Woman Swims After Cruise Ship: British Tourist Chases Husband Through Cold Waters Off Portugal Coast


A confused British woman tried to swim after a cruise ship, mistakenly believing her husband was on board, MSN is reporting.

Susan Brown, 65, and her husband, whose name has not been made public as of this writing, were sailing aboard the Maritime Voyages cruise ship Marco Polo when they stopped in Portugal’s Madeira Islands.

Twenty-eight days into the 32-day cruise, however, Mr. and Mrs. Brown decided to cut their cruise short after arriving in the islands and booked flights home from the nearby Funchal airport.

At the airport, Mr. and Mrs. Brown had an argument.

“She says that when they were at the airport, her husband told her he was getting a taxi and returning to the cruise liner but that didn’t happen and he boarded the plane.”

Mrs. Brown lost sight of her husband and assumed that he had returned to the cruise ship. She returned to the port and found that the ship had already left. In a panic, the woman jumped into the chilled waters and tried to swim after the cruise ship.

She had managed to swim about 500 meters (about 1640 feet), fully clothed, before she became exhausted and couldn’t swim anymore. Authorities believe she used her handbag as a flotation device — a fortunate turn of events that likely saved her life, according to Funchal port captain Felix Marques — and floated for several hours, according to the Independent. It was well after midnight before fisherman heard her screams and rescued her.

“It’s only a hypothesis but we think one of the reasons she may have been able to stay above water for so long was that her handbag kept her afloat.”

One of the fishermen who rescued Mrs. Brown, Marlldo Freitas, said at first that they mistook the woman’s screams for the call of a local seabird, but when they heard her screaming “Help, I need your help!” in English, they realized they were dealing with a potential drowning victim.

Freitas described Mrs. Brown as looking like a survivor of the Titanic because she was so cold and pale.

“She was barely conscious – she’s lucky to be alive. I don’t think she would have lasted another 30 minutes.”

The waters off the coast of the Madeira Islands that day were about 64 degrees – enough to cause hypothermia. Authorities transported Mrs. Brown to an area hospital, where she was admitted into intensive care for treatment of hypothermia, according to Fox News. She was later transferred to a psychiatric hospital.

Authorities believe Mr. Brown has flown back home to Bristol, England.

Friends of Mrs. Brown describe her as a kindly church lady who had been looking forward to her cruise.

“Sue was very much looking forward to the cruise. She was over the moon with it. We saw her a few days before she left and she was fine but full of apologies that she wouldn’t be able to help with the coffee mornings and flowers and the cleaning. I don’t know when they were due back apart from after Easter.”

The cruise ship on which Mr. and Mrs. Brown had been traveling, the Marco Polo, was built in 1965 and originally named the Aleksandr Pushkin, according to Wikipedia. The ship originally served as a cargo ship but was retrofitted into a cruise ship in 1993. In 2014, a freak wave struck the Marco Polo during a severe storm in the English Channel, killing one person and injuring 16.

[Image via Shutterstock/Olga Gavrilova]

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