I think a week is is either optimistic or pessimistic depending on whether you have access to drinking water. Most people can manage several weeks without food. Many people have lasted longer in liferafts.
Is that true? These “animals”, served cold, seem to be prime candidates for getting severe food poisoning in fashionable restaurants, as I know only too well…
Seafood contamination is worse in areas with a lot of sewage in the water, so if you’re on a previously uninhabited island you may be reasonably safe provided you poo carefully. But personally I would consider fasting if I thought I was likely to be picked up reasonably soon.
One aspect of being in the wilderness is that issues such as food poisoning or minor wounds that are generally of little consequence, can suddenly become life threatening when you have no medical care. Generally speaking I would be very careful to try to avoid sickness or injury. In the tropics, keeping clean is vital. Bits of skin that sweat and rub, or wounds that aren’t attended to, can go bad very quickly.
I have heard it said (and having spent time in rainforests, would tend to believe) that hunter-gatherers in e.g. the Amazon or Northern Alaska, don’t learn all the skills they would need to live completely independently until they have reached their early 20s. That is to say, learning to survive indefinitely in such an environment takes as long as getting a higher education in a developed country. There are easier places to live, but most places that are habitable are already inhabited.
I have lived on quite a big, normally uninhabited island for a month in Indonesia. I like to think I might have done OK if I were stranded there. I managed to climb a coconut palm to get a coconut, for example. You can get drinkable water from cutting vines. Quite a lot of the wildlife is either poisonous or venomous or both. If you built a fish trap and ate everything you caught, your time would be short.
The truth is that even though the island was uninhabited, people had visited and modified it. A lot of the coconut trees had steps cut in them, and were owned by people who would visit periodically to harvest them. Surviving for any length of time on a virgin island, or indeed anywhere outside of the tropics, would be much harder. I’d mark out a big ‘V’ by whatever means I could, light a smoky fire, and hope for rescue.
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The journey home took 6 hours on fairly rough seas in a little motorboat. It was full of two Indonesian boatmen, and four scientists/medics, and nets full of coconuts strung together. I asked what all the coconuts were for and was told that they were going to take them to sell. They dropped us off in Bau Bau and left back for the island, with the boat still full of coconuts. My theory was that they were an edible, drinkable liferaft.
Peter wrote:
Is that true? These “animals”, served cold, seem to be prime candidates for getting severe food poisoning in fashionable restaurants, as I know only too well…
You really should never get ill from commercially farmed shellfish, unless you are allergic. If you do, almost certainly they arent fresh, so blame the resteraunt.
Foraged shellfish, crustaceans and seaweed are all pretty safe. The risk is if the water is polluted, or, possibly there has been an algal bloom, but probably if it is an island as you describe, the assumption is it is remote. You should be able to make a fire anyway and cook a stew. Many many remote and even less remote islands have plenty of urchins in the shallow water, and these are both excellent to eat and rich in protein.
The reality is finding land based protein is much more challenging, as is knowing what vegetation to eat, which will usually be protein poor anyway. It is all very well being a vegie, but good luck with that when it comes to survival, unless you are very knowledgeable. I read biology at Uni. so lots of fungal forages and field courses, and I aslo quite enjoy foraging, but would be hard pressed to sustain myself for all that long. Obvioulsy some seasons are better than others. Go into a typical decideous forest in the winter, or Summer, and without knowledge, you will struggle and may well end up seriously poisoning yourself. With knowlleadge there are some reasonable sources of protein. Roots can be very good and there are some common edible species which have the advantage of not having a season.
I guess there may be a risk with shore line foraging, but in terms of providing an all year protein source, as well as sea weeds, which can be very nourshing, or starving, and foraging the shore is probably most peoples best option by far. Similarly fresh water streams if the water is not polluted can offer similiar benefits. If they are healthy they will be full of life.
The thing is that aeroplanes carry an ELT of some sort. They have radios.
Over water one tends to really make sure one knows where the ELT is.
A more likely senario is the first thing you will need is a credit card… 
I would ask a guy named Friday
who could conveniently be sold as a slave to the captain of the rescue boat, if I remember correctly the ending of that book – mind blowing
no, that’s not the end – Friday returns to Europe with Crusoe.
Try and find Susie Wong. (you need to be my age to remember her!)
I had to google on that one, and I am 63 
But then I missed out on western culture, until 1969.
EuroFlyer wrote:
no, that’s not the end – Friday returns to Europe with Crusoe.
yes, but Crusoe was on both sides of the slave trade. In his first ‘adventure’ he was enslaved for some time; he escapes with a slave-boy, and he is the one he sells.
When he is shipwrecked, he was on a journey to buy some slaves for his plantations.
