The pancakes deserve their own moment of consideration. Alvarenga had not eaten conventionally prepared food in more than fourteen months. He had eaten raw fish and raw birds and raw turtle and seabirds and jellyfish and fish eyes. The first food prepared for him by another human being, after 438 days, was pancakes.
He ate them. The account suggests he ate them with the appreciation that fourteen months of raw protein makes possible.
The medical literature on refeeding syndrome — the dangerous electrolyte imbalances that can occur when severely malnourished patients receive food too quickly — is relevant here. The protocol for refeeding after extended starvation requires careful management of what is eaten and in what quantities, because the metabolic disruption of introducing carbohydrates and other macronutrients rapidly after extended deprivation can cause heart failure, respiratory failure, and other serious complications. Whether Alvarenga’s consumption of pancakes was medically optimal is not certain. What the subsequent record shows is that he did not suffer immediately catastrophic consequences from it, though his health did worsen about a week into his time in Majuro before stabilizing.
The couple kept the boat he arrived in. The 25-foot fiberglass skiff that had carried him more than 6,000 miles became their working vessel on Ebon Atoll. The boat continued in service, repurposed for the ordinary commercial needs of a small island community, carrying cargo and passengers between the islets of the atoll. The physical object that had been the entire world of one man for more than a year became, in the hands of the people who found him, a tool for connecting an island community to itself.