On January 30, 2014, Amy Libokmeto and her husband Russell Laijedrik heard shouting from the beach near their home on Eneaitok, a remote islet in Ebon Atoll, Marshall Islands. They found a man standing there — long tangled hair, a thick beard grown past his chest, wearing nothing but shredded underwear. He was waving his arms and shouting in a language they couldn’t understand, and he was holding a knife. When they approached, he dropped it.
He had been at sea for more than four hundred days.
The man was José Salvador Alvarenga, a Salvadoran fisherman who had departed the coast of Mexico in November 2012 on what was supposed to be a thirty-hour deep-sea fishing trip. The plan was to be back at the dock before the weekend was over. Instead, a storm arrived, destroyed his engine, and carried him into one of the most remote stretches of ocean on earth. By the time he reached the Marshall Islands, he had crossed roughly 6,000 to 6,700 miles of open Pacific — drifting on ocean currents, surviving on raw fish and seabirds and rainwater and the blood of sea turtles, tracking time by watching the phases of the moon.
He was alone. His companion, a 22-year-old named Ezequiel Córdoba who was on his first trip with Alvarenga, had died at sea months earlier.
What Alvarenga survived is, by the testimony of the oceanographers who modeled his drift and the medical professionals who examined him, physically possible. Whether every detail of his account is precisely accurate — in dates, in sequences, in the calibration of memory against ordeal — is impossible to confirm from shore. What the official record establishes is that a boat carrying two men was reported missing off Chiapas, Mexico, in November 2012, and that one of those men turned up on an atoll in the Marshall Islands in January 2014. Everything in between is José Salvador Alvarenga’s account of what happened.