On 18 November 2012, a day after being ambushed at
sea by a massive storm, Alvarenga was trying to ignore the growing pond of
seawater sloshing at his feet. An inexperienced navigator might have panicked,
started baling and been distracted from his primary task: aligning the boat
with the waves. He was a veteran captain and knew that he needed to regain the
initiative. Together with his inexperienced crewmate, Ezequiel Córdoba, he was
50 miles out at sea, slowly negotiating a route back to shore.
The spray and crashing waves dumped hundreds of
gallons of seawater into the boat, threatening to sink or flip them. While
Alvarenga steered, Córdoba was frantically tossing water back into the ocean,
pausing only momentarily to allow his shoulder muscles to recover.
Alvarenga’s boat, at 25 feet, was as long as two
pick-up trucks and as wide as one. With no raised structure, no glass and no
running lights, it was virtually invisible at sea. On the deck, a fibreglass
crate the size of a refrigerator was full of fresh fish: tuna, mahimahi and
sharks, their catch after a two-day trip. If they could bring it ashore, they
would have enough money to survive for a week.
The boat was loaded with equipment, including 70
gallons of gasoline, 16 gallons of water, 23kg (50lb) of sardines for bait, 700
hooks, miles of line, a harpoon, three knives, three buckets for baling, a
mobile phone (in a plastic bag to keep it dry), a GPS tracking device (not
waterproof), a two-way radio (battery half-charged), several wrenches for the
motor and 91kg (200lb) of ice.
Alvarenga had prepared the
boat with Ray Perez, his usual mate and a loyal companion. But at the last
minute, Perez couldn’t join him. Alvarenga, keen to get out to sea, arranged to
go with Córdoba instead, a 22-year-old with the nickname Piñata who lived at
the far end of the lagoon, where he was best known as a defensive star on the
village soccer team. Alvarenga and Córdoba had never spoken before, much less
worked together.
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Alvarenga tensely negotiated their slow advance
toward the coast, manoeuvring among the waves like a surfer trying to glide and
slice his way through. As the weather worsened, Córdoba’s resolve
disintegrated. At times he refused to bale and instead held the rail with both
hands, vomiting and crying. He had signed up to make $50. He was capable of
working 12 hours straight without complaining and was athletic and strong. But
this crashing, soaking journey back to shore? He was sure their tiny craft
would shatter and sharks would devour them. He began to scream.
Alvarenga remained sitting, gripping the tiller
tightly, determined to navigate a storm now so strong that harbourmasters along
the coast had barred fishing boats from heading out to sea. Finally he noticed
a change in the visibility, the cloud cover was lifting: he could see miles
across the water. Around 9am, Alvarenga spotted the rise of a mountain on the
horizon. They were approximately two hours from land when the motor started
coughing and spluttering. He pulled out his radio and called his boss. “Willy!
Willy! Willy! The motor is ruined!”
“Calm down, man, give me your coordinates,” Willy
responded, from the beachside docks in Costa Azul.
“We have no GPS, it’s not functioning.”
“Lay an anchor,” Willy ordered.
“We have no anchor,” Alvarenga said. He had noticed
it was missing before setting off, but didn’t think he needed it on a deep-sea
mission.
“OK, we are coming to get you,” Willy responded.
“Come now, I am really getting fucked out here,”
Alvarenga shouted. These were his final words to shore.
As the waves thumped the boat, Alvarenga and
Córdoba began working as a team. With the morning sun, they could see the waves
approaching, rising high above them and then splitting open. Each man would
brace and lean against a side of the open-hulled boat to counteract the roll.
But the waves were unpredictable, slapping each
other in midair, joining forces to create swells that raised the men to a brief
peak where they could get a third-storey view, then, with the sensation of a
falling elevator, instantly drop them. Their beach sandals provided no traction
on the deck.
Alvarenga realised their catch – nearly 500kg
(1,100lb) of fresh fish – was making the boat top heavy and unstable. With no
time to consult his boss, Alvarenga went with his gut: they would dump all the
fish. One by one they hauled them out of the cooler, swinging the carcasses
into the ocean. Falling overboard was now more dangerous than ever: the bloody
fish were sure to attract sharks.
Furious, he
picked up a heavy club normally used to kill fish and began to bash the broken
engine
Next they tossed the ice and extra gasoline.
Alvarenga strung 50 buoys from the boat as a makeshift “sea anchor” that
floated on the surface, providing drag and stability. But at around 10am the
radio died. It was before noon on day one of a storm that Alvarenga knew was
likely to last five days. Losing the GPS had been an inconvenience. The failed
motor was a disaster. Now, without radio contact, they were on their own.
The storm roiled the men all afternoon as they
fought to bale water out of the boat. The same muscles, the same repetitive
motion, hour after hour, had allowed them to dump perhaps half the water. They
were both ready to faint with exhaustion, but Alvarenga was also furious. He
picked up a heavy club normally used to kill fish and began to bash the broken
engine. Then he grabbed the radio and GPS unit and angrily threw the machines
into the water.
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The sun sank and the storm churned as Córdoba and
Alvarenga succumbed to the cold. They turned the refrigerator-sized icebox
upside down and huddled inside. Soaking wet and barely able to clench their
cold hands into fists, they hugged and wrapped their legs around each other.
But as the incoming water sank the boat ever lower, the men took turns leaving
the icebox to bale for frantic 10- or 15-minute stints. Progress was slow but
the pond at their feet gradually grew smaller.
Darkness shrank their world, as a gale-force wind
ripped offshore and drove the men farther out to sea. Were they now back to
where they had been fishing a day earlier? Were they heading north towards
Acapulco, or south towards Panama? With only the stars as guides, they had lost
their usual means of calculating distance.
Without bait or fish hooks, Alvarenga invented a
daring strategy to catch fish. He kneeled alongside the edge of the boat, his
eyes scanning for sharks, and shoved his arms into the water up to his
shoulders. With his chest tightly pressed to the side of the boat, he kept his
hands steady, a few inches apart. When a fish swam between his hands, he
smashed them shut, digging his fingernails into the rough scales. Many escaped
but soon Alvarenga mastered the tactic and he began to grab the fish and toss
them into the boat while trying to avoid their teeth. With the fishing knife,
Córdoba expertly cleaned and sliced the flesh into finger-sized strips that
were left to dry in the sun. They ate fish after fish. Alvarenga stuffed raw
meat and dried meat into his mouth, hardly noticing or caring about the
difference. When they got lucky, they were able to catch turtles and the
occasional flying fish that landed inside their boat.
Within days, Alvarenga began to drink his urine and
encouraged Córdoba to follow suit. It was salty but not revolting as he drank,
urinated, drank again, peed again, in a cycle that felt as if it was providing
at least minimal hydration; in fact, it was exacerbating their dehydration.
Alvarenga had long ago learned the dangers of drinking seawater. Despite their
longing for liquid, they resisted swallowing even a cupful of the endless
saltwater that surrounded them.
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“I was so hungry that I was eating my own
fingernails, swallowing all the little pieces,” Alvarenga later told me. He
began to grab jellyfish from the water, scooping them up in his hands and
swallowing them whole. “It burned the top part of my throat, but wasn’t so
bad.”
After roughly 14 days at sea, Alvarenga was resting
inside the icebox when he heard a sound: splat, splat, splat. The rhythm of
raindrops on the roof was unmistakable. “Piñata! Piñata! Piñata,” Alvarenga
screamed as he slipped out. His crewmate awoke and joined him. Rushing across
the deck, the two men deployed a rainwater collection system that Alvarenga had
been designing and imagining for a week. Córdoba scrubbed a grey five-gallon
bucket clean and positioned its mouth skyward.
Dark clouds stalked overhead, and after days of
drinking urine and turtle blood, and nearly dying of thirst, a storm finally
bore down on the men. They opened their mouths to the falling rain, stripped
off their clothes and showered in a glorious deluge of fresh water. Within an
hour, the bucket had an inch, then two inches of water. The men laughed and
drank every couple of minutes. After their initial attack on the water
supplies, however, they vowed to maintain strict rations.
Alvarenga’s journey from Mexico to the Marshall Islands.
Illustration: Guardian Graphics
After weeks at sea, Alvarenga and Córdoba became
astute scavengers and learned to distinguish the varieties of plastic that bob
across the ocean. They grabbed and stored every empty water bottle they found.
When a stuffed green rubbish bag drifted within reach, the men snared it,
hauled it aboard and ripped open the plastic. Inside one bag, they found a wad
of chewed gum and divided the almond-sized lump, each man feasting on the
wealth of sensorial pleasures. Underneath a layer of sodden kitchen oil, they found
riches: half a head of cabbage, some carrots and a quart of milk – half-rancid,
but still they drank it. It was the first fresh food the two men had seen for a
long time. They treated the soggy carrots with reverence.
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When they had several days’ worth of backup food,
and especially after they had caught and eaten a turtle, Córdoba and Alvarenga
briefly found solace in the magnificent seascape. “We would talk about our
mothers,” Alvarenga recalled. “And how badly we had behaved. We asked God to
forgive us for being such bad sons. We imagined if we could hug them, give them
a kiss. We promised to work harder so they would not have to work any more. But
it was too late.”
After two months at sea, Alvarenga had become
accustomed to capturing and eating birds and turtles, while Córdoba had begun a
physical and mental decline. They were on the same boat but headed on different
paths. Córdoba had been sick after eating raw seabirds and made a drastic
decision: he began to refuse all food. He gripped a plastic water bottle in
both hands but was losing the energy, and motivation, to put it up to his
mouth. Alvarenga offered tiny chunks of bird meat, occasionally a bite of
turtle. Córdoba clenched his mouth. Depression was shutting his body down.
The two men made a pact. If Córdoba survived, he
would travel to El Salvador and visit Alvarenga’s mother and father. If
Alvarenga made it out alive, he’d go back to Chiapas, Mexico, and find
Córdoba’s devout mother who had remarried an evangelical preacher. “He asked me
to tell his mother that he was sad he could not say goodbye and that she
shouldn’t make any more tamales for him – they should let him go, that he had
gone with God,” Alvarenga told me.
“I am dying, I am dying, I am almost gone,” Córdoba
said one morning.
“Don’t think about that. Let’s take a nap,”
Alvarenga replied as he lay alongside Córdoba.
“I am tired, I want water,” Córdoba moaned. His
breath was rough. Alvarenga retrieved the water bottle and put it to Córdoba’s
mouth, but he did not swallow. Instead he stretched out. His body shook in
short convulsions. He groaned and his body tensed up. Alvarenga suddenly
panicked. He screamed into Córdoba’s face, “Don’t leave me alone! You have to
fight for life! What am I going to do here alone?”
To deal with
losing his companion, Alvarenga simply pretended he hadn't died. 'How do you
feel?' he asked the corpse
Córdoba didn’t reply. Moments later he died with
his eyes open.
“I propped him up to keep him out of the water. I
was afraid a wave might wash him out of the boat,” Alvarenga told me. “I cried
for hours.”
The next morning he stared at Córdoba in the bow of
the boat. He asked the corpse, “How do you feel? How was your sleep?”
“I slept good, and you? Have you had breakfast?”
Alvarenga answered his own questions aloud, as if he were Córdoba speaking from
the afterlife. The easiest way to deal with losing his only companion was
simply to pretend he hadn’t died.
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Six days after Córdoba’s death, Alvarenga sat with
the corpse on a moonless night, in full conversation, when, as if waking from a
dream, he was suddenly shocked to find he was conversing with the dead. “First
I washed his feet. His clothes were useful, so I stripped off a pair of shorts
and a sweatshirt. I put that on – it was red, with little skull-and-crossbones
– and then I dumped him in. And as I slid him into the water, I fainted.”
***
When he awoke just minutes later, Alvarenga was
terrified. “What could I do alone? Without anyone to speak with?” he told me.
“Why had he died and not me? I had invited him to fish. I blamed myself for his
death.”
But his will to live and fear of suicide (his
mother had assured him that those who kill themselves will never go to heaven)
kept him searching for solutions and scouring the ocean’s surface for ships.
Sunrise and sunset were best, as blurry shapes on the horizon were transformed
into neat silhouettes and the sun was bearable. With his eyesight fine-tuned,
Alvarenga could now identify a tiny speck on the horizon as a ship. As it
approached, he would identify the type of vessel – usually a transpacific
container ship – as it growled by. These sea barges ploughed the sea
effortlessly, and with no visible crew or activity on deck, they were like
drones at sea. Every sighting pumped Alvarenga with an energy boost that jolted
him to wave, jump and flail for hours. About 20 separate container boats
paraded across the horizon, yet the maddening ship-tease still excited him.
Storms battered his small boat, but as he got farther out to sea, the storms
seemed to become shorter, more manageable.
Alvarenga let his imagination run wild in order to
keep sane. He imagined an alternative reality so believable that he could later
say with total honesty that alone at sea he tasted the greatest meals of his
life and experienced the most delicious sex. He was mastering the art of
turning his solitude into a Fantasia-like world. He started his mornings with a
long walk. “I would stroll back and forth on the boat and imagine that I was
wandering the world. By doing this I could make myself believe that I was
actually doing something. Not just sitting there, thinking about dying.” With
this lively entourage of family, friends and lovers, Alvarenga insulated
himself from bleak reality.
When he was a small boy, his grandfather had taught
him how to keep track of time using the cycles of the moon. Now, alone in the
open ocean, he was always clear as to how many months he had been adrift; he
knew he had seen 15 lunar cycles while drifting through unknown territory. He
was convinced his next destination was heaven.
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He was whizzing along on a smooth current, when
suddenly the sky filled with shore birds. Alvarenga stared. The muscles in his
neck tightened. A tropical island emerged from the mist. A green Pacific atoll,
a small hill surrounded by a kaleidoscope of turquoise waters.
Hallucinations didn’t last this long. Had his
prayers finally been answered? Alvarenga’s racing mind imagined multiple
disaster scenarios. He could blow off course. He could drift backward – it had
happened before. He stared at the land as he tried to pick out details from the
shore. It was a tiny island, no bigger than a football field, he calculated. It
looked wild, without roads, cars or homes.
With his knife, he cut away the ragged line of
buoys. It was a drastic move. In the open ocean, with no sea anchor, he could
readily flip during even a moderate tropical storm. But Alvarenga could see the
shoreline clearly and he gambled that speed was of greater importance than
stability.
In an hour he had drifted near the island’s beach.
Ten yards from shore, Alvarenga dove into the water, then paddled “like a
turtle” until a large wave picked him up and tossed him high on the beach, like
driftwood. As the wave pulled away, Alvarenga was left face down in the sand.
“I held a handful of sand like it was a treasure,” he later told me.
Making radio contact after landing on Ebon Atoll. Photograph: Ola
Fjeldstad
The famished fisherman crawled naked through a
carpet of sodden palm fronds, sharp coconut shells and tasty flowers. He was
unable to stand for more than a few seconds. “I was totally destroyed and as
skinny as a board,” he said. “The only thing left was my intestines and gut,
plus skin and bones. My arms had no meat. My thighs were skinny and ugly.”
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Although he didn’t know it, Alvarenga had washed
ashore on Tile Islet, a small island that is part of the Ebon Atoll, on the
southern tip of the 1,156 islands that make up the Republic of the Marshall
Islands, one of the most remote spots on Earth. A boat leaving Ebon searching
for land would either have to churn 4,000 miles north-east to hit Alaska or
2,500 miles south-west to Brisbane, Australia. Had Alvarenga missed Ebon, he
would have drifted north of Australia, possibly running aground in Papua New
Guinea, but more likely continuing another 3,000 miles towards the eastern
coast of the Philippines.
As he stumbled through the undergrowth, he suddenly
found himself standing across a small canal from the beach house of Emi
Libokmeto and her husband Russel Laikidrik. “As I’m looking across, I see this
white man there,” said Emi, who works husking and drying coconuts on the
island. “He is yelling. He looks weak and hungry. My first thought was, this
person swam here, he must have fallen off a ship.”
After tentatively approaching each other, Emi and
Russel welcomed him into their home. Alvarenga drew a boat, a man and the
shore. Then he gave up. How could he explain a 7,000-mile drift at sea with
stick figures? His impatience simmered. He asked for medicine. He asked for a
doctor. The native couple smiled and kindly shook their heads. “Even though we
did not understand each other, I began to talk and talk,” Alvarenga told me.
“The more I talked, the more we all roared with laughter. I am not sure why
they were laughing. I was laughing at being saved.”
After a morning of caring for and feeding the
castaway, Russel sailed across a lagoon to the main town and port on the island
of Ebon to ask the mayor for help. Within hours a group, including police and a
nurse, had come to rescue Alvarenga. They had to persuade him to get on a boat
with them back to Ebon. While they nursed this wild-looking man back to health
and tried to coax out details of his journey, a visiting anthropologist from
Norway alerted the Marshall Islands Journal.El Salvad
Written by Giff Johnson, the first story went out under the
Agence France-Presse (AFP) banner on 31 January and outlined the remarkable
contours of Alvarenga’s story. Reporters in Hawaii, Los Angeles and Australia
scrambled to reach the island to interview this alleged castaway. The single
phone line on Ebon became a battleground, as reporters tried to discover
tantalising details. Alvarenga’s story had enough hard facts to make it
plausible: the initial missing person report, the search-and-rescue operation,
the correlation of his drift with known ocean currents, and the fact that he
was extremely weak.
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But a debate erupted online and in newsrooms around
the world: was this the most remarkable survivor sinceErnest Shackleton, or the biggest fraud
since the Hitler diaries? Officials tracked down
Alvarenga’s supervisor, who confirmed that the registration number of the boat
he had washed up in was the same as the one that had left port on 17 November
2012, and vanished. Guardian reporter Jo Tuckman interviewed
Mexican search-and-rescue official Jaime Marroquín, who detailed the desperate
hunt for Alvarenga and Córdoba that followed. “The winds were high,” Marroquín
said. “We had to stop the search flights after two days because of poor
visibility.”
I began to investigate, talking to people up and
down the coast of Mexico. I looked at medical records, studied maps, and spoke
to survival experts, ranging from the US Coast Guard to the Navy Seals, as well
as Ivan MacFadyen and Jason Lewis, two adventurers who have
crossed that stretch of the Pacific. I spoke with oceanographers and commercial
fishermen familiar with the area. Everyone confirmed that Alvarenga’s version
of life at sea was in line with what they would expect. When he arrived at
hospital in the Marshall Islands, he was debriefed by US embassy officials who
described multiple scars on Alvarenga’s very damaged body. “He was out there
for a long time,” the US ambassador sa
Meanwhile back in the Marshall Islands, Alvarenga’s
medical condition steadily worsened. His feet and legs were swollen. The
doctors suspected the tissues had been deprived of water for so long that they
now soaked up everything. But after 11 days, doctors determined that
Alvarenga’s health had stabilised enough for him to travel home to El Salvador,
where he would be reunited with his family
He was diagnosed with anaemia and doctors suspected
his diet of raw turtles and raw birds had infected his liver with parasites.
Alvarenga believed the parasites might rise up to his head and attack his
brain. Deep sleep was impossible and he thought often of Córdoba’s death. It
was not the same to be celebrating survival alone. As soon as he was strong
enough, he travelled to Mexico to fulfil his promise and deliver a message to
Córdoba’s mother, Ana Rosa. He sat with her for two hours, answering all her
questions.
Life on land has not been straightforward: for
months, Alvarenga was still in shock. He had developed a deep fear of not only
the ocean, but even the sight of water. He slept with the lights on and needed
constant company. Soon after coming ashore, he appointed a lawyer to handle the
media requests that came in from all over the world. He later changed
representation, and his former lawyer filed a lawsuit demanding a
million-dollar payout for an alleged breach of contract.
It wasn’t until a year later, when the fog of
confusion subsided and he scanned the maps of his drift across the Pacific
Ocean, that Alvarenga began to fathom his extraordinary journey. For 438 days,
he lived on the edge of sanity. “I suffered hunger, thirst and an extreme
loneliness, and didn’t take my life,” Alvarenga says. “You only get one chance
to live – so appreciate it.”
• This is an edited extract from 438 Days by
Jonathan Franklin, published by Macmillan at
