José Salvador Alvarenga stepped off a patrol boat in Majuro, the capital of the Marshall Islands, looking nothing like the fisherman who had disappeared 14 months earlier. His hair hung in wild tangles, a thick beard obscured his face, and he walked with slow, cautious steps. Fourteen months adrift in a tiny fishing boat had left him weak, riddled with parasites, and his malnourished body swollen with fluid retention.
Tom Armbruster, then the US Ambassador in the Marshall Islands, was one of the first to speak to him after the ordeal. 'He looked like somebody who had been out in the wild for quite a long time,' Tom, now an international consultant, tells Metro over Zoom. 'He moved with difficulty and seemed to be swollen. He was certainly not emaciated.'
A routine trip becomes a 438-day nightmare
Alvarenga set sail from Costa Azul, Mexico, on a routine two-day shark fishing trip in November 2012. After his GPS broke and the motor failed during a five-day storm, he and apprentice fisherman Ezequiel Córdoba, 22, were pulled out to sea. The boat was a 25-foot fibreglass vessel with no cabin or roof, just a crate the size of a fridge that became their only shelter.
After the storm, they were more than 250 miles offshore and beyond coastguard help. Salvador told journalist Jonathan Franklin, author of the book 438 Days: 'I was so hungry that I was eating my own fingernails, swallowing all the little pieces.' They drank their own urine, licked the inside of the boat for water, and once shared a piece of already-chewed gum found in a floating rubbish bag.
Survival tactics and tragedy
Salvador captured turtles and fish, lured birds on board to snare them, and drank their blood. 'He would drink the birds' blood and keep them until he needed them,' Tom explains. Ezequiel could not drink the blood. 'He just couldn't get his body to do it, and he wasted away,' Tom says. Four months in, Ezequiel told Salvador he was dying and passed away hours later.
After Ezequiel's death, Salvador propped him up and talked to him for days. When the young man's skin turned leathery, he took his clothes, washed his feet, sent him overboard, and passed out. The following months were a cycle of hunting, desperation, and hallucinations. A container ship passed so close he could see the faces of the men on board, but they passed him by. 'He talked about considering suicide and even offering himself to the sharks,' Tom recalls.
Rescue and aftermath
After 14 months, Salvador spotted land and assumed it was another hallucination. He had seen the remote atolls of the Marshall Islands, more than 9,000 miles from Costa Azul. He rowed for hours, swam the final stretch, and crawled onto the sand. Locals Emi Libokmeto and Russel Laikidrik took him in and fed him coconut water and pancakes.
Tom and his deputy Norman Barth met him on the boat to the mainland. 'We were pretty quickly convinced that yes, this was a fisherman who'd been gone a long, long time,' Tom says. The world's press was sceptical, but Tom has no doubts: 'There is just no other real explanation.'
After returning to dry land, Salvador struggled with water and nightmares. He later worked on his account with Jonathan Franklin to help people experiencing depression. He told him: 'I suffered so much and for so long. Maybe if people read this they will realise that if I can make it, they can make it.'
The family of Ezequiel filed a $1 million lawsuit citing cannibalism and defamation, but the claim was dropped after experts found no sign of foul play and Salvador passed a lie detector test. Since then, he has kept out of the spotlight. 'He's just trying to keep a low profile,' Tom says. 'He is one of the world's greatest survivors. An extraordinarily resourceful man with immense character.'
