The way journalists and the public handled this distinction in the first weeks after the story broke was, in many cases, imprecise. The tendency to treat Alvarenga’s account as established fact where it was actually attributed account is understandable — it is a narrative habit — but it obscures an important distinction. The claim that Cordoba refused to eat raw food and died is what Alvarenga said. The claim that the drift lasted 438 days is what official records, corroborated by Franklin’s research, establish. These are different kinds of claims with different evidentiary bases, and conflating them does a disservice to both the complexity of the story and the intelligence of the audience.
Franklin’s book, published in November 2015, handled this distinction with appropriate care. It presented Alvarenga’s account as his account, attributed to him, while separately noting the corroborations that exist for the parts of the story that can be independently verified. The book did not claim to verify everything; it claimed to provide the most complete and carefully gathered version of Alvarenga’s testimony that existed, together with the available corroborating material.
## The Mechanics of Finding and Losing Hope
Four months into the drift, Ezequiel Cordoba was gone. Alvarenga was alone.
The physical dimensions of this change were significant: he no longer had another pair of hands for tasks that were easier with two people. The emotional dimensions were more significant still: he had lost the only other human presence in a universe that contained nothing else human. The Pacific stretched in every direction. The boat was the same size it had always been. He was the only person in it.