What Alvarenga’s story adds to the literature is several things. The role of practical skill — the expertise of an experienced fisherman — is central to his survival in a way that is different from the survival of a passenger or a soldier or a recreational sailor. He was a professional, and the professional skills he brought to the situation were directly applicable. The bird catching, the fish catching, the resource management, the knowledge of what the ocean contained and how to extract it — these were not improvised from nothing. They were adaptations of professional knowledge to an extreme situation.
The duration also raises questions about the psychological literature on isolation and solitude. Accounts of solitary confinement and extreme isolation consistently document significant psychological deterioration at much shorter durations than 438 days. Alvarenga’s survival of more than a year of isolation — after Córdoba’s death — and his emergence from it as a person who, by Franklin’s account, had adjusted reasonably well to civilian life, suggests either extraordinary psychological resilience, or the specific mitigating factor that being at sea in a survival situation, while isolated from human contact, is not the same as being confined in a small space with nothing to do. He was occupied. He had tasks. He had the sun and the sky and the constant physical demands of keeping himself alive. The isolation was real, but it was not the blank void of a cell.
## The Return to Memory: What the Pacific Gives and Takes
Amy Libokmeto and Russell Laijedrik, the couple who found Alvarenga on the beach at Eneaitok, kept the boat he arrived in. The 25-foot fiberglass skiff that had been loaded with bait and ice and fresh fish on November 17, 2012, that had lost its motor in a five-day storm, that had carried two men west across the Pacific and delivered one of them to a beach in the Marshall Islands — that boat became a working vessel for the couple on Ebon Atoll. They use it to carry cargo and passengers.