The radio on Alvarenga’s boat had failed. Its battery was dead. He had no flares — or if he had had flares at departure, they were used or lost in the early days of the storm. He had no mirrors for signaling — a standard piece of emergency equipment that can flash light toward a distant vessel — and no means of making himself visible through light or sound beyond waving his arms and shouting in a direction that could not carry his voice any meaningful distance.
He was, in the practical terms of maritime visibility, nearly undetectable.
The twenty ships that passed without responding were not, in all likelihood, crewed by people who saw a man in distress and chose to ignore him. They were more probably crewed by people who never saw him at all. The distinction matters for what it says about the nature of his situation: he was not being failed by human indifference; he was failing to reach human awareness. He was simply too small and too powerless to be seen from the scale at which large ships operate.
The psychological experience of being near ships that didn’t see him was, by his account, one of the hardest aspects of the drift. Each ship was evidence that the world still existed, that people were out there, that rescue was not an impossibility — and then each ship was gone, carrying that evidence with it. The energy spent waving, the hope activated and then denied, the return to the silence of the open ocean after the ship disappeared over the horizon — this cycle, repeated approximately twenty times over more than a year, imposed a specific kind of suffering that goes beyond the physical deprivation of the drift.