He caught birds at night, killing them quickly. He used the turtle shell as a cup. He adapted the boat’s existing containers for multiple functions. He was not improvising wildly; he was applying the skills of a professional who had spent years in and around the ocean to a situation that required those skills at their maximum.
## Ezequiel Córdoba’s Death: The Account Attributed to Alvarenga
The most difficult element of Alvarenga’s story, and the one that has received the most scrutiny, is his account of Ezequiel Córdoba’s death.
By Alvarenga’s account, Córdoba became ill from eating raw food and eventually stopped eating. The refusal to eat raw fish and raw bird, in the physical and psychological circumstances of the drift, led to a progressive weakening that Alvarenga says he tried to reverse but could not. Córdoba’s death is placed by Alvarenga at approximately the fourth month of the drift — which would put it around March 2013, roughly four months into a voyage that had begun in November 2012.
Early news reports cited different timelines — some early accounts placed Córdoba’s death at “about a month” into the voyage, which conflicts with the later, more detailed account. The most consistently reported version, which Franklin’s book developed in detail, placed the death at approximately the four-month mark.
Whatever the precise timing, the documented consequence is clear: Alvarenga was alone for the remaining ten or more months of the drift.
His account of the immediate aftermath is one of the most psychologically significant elements of the story. He kept Córdoba’s body on the boat for approximately six days before releasing it into the ocean. The reasons he gave — in the account as Franklin reported it — involved the difficulty of accepting the loss, the psychological anchor that another human presence represented even when that presence was no longer living, and the sheer weight of what releasing the body meant for his own situation.