This man’s odyssey is covered in just three pages of Ship of Ghosts (pp. 158 – 160) but it is so remarkable because of how it began: he was the last man off the Perth, and “rode a series of floating vehicles to survival, each one more seaworthy than the one before: a wooden plank, a Carley float, and finally a lifeboat, where he joined about seventy of his shipmates. An able sailor, Gillan got the mast and sails up, fashioned a tiller out of driftwood, and turned toward Sumatra before adverse headwinds forced him to shape a course back toward Java. Going slowly blind from the bunker oil clotting in his eyes, Gillan turned over the tiller to a sailor named McDonough. When the wind died at nightfall, they had to row. They were soon desperate with exhaustion. One sailor who started vomiting up oil was relieved of rowing but sat there for a time still pulling an invisible oar until someone eased him to the bottom boards, slick with the blood of the injured, to sleep.”
And then they made land. Gillan, who was still blind, found his hand held by a stoker named Bill Hogman who, unasked, “served as his eyes, leading him after the others all that day and far into the night, guiding his steps, explaining what the country looked like.”
Kanlaon 