It was morning on the idyllic Ebon Atoll, and husband and wife Russel and Emi were
busy processing the coconuts they dried for work when they were disturbed by frantic shouting.
They hurried down to the beach, where they found a skinny man with a thick,
unkempt beard and long hair, dragging himself through the crashing surf.
To say the discovery was a surprise would be one of the biggest understatements in
all of human history. Ebon Atoll is part of the Marshall Islands,
a name that will be familiar to regular viewers, as it cropped up in my video
on Amelia Earhart as one of the possible final resting places of the famous Aviatrix.
If you've seen that video, you may remember that the Marshal
Islands are one of the most difficult to reach places on earth - so remote that
the US tested no fewer than 67 nuclear bombs there after the Second World War.
When you live somewhere like Ebon Atoll, unexpected visitors are pretty bloody rare.
At first, Russel and Emi assumed the stranger had fallen off a passing cargo ship.
The truth, they would later discover, was far, far stranger.
The man spoke only Spanish, and with no common languages between them Russel and Emi took a
boat ride to Ebon Atoll's main town in search of help. Over the course of the following few days,
the strange man who'd emerged from the sea like a hairy Ursula Andrews began to tell his story.
And what a tall tale it turned out to be. The man, whose name was José Salvador Alvarenga,
claimed to have gotten lost in a storm while fishing off the coast of the Mexican state
of Chiapas on the 17th of November, 2012, and had been drifting ever since in the 23-foot skiff that
was still bouncing around in the surf nearby. Considering the fact it was now early 2014,
if Alvarenga was telling the truth he’d be lost at sea on a tiny boat for a staggering 438 days.
It was an absurd claim, and to begin with most who heard it were understandably sceptical.
How could such a tiny boat have possibly survived the journey in one piece? How
had Alvarenga found enough food and water to sustain himself,
and why hadn't he died of scurvy within a matter of months without access to fruit and vegetables?
The scruffy Mexican had a plausible enough answer to every question thrown at him,
but serious doubts remained - after all, what he was claiming simply didn't seem possible.
The story soon went viral, and over the following few days Alvarenga was grilled on every aspect
of it. The authorities remained so convinced he was lying that he was subjected to a polygraph.
Military survival specialists and civilian adventurers were asked to
review Alvarenga's descriptions of life at sea, and an oceanographer
was recruited to run computer simulations on Pacific ocean currents to map the most
likely route a small vessel cast adrift off the Mexican coast would have taken.
But try as they might, nobody seemed able to pick any holes in Alvarenga's incredible tale.
The survival experts supported his stories of how he overcame the sea’s many challenges;
the adventurers agreed his experience of life on the open Pacific Ocean matched their own;
and the oceanographer's simulations predicted Alvarenga's skiff would
have passed within 130 miles of Ebon Atoll.
Eventually, someone managed to get hold of Alvarenga's boss back in Mexico, and he quickly
confirmed that an employee by the name of José Salvador Alvarenga had indeed gone missing on
the 17th of November 2012 in a boat matching the registration of the one now moored off Ebon Atoll.
Putting all these puzzle pieces together, the world's press was forced to publish this most
improbable piece - José Salvador Alvarenga was telling the truth.
Rewind just over 14 months and a much rounder, less hairy Jose Alvarenga was about to embark
on a two day fishing trip. As far as he was concerned it was a day like any other,
and little did he know, as he stepped off the dock and into his boat, he’d spend well over a year,
endlessly afloat. The only minor inconvenience was that his longtime fishing partner had pulled
out of the trip at the last minute, meaning a replacement had to be found.
That unfortunate soul was 23-year old Ezequiel Córdoba.
The two men had never worked together before - in fact, they'd hadn't even met. Of course,
they would soon have more than enough time to get to know each other.
The trip got off to the perfect start,
and before long the pair had landed a bumper catch - almost 500 kilograms of
fresh fish. You could say it was all going swimmingly... but then the weather changed.
Picture a particularly dramatic scene from 'A Perfect Storm,' only replace the Andrea
Gail with a tiny boat one third the size and with one tenth of the equipment. Alvarenga
and Córdoba were sodden to their skins as wave after wave, rammed and slammed their
solitary skiff., - threatening to swallow up the men, the boat and their precious catch.
Speaking of the catch - half a metric ton of tuna, mahimahi, and various species of shark is the last
thing you want sloshing around your tiny deck in the middle of one of the worst storms in years.
Fearing the careening catch could cause them to capsize, Alvarenga made the difficult decision to
dump the lot overboard. Considering the fact the two men would soon be on the verge of starvation,
I can only assume that decision haunted him for a very long time indeed.
The storm raged for a full 5 days, and its relentless waves wrecked the boat’s engine and
trashed every single piece of electronic equipment on board. Crucially, that included both the GPS
and the two-way radio. Alvarenga had managed to fire off an SOS call to his boss on shore before
the radio died, but with no way of pinpointing their position it didn't help all that much.
A large search and rescue operation was launched to try and track them down, but the conditions
were still incredibly challenging, and the 23 foot skiff - with no sails, no structures
on the deck, and no lights of any kind - was essentially invisible amid the towering waves.
After two days of searching, the rescue was called off, and the men were presumed dead.
Back in the skiff, Alvarenga and Córdoba passed the rest of the storm huddled
inside the now empty icebox that had recently housed their catch.
When they emerged, cold, exhausted, and smelling absolutely awful 5 days later,
they had no clue where they were, and the horizon consisted of solid seawater in every direction.
In the cold light of day, the two men took stock of their situation,
quickly coming to the conclusion that they were, to put it mildly, fucked.
They'd dumped all their food and had barely any water, their fishing gear had been swallowed
by the ravenous waves, and everything that required electricity to function was frazzled.
The most pressing concern was the water situation. A human being can go a surprisingly long time
without food - Scotsman Angus Barbieri survived a frankly preposterous 382 days consuming only
coffee, tea, and vitamins back in the 60s, though this before and after picture should
give you some idea as to how he did it - he lost 125 kilograms during the course of what is the
longest fast in history. Surviving without water, on the other hand, is another matter
entirely - the world record for that one goes to an Austrian bricklayer called Andreas Mihavecz,
who was somehow locked in a prison cell and forgotten about in 1979. He was left there
for 18 days before someone found him by accident. Miraculously, he went on to make a full recovery.
Anyway, Alvarenga and Cordoba set up a rain harvesting system using a bucket
that had somehow survived the storm, and they improved the setup incrementally
over time with bottles and scraps of plastic they scavenged from the ocean.
With the fishing gear gone and days without anything to eat leaving the men desperate,
Alvarenga got creative, developing a method of catching fish with his bare hands. Almost
anything that floats out on the open ocean will attract a few piscine visitors sooner or later,
and Alvarenga would hang over the side of the skiff with his hands dangling in the
water until an unsuspecting fish swam between them. He would then flip the hapless creature
into the boat with a flick of his wrists, and their still-wriggling dinner was served.
To supplement this gourmet sashimi diet, the two men also caught seabirds and turtles that
ventured too close to the boat. These animals came in particularly handy when
the water supply was running low after a long period without rain - drinking bird
and turtle blood can’t have been easy, but it’s just about better than dying of thirst.
All that animal meat had another benefit too - it contained vitamin C,
and eaten in relatively high quantities it just about staved off the ravages of scurvy.
When food was plentiful, the two men dried the fish and meat in the
sun on the side of the boat, but when times were
desperate they swallowed whatever they could get their hands on Gollum-style.
And it was this habit of necessity that brought about the journey's great tragedy.
After consuming a meal of raw seabird, Córdoba fell quite suddenly ill,
and it soon became clear why. Inside the bird's stomach was the half-eaten
remains of a poisonous sea snake. Cordoba survived the incident, but he was never
quite the same again. He started refusing food entirely, and in his already weakened
state his condition quickly deteriorated. 4 months into the journey, he passed away.
Alvarenga was understandably devastated. The two men had grown close during their ordeal,
and with Cordoba's death Alvarenga had not only lost a friend, he'd lost his link to humanity.
The previous 4 months had been one long battle against the elements,
against starvation and dehydration, and against the constant fear that the fish would wise up or
the rain would stay away a few days too long. But with the passing of Ezequiel Córdoba,
Alvarenga found himself facing off against another, far deadlier enemy - total isolation.
The prospect of being alone in that desperate situation was so terrible that at first,
Alvarenga simply couldn't face it. He kept Córdoba’s body with him in the boat,
chatting away with his young friend as if he were still alive. For six full days he chatted to the
corpse, whilst nature took its course - until he suddenly realised, he was losing his mind.
The two men had come to an agreement that should one of them die, the other wouldn't
eat the body. So Alvarenga said a few quiet words of farewell to his former friend, then
rolled him solemnly overboard. He wouldn't set eyes on another human being for close to a year.
Of course, the oceans aren't *entirely* empty, and Alvarenga frequently saw ships passing by
on the horizon. Shipping containers mostly, colossal floating mini cities that traverse
some of the most remote parts of our planet's 139 million square miles of ocean. But despite being
some of the biggest vessels in existence, container ships invariably have very small
crews - usually no more than 20-30 people - so eyes on the ocean are limited. Alvarenga's tiny
skiff was little more than a speck amongst the endless waves, and he was never spotted.
It's impossible to imagine what he must have gone through as those long
months ambled by. We live in an age where people won't even sit on the toilet for 5
minutes without their mobile phones for fear of being subjected to the tyranny of boredom. Jose
Salvador Alvarenga spent 10 months alone in a tiny boat with absolutely *nothing.*
And yet, despite the hardships and the dangers and against all the odds,
he clung to life day after day, month after month.
And then, one morning, his slumber was stirred by something strange - a flock of birds circling
overhead. Seabirds weren't a particularly uncommon sight for Alvarenga - he'd murdered his fair share
over the previous 14 months after all. But these weren't like any seabirds he'd come to know,
in the past year or so. And there was a good reason for that - they *weren't seabirds.*
Alvarenga scrambled to his feet, and there, in the distance, he saw it - land. The skiff drifted
over the coral barrier that surrounded what he would later learn was Ebon Atoll, and he dived
head first into the water. Minutes later, the waves tossed his battered body onto the beach.
As bad as things had been for Jose Salvador Alvarenga - and make no mistake,
they had been impossibly, unfathomably bad - that moment, falling onto the beach and feeling the
sand between his fingers must have been one of the most exquisite ever experienced by a human being.
For the first time in more than a year, his feet were firmly on dry land...
Ebon Atoll is a rough circle comprising 22 separate islands,
and the one Alvarenga happened to have landed on - Tile Islet - was smaller than a football
pitch and entirely uninhabited. But only a few metres separate it from Eninaitok to the north,
and it was there that Russel and Emi heard his cries, bringing our story full circle.
It feels a bit ridiculous to call Jose Alvarenga lucky, but it's worth pointing out that Ebon Atoll
is the only land for at least 100 miles in any direction. It's one of the most remote places on
the planet, and if his path had been just a few miles to the north or south he'd have drifted
clean past it. The next stop would likely have been the Philippines more than 3000 miles away.
It's difficult to sum up a story like Alvarenga's. It's one of those things that the human brain just
isn't capable of comprehending, like the size of the universe or the price of beer in London.
Put simply, Jose Salvador Alvarenga's 438 days at sea represent one of the
most remarkable journeys - and feats of survival - ever endured by a human being.
Thanks for watching.