What to Carry, What to Burn

When shark fisherman José Salvador Alvarenga gets caught in a storm at sea, he thinks he'll be able to ride it out. But the motor breaks in his little boat, and he starts to drift across the Pacific...Sources for this episode include the book 438 Days by Jonathan Franklin (highly recommended!), as well as the Guardian article "Pacific Castaway Recounts his 13 Month Odyssey" by Leila Haddou and the Time article "A Castaway who Survived 14 Months at Sea is Being Sued for Cannibalism" by Tiare Dunlap. Other works mentioned are the book A Marriage at Sea by Sophie Elmhirst (also highly recommended!) and the poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, from which this episode gets its name.

When Lucy Irvine stumbles on an ad in the back of a magazine—an eccentric writer is looking for a “wife” to join him on a tropical island—she thinks she’s found the adventure of a lifetime. But the survival you sign up for is not necessarily the survival you end up in… To learn more about this story, I recommend the book Castaway by Lucy Irvine. There are other sources, as listed in the episode, but I don’t recommend them!

It’s 1976, and a 20-something aspiring painter, Lauren Elder, is flying over California’s Sierra Mountains to pick up a cat named Ferocious. When the plane crashes, she’s faced with a decision: stay and wait for rescue, or cross a wilderness where—in her hallucinatory state—she can’t even tell what's real.Sources for this episode include the book And I Alone Survived by Lauren Elder and Shirley Streshinsky, articles in Artforum and the LA Times by Maria Borges and Cecilia Rasmussen, LaurenElder.com, and the Women Eco-Artists Dialogue (weadartists.org).https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2006-may-07-me-then7-story.htmlhttps://www.artforum.com/events/lauren-elder-216640/

It's bad enough that 19th-century sailor Bob Holding gets stranded on an island after a shipwreck—but to make it worse, his companions are entitled, incompetent, and straight up murderous. Plus, they're not as alone on the island as they think...Sources for this episode include the books The Wake of the Invercauld: Shipwrecked in the Subantarctic by Madelene Ferguson Allen and Island of the Lost by Joan Druett.

Francois Raynal and his buddy, Captain Musgrave, are looking for a rumored island full of silver when they end up stranded in the Southern Ocean, surrounded by thousands of belching sea lions. After surviving a year in the wilderness, they accept that the world won’t save them—so they develop an ingenious (and terrifying) plan to save themselves. Sources for this episode include the books Island of the Lost, by Joan Druett; The Wreck of the Grafton from the Private Journals of Thomas Musgrave, by Thomas Musgrave; and Wrecked on a Reef or 20 Months on the Auckland Islands, by Francois Raynal.

Ada Blackjack wants one thing: To make enough money to bring her son home from an orphanage. But good work is hard to find in 1920s Nome, Alaska, so when four strangers come to town, looking to hire someone for a secret yearlong expedition, Ada embarks on the trip—not knowing that she’ll be the only one of them to survive. Featuring guest Sarah Marshall of You’re Wrong About.