FamilyMatt Lewis named his daughter after the Chilean fishing boat that rescued him in a storm that killed 17 men. It was a promise made years before to the man who pulled him to safety

Recently, Matt Lewis sat down with his four-year-old daughter to explain how she got her name. “I told Camila that, a long time ago, before she was born, I worked on a fishing boat that sank. People died – she knows that – and the boat that rescued the rest of us was called the Camila. She doesn’t understand how serious it was and I don’t want her to. Told to a child, it sounded quite a magical little story.”

The real story – of shipwreck, human folly and superhuman fightback – has just been published and chosen as Radio 4’s Book of the Week.

Last Man Off is the kind of gripping first-hand account that makes you grateful for the quiet comforts of home. Now 40, and living in Aberdeenshire, Matt is married to Corinne, a biology teacher. He is a part-time stay-at-home father who looks after Camila and Tate, seven, and a part-time zoologist – Mr Bug – who runs animal handling sessions for children.

Sixteen years ago, though, he was a hero of the high seas – the last man off the boat he worked on as it sank in the southern Atlantic ocean with 17 lives lost.

That was in 1998, when Matt was 23. He had just graduated in zoology from Aberdeen University and was trying to break into marine biology when he was offered a job as scientific adviser on a South African fishing boat. The hard part was leaving Corinne. They had met at the university scuba diving club a year before and had just moved in together. “I was in love with her and thought our future would involve each other,” says Matt. “I knew I wanted kids one day but it was too early to be deciding what to do.”

So he took the job and went to South Africa. The Sudur Havid was an unprepossessing deep-sea vessel – 44m long and 8m wide, built in 1964 but modified to adapt to modern fishing techniques. Matt’s first thought was, what’s that grubby little boat?

In this vessel, a crew of 38 men sailed from Cape Town to the icy waters around South Georgia in the depths of winter.

Matt enjoyed the camaraderie but soon realised that sea life was not for him. The men in charge, the skipper and fishing master, both said the long absences and golden homecomings could strengthen family ties and prolong marriages. But other men had left their families for the first time and were struggling. Matt missed Corinne desperately. For a while, the faxed letters she sent via the South African office were not forwarded and he was convinced she had met someone else.

“Luckily, just before the sinking, I got a flurry of faxes,” he says. Hearing from home also spurred Matt to find courage when the storm struck. “In that desperate time, it’s the thoughts of loved ones that matter.”

The disaster, two months into the trip, was caused by a catalogue of errors. The boat wasn’t watertight. The pumps failed. The engineers were slow to make repairs. The captains insisted that they keep fishing in a near gale with waves 10m high. When the boat tipped, no one took charge.

Matt had watched Robinson Crusoe before leaving home. As the boat was going down, “One cheesy line came into my mind – ‘All men die. What matters is how you die.’

“It calmed me down and made me realise I didn’t want the people I loved back home to hear I’d been reduced to a pile of tears, that I’d sobbed on deck and fallen apart at the end. So I gathered my thoughts and determined not to show myself up.”

Matt searched for his fellow crew members, helped to launch the liferafts, distributed and secured life jackets on some of the men. Some drowned jumping from the deck into the snow and spray. Last man off, Matt got to a raft but didn’t expect to survive. It was waist-deep in frigid seawater. They had no paddles, no bailers, no radio – and nobody knew where they were. “I had a horrible feeling we weren’t going to make it,” says Matt. “I couldn’t see a way out.”

Thoughts of Corinne sustained and tortured him. He wondered if he’d ever have sex again. “It’s daft but I seriously did think about that,” he says. “It just all seemed so far away.”

Matt has since spoken to other members of the crew – all thought about their families as they drifted into the night. Stephan, a deckhand, recalled hugging his 10-year-old sister goodbye. Another deckhand, Morné, fumbled for the silver bracelet his girlfriend had given him before he left port. He kissed it goodbye and made his peace but promised that, should he survive, he would ask her to marry him as soon as he got home – which he did.

“Some people made big decisions in the rafts,” says Matt. “For me, it wasn’t a time for deep thought but my family and Corinne gave me a reason to fight. I don’t think the people who died did so because they didn’t fight – but there were people who seemed to give up. It’s understandable when you’re faced with such horrific odds.”

Three hours later, a Chilean fishing boat, the Isla Camila, which had heard the Sudur Havid’s last Mayday signal, arrived to the rescue but 10 of the men in Matt’s raft were already dead.

At home, Matt just wanted to get back to normal. “On the first night back, our happy homecoming, I had a nightmare and shot up in bed, in a cold sweat, breathing frantically. I’d been back in the lifeboat – it was full-on, waking terror,” he says.

“Corinne calmed me down. Her quiet support was what I needed. She saw me through the trough and gently nudged me towards counselling, which helped. I didn’t tell her the details of the sinking. I couldn’t – it came out gradually in dribs and drabs.

“I’ve never told my parents how brutal it was and what I saw,” he continues. “How can you tell people who love you how close it really was – how scared you were and how much it hurt? I tried – but then I’d change the subject to dispel the tension. Mum is reading the book now.”

Matt coped well at first. Running on adrenaline, he felt each day was a gift. He even returned to sea as a scientific adviser for a couple of months “to prove to myself that I could”.

A year later, he came, in his words, crashing down. “There was nothing for me jobwise in Aberdeen and I needed to get on with my career,” says Matt. He took a job at an aquarium near Chester. “I removed myself from all my mates and, most importantly, Corinne – my entire support network,” he says. “I was miserable. I acted like a twit and Corinne and I split up. We were apart for three years. She went travelling and I was very jealous. When she got back, we both wanted to be together.”

Matt Lewis in his role as Mr Bug, going into schools to show children how to handle wildlife. Photograph: d

Matt and Corinne were married in July 2007, nine years after the Sudur Havid was wrecked. Tate, then three months old, was at the wedding. When their daughter was born two years later, her name was a given. Matt had made a promise in the aftermath of the rescue, on his last night in the Falkland Islands before going home. A fisherman from the Isla Camila approached him in a bar and asked if Matt remembered him. He explained that he’d pulled Matt to safety from the raft, stood him on his feet and kissed his cheek.

“What do you say to something like that?” says Matt. “I promised that one day, if I had a girl, I’d call her Camila to remind me of what those fishermen did for us. It was a drunken promise in a pub – but not a flippant one.”

These days, Matt feels unusually appreciative of his life. “I’m with the children a lot. Watching them is a privilege after coming so close to dying. In those quiet moments, you look at what you’ve got and think, wow, this might not have happened.”

Yet he also yearns for adventure now and again. “Sometimes, there’s this feeling that, on the Sudur Havid, I was at my most – at my best – and how can the rest of life be as committed as that?” he says. “You want to be impulsive and live each day as if it’s your last. That’s hard when someone’s asking you to write a shopping list!

“We’re not dull but we’re not international adventurers. Maybe I’d have happily turned into the Wild Thornberries, taking my kids across Africa filming wildlife. Corinne and I have talked about it. Right now, we’ve got two happy little kids in a happy little village in Scotland. That’s not something you want to put at risk.”

Last Man Off by Matt Lewis is published by Viking, £16.99. To order a copy for £13.59, including free UK p&p, go to theguardian.com/bookshop or call 0330 333 6846

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