Jonathan May

Jonathan May was among the Belgian rescuers involved in the response at Zeebrugge, representing the port workers, emergency crews, and local responders who had to confront a wreck that was still full of trapped people. In disasters like the Herald of Free Enterprise, rescuer biographies matter because the first response is usually improvised. The official systems—boats, ambulances, communications, command structures—must suddenly operate under conditions they were never designed to fully contain.

May’s role belongs to the shore-based side of the rescue, where the first task was simply to understand the scale of the emergency. A ferry on her side near a harbor entrance is a visual shock, but rescue personnel had to move beyond shock and into action: reaching survivors, coordinating transport, and working against the clock as the cold and the wreck’s geometry limited what could be done. That kind of work is often invisible in the grand narrative, yet it is central to whether more people live or die.

The rescue effort at Zeebrugge was defined by uncertainty. Responders did not have a neat casualty scene; they had a partially accessible ship with possible air pockets, submerged compartments, and people whose locations were unknown. Anyone working that scene had to make decisions amid incomplete information. The emotional difficulty for rescuers lay in the knowledge that time mattered in a way that could not be negotiated.

May represents the local professionalism that turned chaos into a search operation. His place in the story is not as a solitary hero but as part of a collective emergency response that included police, medics, port workers, divers, and volunteers. The disaster’s aftermath depended on such people, because official command alone could not reach every trapped space or console every family waiting on shore.

In the documentary record of the Herald, rescuers like May remind us that catastrophe does not end with the capsize. It continues through the hands that search, the voices that relay names, and the labor of trying to extract the living from a wreck that has already become a memorial of loss.