Bombard’s physiological claim was a number: about a pint and a half of sea water a day, for about five days, taken early, before the body has run short of water. He got it by dividing the salt a healthy body can pass in a day by the salt in a litre of the sea, and he tested it, by his own account, on fourteen days out of the hundred and thirteen between Monaco and Barbados, in sips he did not measure. This piece sets out what the people who did measure it found, before and after him, and why the two sides have never quite met.

What the manuals said

Every castaway’s handbook of the period gave the same instruction, in the imperative. The United States Army and Air Force’s Survival at Sea of June 1950 opens its section on water with the sentence “Water is the most important item for survival. Man can exist only about 7 days without it,” and goes on, in italics: “Do not drink salt water, as this will cause diarrhea, weakness, and unbearable thirst. Delirious men may have to be restrained from drinking salt water. Never drink urine. If water is not available, do not eat.” The Air Force’s Survival of December 1952 puts fish juice in the same sentence as the sea: “Don’t drink body fluids of fish, urine, or salt water. They are dangerous.” It allows one thing Bombard also allowed: “a small amount of sea water mixed with rain will hardly be noticeable and will not give you any bad physiological reaction,” and it suggests a little sea water in rainwater for the taste. Britain’s equivalent was the Medical Research Council’s War Memorandum No. 8 of 1943, A Guide to the Preservation of Life at Sea after Shipwreck, which Bombard does not cite and which also said no.

Ladell, 1943

The British no rested on an experiment that had found, strictly, a small yes. In 1942 and 1943 W. S. S. Ladell, at the National Hospital in Queen Square, kept volunteers on the ration of “the man on the raft” for the Council’s committee on the care of shipwrecked personnel, some with no water at all for four days, some on limited water for ten, and some with a supplement of up to 400 cubic centimetres of sea water a day. A man needs 800 to 1,000 cubic centimetres of water a day; short of that he runs a “water debt” to his own tissues and still passes 350 to 450 cubic centimetres of urine. Sea water added to the urine, and with it the urea the kidneys had been failing to clear. Ladell’s summary, in The Lancet of 9 October 1943, is three findings: “An increase in urine output, with an improved total urea-clearance; a slight gain to the body of water, because the extra water lost in the urine is less than the extra water ingested as sea-water; an initial retention of chloride equal to the chloride lost before beginning to drink the sea-water; and subsequently full excretion of all the chloride ingested.” He also noted “a definite psychological value in having the extra volume of fluid available for drinking, even though it was salt to taste.”

The journal’s footnote says why none of that reached the lifeboats. “The secretary, Dr. B. S. Platt, asks us to point out that the committee, in Memorandum No. 8, do not recommend the drinking of sea-water. In reaching this decision they took account of other relevant factors besides the evidence recorded in the present paper.” The other factors were the men in the Atlantic that year who were drinking it by the cupful, late, and dying.

Hervey and McCance, 1952

The Cambridge experiment that Bombard narrowly missed hearing about was published by the Royal Society on 10 July 1952, as he was coming into Tangier. G. R. Hervey and R. A. McCance gave six men, in a constant environment and with no other food or drink, three rations in turn for three days each: 350 millilitres of distilled water; 250 millilitres of distilled water with 96.5 grams of carbohydrate; and 350 millilitres of distilled water with 150 millilitres of sea water. The carbohydrate improved the water balance on the third day by about 200 millilitres, by sparing protein, preventing ketosis and lowering the metabolic rate. The sea water improved it too, by 80 to 150 millilitres, “but the rise in the osmotic pressure of the body was greater than when distilled water alone was given. These effects were due to the retention of most of the water of the sea water, together with the salt which it contained. It is suggested that the effects of sea-water drinking on body tonicity and fluid distribution are deleterious, and that the gain of water observed on the third day would eventually have been replaced by a loss.”

That is, on the third day the books balanced in sea water’s favour, as Ladell had found, and the body was saltier for it, and the authors judged that the salt would come to be paid for. Three days is the period Bombard said sea water bought a castaway before the fish came. Nobody has run the fourth and fifth days on a ward.

The Lancet, 1953

When The Bombard Story came out in England, The Lancet gave it an annotation on 7 November 1953 that reports the claim in his terms, “provided his kidneys are healthy an average man can drink with impunity 1½ pints of sea water a day,” and the result in his figures: 65 days, no rations opened, 55 pounds lost, 2,500,000 red cells to the cubic millimetre on arrival, “no signs of vitamin deficiency.” It accepted that he had “disproved the fallacies that there are no fish away from inshore waters and that sea water is laxative.” Its conclusion, that “by enterprise and endurance he has made his point,” awards him the psychological claim and says nothing about the pint and a half. The journal’s reviewer had noticed what the dose in the book was: unstated.

The 27,000, 1956

The comparison the physiologists could not stage had already happened. In 1956 the Medical Research Council published The Hazards to Men in Ships Lost at Sea, 1940-1944, by McCance, C. C. Ungley, J. W. L. Crosfill and E. M. Widdowson, an analysis of the records of 448 sinkings and 27,000 men and women. The British Medical Journal’s leading article of 3 November 1956 summarised it. Seventy per cent of the ships sank within fifteen minutes; more than a quarter of those at risk died in the sinking or were never picked up; eight per cent of those who reached a boat or raft died afterwards. On water: “Of 113 men on voyages lasting from 3 to 15 days with no water available, 57 died—53 in less than 6 days. On voyages of more than 32 days with 4 oz. (114 ml.) of water or less per man per day, 90% died. With 4 to 8 oz. (114 to 228 ml.) per day survival rates were excellent,” and above 8 ounces 98 per cent survived however long the voyage. The journal thought even that too generous, since unmeasured rain had helped, and warned against reading the report as a reason to cut the lifeboat ration of 110 ounces a man.

Then the sentence with Bombard’s name in it. “The report makes no mention of attempts to supplement water supplies by fish juice—a practice of questionable value recommended by A. Bombard—but sea water was drunk in unspecified quantities on some voyages. The mortality of the sea-water drinkers was 38.8%, ten times that of those who drank only fresh water, but, contrary to theoretical expectation, their mortality was less, instead of more, marked at higher temperatures. There are physiological reasons why it is dangerous to drink sea water, even in small amounts, but recent American work suggests that it may be physiologically permissible to eke out fresh water with limited amounts of sea water. According to the figures in the report the mortality of the sea-water drinkers did diminish as the fresh-water supplies increased, but with so many other factors involved this theory can be neither proved nor disproved from the information available.”

Read against Bombard’s claim, the passage cuts both ways and he would have said so. The sea-water drinkers of 1942 were, as a rule, the boats that had run out; they drank late, in quantity, after the water debt had been run up, which is exactly the condition under which Bombard said sea water killed. His regime, small amounts from the first hour, was not one the wartime records could find. But a tenfold mortality is a tenfold mortality, and it was the only number on the question drawn from more than a dozen people, and it went into every manual that came after.

Lindemann, 1955 to 1958

Hannes Lindemann’s measurements were made in the same kind of instrument as Bombard’s, a notebook in a small boat, with one difference: he wrote down the dose. On the first leg of his dugout voyage from Liberia in 1955, he took “four small glasses” of sea water a day, with canned milk and fruit juice beside it because he knew his kidneys would need other liquid to pass the salt; by the second day his feet had begun to swell, and over seventeen days the oedema climbed to his knees, with broken vessels in the skin and a thumbprint that stayed in the heel. On an eleven-day leg in Moroccan waters, seven fluid ounces of salt water a day with a quart and a half of other liquids: oedema to the knees by the second day, and blisters on the feet ashore. On fourteen days without a rudder off the Sahara, ten and a half fluid ounces a day “in doses of one and three-fourths fluid ounces six times a day,” and swollen legs in spite of rest and exercise. “I had proved to myself that there is no advantage to drinking salt water; it can, in fact, weaken a sailor’s physical condition at a time when he needs all his strength.” On later trips, when he cut it out, “my legs remained nearly normal in size.”

Ten and a half fluid ounces is about 300 millilitres, less than half of Bombard’s pint and a half. Lindemann’s intake was lower, his exposure longer, his climate hotter, and he took the water with other fluids, which Bombard did not, so the two are not the same experiment. But Lindemann’s is the only one of the two with a dose written in it, and the sign of its result was the sign the wards had found: water on the third day, salt on the fourth.

What is left

The question Bombard asked is still a fair one, and still answered mostly by argument. The wartime data cannot separate an early sip from a late gulp. The ward experiments stop at three days. Bombard’s own record contains no volume. Lindemann’s contains a volume and a swelling and no blood chemistry. The official guidance since has been the 1950 sentence with the italics taken out: do not drink it. The best reason for that is not that Bombard was wrong about a pint and a half for five days, which nobody has shown, but that no castaway who is dying of thirst is in a position to measure a pint and a half, or to count to five.

Sources

• United States Department of the Army and Department of the Air Force, Survival at Sea, FM 21-22 / AFM 64-26, June 1950, page 81. archive.org
• United States Air Force, Survival, Air Force Manual 64-5, December 1952, pages 124 to 125. archive.org
• W. S. S. Ladell, “Effects of Drinking Small Quantities of Sea-Water: An Experimental Study,” The Lancet, 9 October 1943, pages 441 to 444, with the editorial footnote on Memorandum No. 8. archive.org
• G. R. Hervey and R. A. McCance, “The effects of carbohydrate and sea water on the metabolism of men without food or sufficient water,” Proceedings of the Royal Society B, 139 (897), 10 July 1952, pages 527 to 545; the abstract. doi:10.1098/rspb.1952.0033
• “Survival of Castaways at Sea,” The Lancet, 7 November 1953, page 998. archive.org
• “Survival at Sea,” British Medical Journal, 3 November 1956, pages 1044 to 1045, on Medical Research Council Special Report No. 291. archive.org
• Hannes Lindemann, Alone at Sea, New York: Random House, 1958, chapters 1 to 4 of the first voyage. In copyright; quoted in short phrases. archive.org
• Alain Bombard, The Bombard Story, London: André Deutsch, 1953, “Purpose” and “Summing Up,” for the pint and a half, the five days, and the fourteen days of sea water. archive.org