Cheers, tears, ballons and hugs greeted Bermudian William Arthur (Billy) Lewis on his return home 47 years after he left the Island as a young merchant seaman. Nothing more remarkable than that, you might say. Bermudians invariably come back sooner or later. But that would be without knowing the incredible story behind the joyous reunion with his family, some of whom he didn't even know existed. It took a niece's school project to start the ball rolling, and her mother's dogged determination to finally solve the mystery of Billy Lewis, the missing link in the family chain, and bring closure to a matter that had been torturing her soul for as long as she could remember. In an exclusive interview with Lifestyle's Nancy Acton, Pebbles Cordeiro and her long lost brother tell the tale of the intervening years that kept them apart.

Ask William (Billy) Lewis what he's been up to since he left Bermuda 47 years ago and he responds: “It would take three weeks to tell you my life story, and even then there are parts that I will never share with anyone.”

Nonetheless, what Mr. Lewis does reveal is indicative of a man who apparently has nine lives mixed with a touch of James Bond.

Clearly a tough cookie in his day, he has also been blessed with the strongest of wills to survive, and has done so against some pretty incredible odds. How else to explain that, among other things, he has been torpedoed twice, shipwrecked in shark-infested waters for three days, shot at by the Japanese, knifed, robbed, divorced, and jailed, and lived to tell the tale?

From a very early age, Billy Lewis admits he always loved to fight. From decking fellow students at Dellwood School to tossing his ex-wife's lover out of his third-floor bedroom window, he has never hesitated to resolve issues that displeased him. And yet there is a soft and sentimental side to his nature that has led him to jump ship twice over a woman, generously buy a home for a kind friend with whom he also shares it; speak fondly of being “adopted” by a neighbouring family in England whose children call him “Grandad;” and revel in the affection with which he is currently being showered by his new-found, extended Bermuda family.

One of eleven children growing up on Woodlands Road, Mr. Lewis left school an academic underachiever but with a taste for adventure, so he joined first the Queen of Bermuda and then the Ocean Monarch for a few years. Following a break ashore, he spontaneously signed on with a Norwegian liberty ship that happened to be alongside in Hamilton and embarked on what would be the first of many eventful voyages in his life.

En route, he would “miss” the sailing from one port due to a dalliance, catch up with the ship in another, and then experience a harrowing storm that left it badly damaged. During his next voyage on an oil tanker, the ship broke in two on Christmas day, leaving him among the stranded crew on its aft end.

After that he joined a ship going to Australia, where another dalliance inspired him to jump ship, he then spent most of the next five years in the bush, and became friendly with an aborigine family.

Returning to sea on a cargo ship - a voyage that included another storm-induced disaster that nearly sank it - he ultimately limped into fogbound Merseyside in England, where he signed off with ?30,000 and all his worldly goods, including important papers, in his luggage. Seeking advice from a stranger at the railway station, Mr. Lewis was told: “Don't bother with expensive hotels, I'll take you to my sister. She'll put you up,” whereupon the duo duly set off on what would be one of the oldest scams in the book.

“Unknown to me the ‘sister' was a prostitute, and while I was enjoying her charms her ‘brother' made off with my suitcase and I had nothing,” the ex-merchant mariner recalls. “I was homeless for five years.”

Finally, he pulled himself together and moved to Nottingham and a job in a scrapyard, whose owner eventually died and willed him the business. Mr. Lewis elected to sell it and embark on a new career in London, working in demolition and steel erection.

“I built the Post Office tower,” he says proudly. “We were up there walking around on six-inch-wide girders doing the riveting.”

Dangerous as the work was, however, the intrepid Bermudian said he had no fear of dying.

“If you fell, you fell, that's it,” he shrugs.

And it nearly was “it” when he was demolishing a 500-foot, soot-lined chimney - a painstaking task that required chipping away at the structure from the top, brick by brick, with an axe. Sure enough, one day Mr. Lewis lost his footing, plummeted 85 feet and lived to tell the tale.

“As I was falling I called out to my mate, ‘Here we go again'. I was covered in soot and looked like someone from the black and white minstrels! ” Mr. Lewis laughs. “That's life. When your time's up that's it.”

But it wasn't his time, so the “Hell's Angel” set out on his motorbike to tour the United Kingdom before settling in Manchester to open an antique business. Today, a magnificent carved Chippendale fireplace surround in his home is a legacy of those days, which, incidentally, he refused to sell for a six-figure sum.

While specific dates sometimes elude him, Mr. Lewis also recalls his harrowing adventures in the merchant marine during the Second World War when he was twice torpedoed, and on one occasion was the only crewman not machine-gunned to death by the Japanese because he swam underwater to shore, and ultimately made his way to safety. His journeys took him all over the world, and today his body still bears the scars of the less happy aspects of those adventures.

Marriage was another disaster. Three months into it, he discovered his wife in bed with someone else and angrily flung the interloper from the third-floor window - a gesture which earned him an 18-month sentence in two of Britain's most famous jails: Wormwood Scrubs and Strangeways. When his uncle Maurice visited him, it represented the first and only time Billy Lewis had ever had contact with anyone from his family since leaving Bermuda.

On his release, Mr. Lewis became a wrestler, and worked in a funfair.

“Oh, I've done every blinking job going,” he says. “I also worked as a security guard for 75p an hour, picked the boys' brains and then opened my own firm.”

Then came the accident that nearly ended his life. Driving his six-cylinder E-type Jaguar convertible, he crashed at 125 mph, and suffered injuries so horrific that he spent the next four years in hospital, two of them in a coma. For the second time in his life (the first was as a baby), the doctors gave him up for dead, but they didn't know Billy Lewis. “Once a fighter, always a fighter.” Suddenly one day he opened his eyes and asked, “Where am I?”

Despite the amnesia which held him prisoner, a sailor's instincts were still intact.

“The old matron, who was a right pig, was standing over me. ‘Who are you?' she asked.'Give me a kiss and I'll tell you,' I replied.”

Over the next 22 months, Mr. Lewis fought his way back from a death's door and total amnesia. Today, three solid silver plates in his head as well as a solid silver jaw; a rebuilt, metal shoulder; a missing index finger and natural teeth are all testament to his ordeal. Officially classed as handicapped, he is nonetheless mobile and his memory, while not perfect, has improved greatly.

“There's still a lot of life left in me yet,” he assures.