What to Carry, What to Burn

21-year-old Violet Jessop goes to sea to support her family--and ends up caught in two major maritime disasters.(Spoilers below, in the source list.)Sources for this episode include the book Titanic Survivor: The Newly Discovered Memoirs of Violet Jessop who Survived Both the Titanic and Brittanic Disasters, by Violet Jessup, introduced, edited, and annotated by John Maxtone Graham.

In 1943, Jan Baalsrud and his friends sneak into northern Norway on a fishing boat to blow up a Nazi air base—but when the Nazis catch them first, Jan ends up barefoot in the snow on an arctic island, trapped and alone.Sources:We Die Alone: A WWII Epic of Escape and Endurance, by David HowarthDefiant Courage: Norway’s Longest WWII Escape, by Astrid Karlsen Scott and Dr. Tore HaugThe Fugitive, published in The New York Times, by Robert KolkerWelcome to the Goddamn Ice Cube by Blair BravermanIrene by Sofia Jannok: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tU-np8zS4HQ

Juliane Koepcke had an unusual childhood, helping her biologist parents with fieldwork in the Amazon. At seventeen, after surviving a two-mile free fall from a broken plane, she has to lean on everything she learned from her family to survive the jungle. Sources for this episode include the book When I Fell From the Sky by Juliane Koepcke, the film Wings of Hope by Werner Herzog, and the New York Times story “She Fell Nearly 2 Miles, and Walked Away,” by Franz Lidz.

Navigator Valerian Albanov escapes an icebound ship--and ends up the reluctant leader of a desperate trek across the frozen sea. Sources for this book include the book In the Land of the White Death by Valerian Albanov, translated from Russian to English by Alison Anderson, and the book The Riddle of Navigator Albanov, by Mikhail Andreyevich Chvanov.

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!