the whole body (even under the nails) was covered with small ulcers. Bombar opened the abscesses, but they were in no hurry to heal. The skin on my legs also peeled off in shreds, and the nails on four of my fingers fell out. Being a doctor, Alain monitored his health and recorded everything in the ship's log.

When it rained for five days in a row, Bombar began to suffer greatly from excess humidity. Then, when there was no wind and heat, the Frenchman decided that these were his last hours and wrote his will. And when he was about to give his soul to God, the shore appeared on the horizon.

Having lost twenty-five kilograms of weight in sixty-five days of sailing, on December 22, 1952, Alain Bombard reached the island of Barbados. In addition to proving his theory of survival at sea, the Frenchman became the first person to cross the Atlantic Ocean in a rubber boat.

After the heroic voyage, the whole world recognized the name of Alain Bombard. But he himself considered the main result of this journey not to be the glory that fell. And the fact that throughout his life he received more than ten thousand letters, the authors of which thanked him with the words: “If it weren’t for your example, we would have died in the harsh waves of the sea.”

When this planned expedition across the Atlantic Ocean became known in the press, the young French doctor Alain Bombard was bombarded with letters. One of the enthusiasts offered to take him on board, also for purely gastronomic reasons: in case of emergency, he allowed himself to be eaten.

Of course, such a sacrifice was not accepted. Actually, there was a supply of food in the boat, but it was sealed, because Bombar wanted to prove that it was possible to survive by eating what was found in the ocean desert. What kind of humanity is there! And, by the way, when he, exhausted but immensely happy, completed his unprecedented voyage across the ocean to the island of Barbados after 65 days, it was the metal boxes with food that he had to worry about the most. The joyful natives who helped pull out the boat, which was almost torn to pieces by the surf, considered the canned food a gift from fate. But Bombar, first of all, had to officially certify their safety.

While still a student, this naval doctor, an excellent swimmer and sailor, took up the problem of survival in extreme conditions. Where is the limit of endurance of the human body? Why are people so rarely saved after shipwrecks? Only in some cases, a person, having crossed all the norms determined by physiology, still remained alive...

“Victims of legendary shipwrecks who died prematurely,” Bombard wrote in his book “Overboard at Will,” “I know: it was not the sea that killed you, it was not hunger that killed you, it was not thirst that killed you! Rocking on the waves to the plaintive cries of seagulls, you died of fear.”

How to deal with despair, which kills more accurately and faster than any physical deprivation?

Typically, rescue services searched for disaster victims in the open ocean for no more than 10 days. It was believed that a person would survive for about a week. In those years, the World Ocean annually took the lives of 200 thousand people, and almost three quarters of them did not drown, but died, or went crazy in lifeboats or on rafts, where even food supplies remained. And Bombar argued: food and drink can be obtained in the ocean itself, and if courage does not leave a person, then he can wait for help on the raft for a long time.

The best proof is a real-world test, and Bombard decided to do it on himself. The route will be laid in the tropical Atlantic away from the main routes of cargo and passenger ships. Trade winds and currents will inevitably carry a drifting boat to opposite shores of the ocean. It is not for nothing that sailing ships have passed here since the era of the great voyages of Christopher Columbus.

Aeronaut Debrutel invented an inflatable rubber punt for Bombard, 4.6 m long and 1.9 m wide, in the shape of an elongated horseshoe, connected at the ends by a wooden stern. Thanks to this, the fishing lines did not rub the rubber. On the rubber bottom there were light wooden slats; a beam divided the boat in two lengthwise. In front is a mast with a quadrangular sail and two retractable keels.

There were many friends who supported Bombard, but there were more skeptics who doubted the need for such an experiment. In response, Bombar called the boat “Heretic”. The English yachtsman G. Palmer helped the French doctor test the boat and the ability to do without the usual food. This rehearsal of the planned path across the ocean took place in May 1952 in the Mediterranean Sea. Within two weeks, Bombard was convinced of the correctness of his scientific developments and decided to continue the experiment. After all, they caught fish even with the simplest gear, replaced fresh water with “fish juice,” and gradually drank sea water. Alain Bombard was not stopped by Palmer's refusal to participate in the transatlantic flight.

On October 19, 1952, the Heretic, leaving Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, headed first to the Cape Verde Islands in order to avoid the Sargasso Sea with its frequent calms. The first days with a 3-4 force northeast wind became a serious test for inflatable boat. “Lord, how furious this trade wind is!” - exclaimed the navigator. For two hours he had to frantically bail out water, and the Heretic was saved. “Shipwrecked,” the navigator then writes in his diary, “always be more stubborn than the sea, and you will win!”

At first, the feeling of loneliness did not arise, but after two weeks Bombard notes: “I am just a speck of dust, lost in the vastness of the ocean, where all the concepts of distances familiar to humans lose their meaning.”

Bombard was constantly worried about the safety of the boat. Even slight abrasion of the covering where he rested his back while sitting behind the wheel was undesirable; he had to put a pillow on it. The boat was constantly accompanied by schools of mackerel and flying fish, sometimes birds, but the danger was posed by a curious swordfish: its one and a half meter “weapon” could pierce the rubber shell.

Bombaru had enough “seafood” to not feel hungry. For 53 days of travel, his only food was fish, sometimes with the addition of plankton strained out with a cloth. True, one day a tern was caught on the bait, and even that one was thoroughly saturated with fish. The method of extracting “fish juice” is a triangular incision at the dorsal fin. But the navigator admitted to his diary: “What I suffer most from is the lack of fresh water. I’m tired of eating fish, but even more tired of drinking it...” He used to dream that, upon returning to earth, he would have a feast of his favorite gourmet dishes of French cuisine.

The first rain came only on the 23rd day, and Bombar was able to collect life-giving moisture. But the radio receiver failed on the 20th day. The connection with the earth was severed, and he found himself as if on another planet, “in another world, moving, living and truly incomprehensible.” Sometimes the ocean seemed like a “strange monster” to him.

The constant dampness was exhausting. Even on a sunny day, nothing had time to dry. The slightest wound did not heal and began to fester. The nails have completely grown into the meat. The abscesses had to be opened without anesthesia. For the purity of the experiment, Bombard did not use medications.

“But still I sleep 12 hours a day... I trusted my boat: I knew that even if some terrible wave fell on it, there would be danger, but the Heretic would not capsize... if nothing happened to me during the day, why should I be afraid that something will happen at night.” But still, in such a case - and this would be certain death - the doctor kept a good dose of poison in his shirt pocket.

Often large Marine life They had fun pushing the unusual “alien” like a ball, and Bombar did not interfere with them. But then an unusual shark began to pursue the boat. Maybe this predator tried “human flesh” and was not afraid of anything. Others ran away from being hit on the head with an oar. And this one furiously hit the bottom with its muzzle over and over again. Bombar decided to defend himself: he tied a knife to the end of the oar. When the shark, as usual, turned over during an attack from the side, he struck, ripping open its belly almost to its head.

One day Bombar checked the safety of the shell overboard. An unexpected gust of wind began to blow away the boat, and with great difficulty he managed to catch up with it. Now he lowered himself into the water only with a rope tied around him.

Bombar experienced the most critical days at the end of November - beginning of December. There was no wind. The frigate birds that appeared seemed to be talking about the approach of land. But in vain: land did not appear. His body began to become exhausted. On Saturday, December 6, he made his will: “In conclusion, I want to say: the fact that I died does not at all deprive all shipwrecked people of hope. My theory is correct and confirmed by 50 days of experience; there is not enough human strength for more.”

But four days after that, on December 10, he saw the large cargo-passenger ship Arakaka. They also noticed the Heretic, and invited the brave navigator on board with all cordiality. After taking a shower, I had breakfast – a teaspoon of liver pate, a little tea. Subsequently, Bombar was accused of being on the ship. He, of course, did not deserve reproaches in the slightest. His voyage was not a sporty, non-stop transatlantic voyage. For the purity of a scientific experiment, 53 days in the open ocean on a boat is more than enough.

Bombar found the strength to continue his solo voyage. He believed that not for scientists, but for sailors, the very fact that he managed to independently reach the American shore would have enormous effective power.

And he was right. His experience helped those who accepted his conversion to survive in the ocean wilderness: “...Deprived of everything after a catastrophe...suddenly faced with a dilemma: to live or die, and he must muster all his strength, all his will, all his courage to fight against despair.” Bombard had a decisive influence on the introduction into navigation practice of inflatable life rafts, the prototype of which was the Heretic. Continuing his research, he insisted that life rafts should also be equipped with tents in which one could stay warm or shelter from the sun.

The feat of the French doctor, who risked his life to save hundreds and thousands of people, wrote maritime historian V. Voitov, “can be equated to the feat of Louis Pasteur, who tried the rabies vaccine on himself.”