This paper develops a fault tolerant control method for unmanned surface vehicle with unknown nonlinearity, actuator degradation and external disturbance simultaneously. The sliding mode controller is designed first to eliminate the effects of disturbances, where the quantization errors between the unmanned surface vehicle and the remote control station can be compensated. Then, the adaptive mechanism updated online is applied to deal with the unknown nonlinearity and actuator degradation. Furthermore, the proposed control law is shown to guarantee the strict stability and reachability of the sliding surface. Finally, the feasibility of this method is verified by conducting experimental simulation.