Volume Eight - Pre-Victorian to the present day - more aspects - Pamir and Passat - the end of an era . . .

Another survivor dozed off sitting on the thwart, his head rolling on his shoulders. They tried to get him to await the new day, but he also accompanied his young comrade in everlasting sleep.

At the break of the following day, the sailor Anders decided to dive into the water and swim for exercise; he was quickly hauled out by his companions who spotted a shark in time. That afternoon an oil tanker was seen, an episode which only brought more despair, as despite their shouts and signaling it immutably continued its course.

In the midst of further bad weather, the boat again turned over. Once righted, a sailor swam away shouting "I am going to fetch the Captain". A type of collective madness came over the crew men, who began to suffer hallucinations: they saw people, cities, land.

One sailor out of his mind jumped into the water for swimming exercise, leaving them with great shouts of laughter. In his turn Peter Frederich, who had also gone berserk, dived into the water to swim while a shark was close by, and was finally lost in the distance. At the end only five survivors remained, who could not decide whether all this behaviour was part of a collective suicide or a series of accidents linked with the sharks. I prefer to think it was the latter.

The misery of these poor unfortunate men came to an end when, alerted by the search systems, they were sighted by a ship approaching them. Only when they could distinguish human figures on the bridge arms waving in salute did the shipwrecked sailors feel they were saved.

The Rescue - The distress call radioed by the PAMIR was received 600 miles away from the scene of the disaster, in the Azores. The American 57th rescue squadron was alerted, but due to the bad weather conditions prevailing, they were unable to send a search flight from the port of Lagos (Nigeria).

The weather finally improved, and the SC-54 took off. Several hours later the plane spotted two manned Pamir boats, and the remains of a life raft, with no signs of a survivor on it. Running low on fuel they decided to head for Bermuda and report what they had seen in detail.