- Sometimes the whole world is mistaken (though seemingly using centuries of experience).
- Sometimes that mistake is costing innocent lives.
- Sometimes one man sets out to uncover the truth, in an effort to save lives.
- He is invariably met with denial and paid little heed.
Read the amazing story of Alain Bombard here…
An excerpt:
Unlike a great many other kinds of exotic flesh sampled by humans, raw breast of shearwater ended up not to taste like chicken — a revelation that likely disappointed Bombard. Fish had been the whole of his diet for two weeks previous. He ate their flesh and their innards to keep himself from death. Yet Bombard was no castaway; this joyless diet was one he chose. He was an experimentalist determined to prove a theory he had developed: that shipwrecked sailors could survive until rescue or landfall if they drank seawater in moderate amounts. It of course ran counter to prevailing wisdom that seawater would not only fail to preserve a castaway; it would hurry him to death all the faster. The same prevailing wisdom lay behind the famous saying: “Water, water everywhere — and not a drop to drink!”
This story bears a moral for our own time, too, of course.