Van Sebille’s independent debris-tracking models showed that objects starting off Mexico’s Pacific coast in late 2012 would reach the Marshall Islands in fourteen to twenty months — a window that encompasses the 438-day duration.
The U.S. Embassy official who interviewed him in Majuro found him credible.
In April 2014, Alvarenga’s lawyer reported that he had passed a polygraph test — though polygraph results are not considered legally definitive evidence, they are one data point in the overall assessment.
The physical evidence on the boat — the live tethered bird, the bird remains, the turtle shell used as a cup — was consistent with the survival methods Alvarenga described. The boat’s state, with a dead motor and the remnants of a long-term ocean dwelling, was consistent with an extended drift.
None of this constitutes independent observation of every day at sea. It cannot. What it constitutes is a set of evidence that, taken together, supports the plausibility of the core account: a boat left Mexico in November 2012, drifted for more than a year on ocean currents that models confirm would carry a boat from that departure point to the Marshall Islands, and was found at Ebon Atoll in January 2014 with one survivor and evidence consistent with the survival methods he described.
The gap between “plausible and corroborated” and “every detail independently verified” is the permanent condition of any account of events that occurred in isolation, at sea, beyond any witness’s observation.
## Jonathan Franklin and the Book That Came Later
Alvarenga did not immediately cooperate with the journalists who descended on the story after his rescue. He told a reporter from El Salvador, according to Franklin’s subsequent account, that he was tired of questions and wanted to forget the experience. He was not interested in being a media figure. He wanted to go home.