The book that resulted from the eventual cooperation is called 438 Days: An Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea. It was published by Simon and Schuster on November 17, 2015 — exactly three years to the day after Alvarenga had departed Costa Azul. The timing was presumably deliberate.
Franklin addressed, in the book and in subsequent interviews, the question of how to write about an experience that no outside person witnessed. The answer he arrived at was not to claim verification he did not have but to present Alvarenga’s account as precisely that — an account, attributed to the man who lived it, examined against such corroborations as exist. The distinction between “what Alvarenga said happened” and “what independently happened” is maintained throughout the book, at least in Franklin’s own characterization of his approach.
This is the correct approach for a story of this kind, and it is worth underscoring why. The alternative approaches are both worse. The approach of treating Alvarenga’s account as established fact collapses the distinction between testimony and verified event and implicitly claims a certainty that does not exist. The approach of treating the account with such suspicion that the story can barely be told fails to represent what the corroborating evidence actually does establish and does a disservice to an account that has more support than most comparable survival stories.
The careful middle path — here is what he said, here is what we can independently confirm, here is what we cannot — serves the reader and serves the truth. It is also, it should be said, the more interesting approach, because it preserves the complexity of a situation in which a man’s testimony is the primary record of something real that happened and that we cannot fully verify.