Meet Violet Jessop - the woman who survived not one, not two, but THREE major ship disasters and lived to tell about it!
Jessop was working as a stewardess aboard the RMS Olympicin 1911 when it collided with a British warship, creating a massive hole in the hull. The ship barely made it back to port, but Jessop survived her first maritime disaster.
Undeterred by her close call, Jessop took a job aboard the RMS Titanicin 1912. When the "unsinkable" ship hit an iceberg, Jessop was ordered into Lifeboat 16 and survived the most famous shipwreck in history while 1,500 others perished.
You'd think she'd avoid ships after that, but World War I was raging and Jessop felt called to serve. She became a nurse aboard the HMHS Britannic (Titanic's sister ship) in 1916. The ship hit a mine in the Aegean Sea and sank in just 55 minutes.
Jessop jumped from the sinking ship and was nearly killed by the propeller, but incredibly survived her third major shipwreck. She suffered a serious head injury but lived to tell the tale.
The mathematical odds of surviving three separate major maritime disasters are astronomical - roughly 1 in 200 million. Jessop became known as "Miss Unsinkable" and continued working on ships for decades after her near-death experiences.
She wrote in her memoirs: "I never lost my love for the sea, despite everything it threw at me."
Jessop's incredible survival story makes her one of the luckiest (or unluckiest, depending on how you look at it) people in maritime history!