Oh and to add insult to injury: I started another world in the same Relics map (thinking that maybe it was just that save that had been corrupted) and the same thing happened.
No I stayed in survival mode. But the Relics world has very aggressive shark mobs. So, I tried to find land / spawn but either ran out of energy/health or was eaten by sharks.
(it would be funny except I really liked what I had done in the world.
I've had a similar issue. Sometimes when saving an in progress game based on the "Relics of the Privateers" world, my game will freeze. I will restart my phone and once I am able to open up my minecraft app, I will spawn in the middle of a deep ocean with no inventory--lost a world that I had put quite a bit of work into
whoops--I had just switched the game mode to creative but not the personal mode (I didn't realize there were two options)--so I just switched to creative....its all water, I'm not finding land.
This happened to me in just the last two days. Not before that with any other save.