Last Man Off: A True Story of Disaster, Survival and One Man's Ultimate Test

by Matt Lewis

In the depths of Antarctic winter, hundreds of miles from land or rescue, a small fishing boat is swallowed by waves as high as houses.

The captain is fatally slow to act, and then paralyzed by fear. The officers flee for their lives. Only the actions of Matt Lewis, a 23-year-old British marine biologist and one of the most inexperienced men aboard, will save the lives of the South African crew.

Lewis is the last man off the sinking boat, and leads the escape onto three life rafts. There the battle for survival begins.

256 pages, Paperback

Published April 28, 2015

About the author

Matt Lewis is a trained marine biologist with an MSc with distinction in Marine and Fisheries Science.

Reviews

[Lynda Watts · Rating 5 out of 5]

Great read! Riveting to the very end!

[Larkin :) · Rating 5 out of 5]

Genuinely the BEST book I've ever read. I may only be a teenager but I was right there with him and experienced the entire thing beside him and his ship mates. It was both horrific and thrilling and my family were rather concerned by how much of my day was taken up with the last 2 thirds of it. My frustration was entwined with his own and was possibly even worse since I had the full story whereas he didn't. I felt the listing of the ship in my own bed and struggled along the deck with him. I felt the rough, biting wind scraping at my skin through my oilskins. I felt his panic as he pressed all of his weight into the door with half of his suit on. I felt a whole other kind of anger when I recognised the arrogance of Bubbles and Boetie when the majority of the crew scrambled up the steps to voice their growing fears. I nearly slammed the book closed, in fact I would have, had it not been for my need to engulf the rest of the book. Read it. For the boys and I.

[Megan · Rating 4 out of 5]

I first heard Matt's story on the Real Survival Stories podcast via BBC Sounds and when I heard there was a book, I was keen to find out more.

My preference is for fiction novels so I was wary of this being a dry struggle to read. It wasn't. The style is engaging and honest. It's clearly from the perspective of Matt Lewis and I felt that he was telling me about his experience directly.

A marine biologist on a fishing vessel in the southern hemisphere is not a world I'm familiar with but I was able to follow everything that happened, what went wrong, how everything was laid out and so on.

My hope would be that Last Man Off can serve as a cautionary tale around leadership, planning and safety. Even if this isn't your usual genre, I'd recommend giving this book a go. I knew what happened and it still had me gripped.

[Graham Brownett · Rating 4 out of 5]

An extraordinary account of one man’s survival when an unseaworthy fishing vessel from Cape Town sunk in treacherous seas in the Southern Ocean a few hundred miles off South Georgia.
It is the story of how a crew of 38 lives were put in danger by uncaring owners, by two captains, who both died, put catching fish before the safety of their men, by an engineer who refused to help get a pump working and managers who failed to train or prepare their staff adequately.
Matt Lewis tells the story in an honest and sympathetic way, he has never forgotten the comrades he lost nor how lucky he was to be rescued.

[Lakes Claire · Rating 5 out of 5]

I loved this book. I have lived by the sea all my life and am immersed in the sea on a daily basis. This is all about priorities and how multiple disregard for safety leads to disaster. It is rare that any incident is down to one single action, rather a progression of errors.

[Gok · Rating 4 out of 5]

True story about a fishing ship sinking in freezing cold waters of the south Antarctic.

It’s in two parts, the first being about the fishing and the description of the living quarters and daily life on board. Which I found very interesting, learning all about toothfish fishing. Toothfish cleverly renamed ‘Chilean bass’ which is now a very expensive fish due to clever marketing. It’s not even from Chile.

The second part is when the realisation that the ship is sinking, and the abandon ship and the struggle to stay alive. This part is intense and you won’t be able to put the book down.

A tragic story, but one that needed to be told. And very well written. Recommended read.

[Deedee · Rating 3 out of 5]

I listened to the audio version. Interesting, but just facts as if copied from court transcripts.

[Marianne · Rating 2 out of 5]

I've read many survival narratives. What makes them compelling -- besides the inherent interest in what happened and the roles of nature and luck -- is the human component of individual and group behavior under extreme duress; the unexpected instances of ingenuity, compassion, and man-enhanced luck; how survivors dealt later with their experience and with each other, etc. This narrative provides the first component -- what happened -- but seems to avoid the second (beyond the basics). The experienced captain freezes and fails -- but Lewis gives less than a hundred words, I'd say, in exploring why. The sailors are a diverse lot of white and black Africans, primarily, but Lewis spends little time considering the effect of this diversity, other than the language problem. What we do get is perhaps too much detail on the process of commercial fishing (but I did learn a lot) -- much of that space should have gone to preparing us, the readers, for the extreme trial to come. Matt Lewis needed an editor to help him turn this good first draft into a solid contribution to the literature of survival. Addendum: I wrote this review before reading the Afterword and the final report of the Court of Marine Inquiry. The Afterword contains important views and conclusions that Lewis should have woven into his narrative for the greatest impact and relevance. And the court report brings up significant factors that Lewis did not emphasize -- or mention at all. So many questions arise from reading the report. I don't want to be too hard on Lewis -- he's not a professional writer and it must be difficult to write such a memoir. But a good editor could have made this a very good book.