SURVIVAL MIRACLE!
Fisherman’s record 14 mos. adrift Book’s harrowing tale of deadly seafaring journey
ON JAN. 29, 2014, WHEN fisherman Jose Salvador Alvarenga washed ashore on a remote island deep in the Pacific Ocean, he was 6,700 miles from home, having survived 14 months lost at sea.
It was a record of endurance never equaled by another castaway.
Alvarenga was 36 and looked prepped to play a wild man in a cheesy Hollywood feature. His hair and beard were a matted thicket, his wrists impossibly small, his ankles grotesquely swollen.
When he set out from the small Mexican village of Costa Azul on Nov. 17, 2012, he was at his physical prime, with a compact, muscled physique shaped by his rugged life as a fisherman.
How could Alvarenga have possibly survived more than a year adrift in the ocean? Jonathan Franklin, who documented the ordeal of the trapped Chilean miners in the book “33 Men,” tells the fisherman’s story in the new tome “438 Days.”
Even Franklin, who was reporting for The Guardian newspaper at the time, had trouble believing Alvarenga was who he claimed. The tale was just too incredible. But supporting evidence bore the fisherman out.
Alvarenga arrived in Mexico in 2008, on the run from the village of Garita Palmera in El Salvador after a vicious bar fight left him with 11 stab wounds and multiple broken ribs. Fearing for his life, he fled, leaving behind his baby daughter, Fatima, and his parents.
With few options available to him, Alvarenga became a fisherman. And he reveled in it.
A 60-hour run could yield as much as $150, enough to live on for a week and party hard. Alvarenga was no one’s idea of a hero, but a cruel fate was about to anoint him a seafaring legend.
That November, a huge norteño — a killer windstorm from the north — was predicted. Alvarenga had already made one lucrative haul of shark, mahimahi and tuna — 1,200 pounds in all. But he was greedy for more.
Alvarenga hired 22-year-old Ezequiel Cordoba, a novice fisherman better known as the star of the local soccer team. It wasn’t a good match for the risk-taking Alvarenga, known to travel farther and stay out longer than other, possibly wiser, men.
The two set out in a 25-foot fiberglass boat, as long as two pickup trucks and as wide as one. It had no raised structure for shelter. In the evening, the two men threw out a 2-mile line baited with 700 hooks.
In the wee hours, Alvarenga woke up as the storm turned ugly. He ordered Cordoba to reel the line in.
Cordoba, who had signed up for $50 and two days’ work, froze with panic as Alvarenga fought to bring the vessel home through 10-foot waves. Alvarenga battled through the night and was only 15 miles from the coast when the motor died.
Frantic, he radioed the boat’s owner and demanded to be rescued. His last words to land were, “Come now, I am really getting f----d out here.”
By noon, the radio had died and Alvarenga had to wrest Cordoba from the sea by his hair when he was swept overboard by a wave that also took their food and water supply, according to the book. When the storm was at its height, they were forced to jettison their haul — 1,100 pounds of fish — to lighten the strain on the small craft.
It didn’t take long for their situation to grow dire in the open sea. Aside from a small knife, they were left with no tools, no food and no water. They were now prey for what had been their prime catch. Sharks circled the boat.
Days into their odyssey, Alvarenga improvised an ingenious means to catch fish. He leaned from the boat, always alert for fins, and dangled his hands. When a fish swam between, he would slam his muscled arms shut, digging his fingernails into the flesh.
Alvarenga stuffed the raw fish into his mouth by the handful. He started drinking his own urine, and urged Cordoba to do the same, according to the book. It was a mistake. The salt exacerbated the dehydration, torturing both men.
Their next meal was salvaged from the flotsam of garbage that floated around them. A green bag yielded a wad of used chewing gum, half a cabbage, some limp carrots and a quart of rancid milk. The men feasted.
By 10 days out, without bait or a hook to catch the abundance of fish around them, Alvarenga hit on the idea of harvesting sea turtles, using a tube from the motor to suck them dry of blood. The more delicate Cordoba couldn’t bring himself to do the same.
A rainstorm finally gifted them with an abundance of water that they caught in plastic bottles snatched from the floating garbage piles.
Alvarenga used the lunar cycle to keep track of the passing days. On what they estimated to be Christmas Eve, the men enjoyed a meal made from their only food supply, birds that came to rest at night on the side of the boat.
Within hours, Cordoba was writhing in pain. They split open the gut of the bird and found the
skeleton of a snake. Enough of the skin was left to identify it as a venomous, yellow-bellied sea snake.
Cordoba survived being poisoned, but ultimately lost his sanity and his life to the doldrums, a stretch of sea so still that sailors from earlier times considered it a death sentence.
At one point, Cordoba tried to throw himself overboard to commit suicide by shark attack, according to the book. Then he refused to eat, growing increasingly emaciated and deranged as the days passed. Before he died with his eyes open, he extracted two promises from Alvarenga.
One was that Alvarenga not eat his corpse. The other was that he find Cordoba’s mother and tell her what happened.
Alvarenga befriended the dead body and chatted to it for six days before he realized his own insanity. Cordoba’s corpse went overboard with little ceremony. Alvarenga was alone now and would be for the rest of the year, and then some.
He developed a rich fantasy life in which he enjoyed gourmet meals and good company. When his boat nuzzled up against a whale shark, the ocean’s largest creature, weighing 25,000 pounds, he befriended the monster, chatting to it through the week they kept company.
Later, experts were able to track Alvarenga’s path, a drift westward, then a wild zigzag, for days traveling at a crawling 1 mile per hour. He became the first person in history to have survived a year lost at sea.
Simple body movements were beyond him, and despair had beset him.
“I could see my death was going to (be) very, very slow,” he said when he first spotted land.
A strong wind caught the vessel and brought Alvarenga ashore on an outpost of the Marshall Islands.
Naked, and covered with leeches, the desperate man crawled inward. A red shirt on a clothesline alerted him to the fact that civilization was near. The couple that took him in, members of a remote tribe, didn’t speak his language, but in their company he began his journey back into the world.
Deeply traumatized, Alvarenga returned to El Salvador and his daughter. He made the promised journey to Cordoba’s mother and received her blessing, although the family is now suing for a share of profits from the book.
His old boss and fishing buddies from Costa Azul wanted him back to be a sharkman, as they were known, once more. For now, Alvarenga is sticking to dry land.