After surviving exclusively on holiday sweets she found in the wreckage, Juliane followed a stream toward civilization and survived using the skills her father had taught her. Wait, did he know this was going to happen? Later was he all like, "See, I told you!"

Anyway, she waded downstream for nine days. And we should point out that she did all of this nearly blind, since she somehow managed to lose her glasses in the thousands of feet between mid-air explosion and jungle floor. Juliane eventually found a canoe and paddled it to the first sign of civilization she had seen since the crash: a lumber yard.

Wings of Hope
Years later, she returned to the site of the crash to beat up the wreckage.

The next day, Juliane was airlifted by less combustible means to a hospital, where her father was waiting for her -- we assume with a stopwatch.

More than a dozen people were killed in the crash, but among the survivors was Betty Lou Oliver, elevator operator and immortal.

The impact threw Oliver from the elevator she was standing in, and the resulting fire gave her severe burns. But it was about to get much, much worse.

Wikipedia Commons
Above: A bad day on the job.

Rescue crews, needing to get her to the ground so she could get medical attention, put her right back in the elevator and punched the button for the ground floor. Now, anyone who's familiar with the "Do Not Use in Case of Emergency" signs plastered on every elevator already knows this was a bad idea. Sure enough, the cables were so badly damaged by the accident that they snapped almost immediately.

Betty Lou was sent into a 75-story free fall.

NYC Aviation

Due to what was either a featherweight frame or an adamantium skeleton, Ms. Oliver survived that 75-story fall -- directly after getting hit by a plane -- then returned to the job only five months later. And yes, she went right back to work in the same elevator that tried to kill her.

Way back in 1541, a French noblewoman named Marguerite de La Rocque accompanied one of her relatives on his expedition to explore the New World. During the trip, she was caught banging one of the shipmates, which is apparently a serious offense on French ships. Jean-Francois de La Rocque punished Marguerite by marooning her on the Isle of Demons in Canada's Gulf of Saint Lawrence.

Blaeu Map, 1617
At the time, Newfoundland held less than a dozen people. Barely half of its current population.

In addition to Marguerite, her lover was abandoned on the island, as well as her completely innocent, presumably pissed maidservant. Without much to do on an island, Marguerite and her new boyfriend got to work nailing one another, and without the benefit of prophylactics on the island, she got pregnant.

Getty
Condoms: Because you never know when you'll end up stranded in bumfuck nowhere.

Now, while there weren't specialized OB-GYNs during that time period, it was still pretty well understood that no one should try having a baby on a deserted island. Nevertheless, she birthed a child by herself and survived. Sadly, no one else, including the baby, was as adaptable as Marguerite, and they all eventually died, leaving Marguerite on her own against the relatively unexplored Western Hemisphere.

Amazon.com
With a huge gun, apparently.

Marguerite lived on the island for two solid years, hunting wild animals/monsters, before she was eventually rescued by fishermen. Once back home, her story made her an instant celebrity for reasons that would have probably resulted in her own reality show today.

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"She's got tits? And a gun? GET ME ONE HUNDRED CAMERAS."

Yet, her story still isn't quite as improbable as ...

After several failed attempts to rescue her, Juana was eventually picked up in 1853 wearing what one newspaper described as "skins and feathers of wild ducks, which she sewed together with sinews of the seal." The paper went on to add that "she cannot speak any known language, is good-looking and about middle age." She had not only survived alone on the island, but thrived there, actually outliving everyone else she knew (but more on that in a moment).

Missions of California
She designed her own pinhole cameras on the island, using only dolphin spleens and seagull beaks.

Ironically, despite her amazing individual resilience for almost 20 years, Juana Maria did not last two months once she reached the mainland. Her story was the inspiration for Scott O'Dell's Island of the Blue Dolphins, thus serving as a romantic ideal for future generations of girls of what life might be like if everyone would just leave them the fuck alone.

Amazon.com
It was like this, only with a lot more piles of dead sea otters.

Oh, and what we said earlier about how she outlived everyone she knew? It turns out that her getting left off the rescue boat was the mother of all blessings in disguise. The rest of her people who fled to the mainland ended up dying almost immediately from the new diseases they contracted from their rescuers.

At an age when most kids are worried about hiding boners behind textbooks, 14-year-old cabin boy Narcisse Pelletier was dealing with human trafficking, murder and complete abandonment. The ship on which Narcisse worked was carrying hundreds of Chinese laborers to Australia when it ran aground off of New Guinea in 1857, and several of his shipmates were promptly killed by natives. Narcisse was one of only about 12 men to escape by longboat, and together they paddled around the Coral Sea aimlessly for 12 days, subsisting on sea water and piss.

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"I don't care what you say. This is not part of a balanced breakfast."

They finally made land in Far North Queensland, Australia, and stopped for water before continuing on ... one man short. No one is sure exactly why they left Narcisse in Far North Queensland, home to the most poisonous everything on the planet. Then again, if you have ever spent a long time cooped up with a 14-year-old, you might understand the decision.

Regardless, this was where Narcisse's story started looking a lot less like Cast Away and a lot more like Dances With Wolves. Narcisse bumped into three Aboriginal women, who brought him back to their tribe. Narcisse was immediately adopted by the tribe, and for the next 17 years, he learned their ways and language, eventually growing into manhood and raising at least two kids of his own. Then in 1875, Narcisse was picked up by a passing ship. But by then he had become so in the zone with the Aborigines that he upheld their vow of secrecy regarding everything he had learned during the decades he spent with them.

Fishpond.com
Which resulted in one of the shortest biographies of all time.

He was celebrated throughout France for his heroic story of survival among the savages of Australia, but in reality he never wanted to leave, even insisting that he was kidnapped by the boat that "rescued" him and forced away from his true people. And his options for occupations back in France were less than spectacular -- a traveling show wanted to hire him as an Anglo-Australian freak. He opted to run a lighthouse instead, and died while still bitter about being taken from his tribe.