Castaway survives 13 months adrift
Print Edition
A CASTAWAY who says he survived 13 months adrift in the Pacific said yesterday he thought about suicide but was sustained by dreams of eating his favorite food — tortillas — and reuniting with his family.
Fisherman Jose Salvador Alvarenga also described being forced to dump the body of his teenage companion overboard when he starved to death, but said his own strong religious faith helped as he drifted some 12,500 kilometers from Mexico to the Marshall Islands.
“I didn’t want to die of starvation,” he said through a Spanish interpreter at Majuro Hospital, where he is recuperating after being found disoriented last Thursday at a remote coral atoll.
“There were times I would think about killing myself, but I was scared to do it,” he added, raising his arm, pointing to heaven and declaring: “God! Faith!”
The stockily built Alvarenga, sporting a bushy beard and with his hair bleached a ginger color by the sun, looked in remarkably good physical shape when he arrived in the Marshalls capital Majuro five days after landing on the remote Ebon Atoll.
Speaking from hospital, Alvarenga said he would dream of eating all his favorite foods as he drifted across the Pacific.
“But then I woke up and all I see is the sun, sky and the sea,” he said. “My dream for over a year is to eat a tortilla, chicken and so many other types of food.
“I would imagine and dream a lot about my family — my mother and my father,” he said. Alvarenga said he was not married but has a daughter named Fatima.
Alvarenga said he set out on a one-day fishing expedition in late December 2012 with a teenager named Xiguel, when they became lost in their 7-meter fiberglass boat.
The 37-year-old’s mood darkened as he described how the boy, who he says was aged 15-18, died four months into their voyage, unable to survive on a diet of raw bird flesh, turtle blood and his own urine. “He couldn’t keep the raw food down and he kept vomiting,” Alvarenga said. “I tried to get him to hold his nose and eat but he kept vomiting.”
He said the teenager died of starvation and he pushed his body into the ocean. “What else could I do?”
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