438 Days of Hell: The Story of a Fisherman Who Spent 13 Months in the Ocean with No Hope of Salvation

2024 Author: Richard Flannagan | [email protected]. Last modified: 2023-12-15 23:55

After a whole 13 months of fisherman Jose Alvarenga spent in the ocean - without fresh water, without food, without oars, without hope of salvation, he was finally noticed and rescued. Not everyone believed in his story - no one, except him, survived in such harsh conditions for more than a year. One way or another, it seemed that the torment for the man was finally over, but a year after the rescue, Jose was summoned to court, and it turned out that the story of the fisherman was not over yet.

On January 30, 2014, on one of the islands of the Ebon Atoll in the Pacific Ocean, an unknown man was seen, almost without clothes. The man was pretty overgrown, spoke Spanish and held a knife in his hands. A wooden boat was standing a little to one side on the sand. The locals showed with gestures that they wanted the stranger to lower his weapon. He fell on the sand exhausted and began to repeat his name: "Jose, Jose, Jose."

Of the 700 inhabitants of the island, alas, none of them knew Spanish. Only an anthropology student from Norway, who was doing an internship here, knew a little Italian, so it was not immediately possible to find out the story of the stranger. Jose revealed that his name is Jose Salvador Alvarenga, that he is 37 years old, and that in 2012 he went to sea from the coast of Mexico, was caught in a storm, and has been on his boat in the ocean ever since.

From the island where Jose was found, it was about 10,000 kilometers to the coast of Mexico. People refused to believe that a fisherman alone could survive under the scorching sun for a whole year without food or water. He claimed that he ate fish, turtles (including the blood of turtles), birds and rainwater. And he hid from the scorching sun in a wooden box intended for storing fish.

Jose was sent to the capital of the Marshall Islands, Majuro. A guard was assigned to him. When he asked to call home, he was not allowed. First, the whole story of Jose looked too implausible, especially considering that after a year on the water, he looked too good. Overgrown, sunburned, but not emaciated. Although, in fairness, those who guarded Jose told that all the time on the island and on the way to the capital, he ate everything that was brought to him, and, it seemed, could not get enough.

In a big city, Jose was examined by a doctor - dehydration, partial memory loss, anemia, panic fear of water, but the doctor did not find anything critical in the condition of the fisherman. The doctor doubted the veracity of the man's story, according to him, he remembered how ten years ago a boat with the shipwrecked who had been drifting on the ocean for six months had been nailed to the island, and those people were in such a deplorable state that they had to be carried out on a stretcher.

On the other hand, you cannot compare a fisherman living by fishing in the sea with the victims of a shipwreck. Jose had worked as a fisherman all his life and obviously knew how to fish and how to protect himself from storms.

When Jose was allowed to call home, it turned out that he was not from Mexico, but from El Salvador, and his family had not seen or heard of him for eight years. José's wife and daughter were also at home in El Salvador, and the 14-year-old girl never saw her father, since he left to work in Mexico before she was born.

In the end, we found information about Jose and in Mexico - in one of the villages they said that, in November 2012, two fishermen disappeared there, and Jose (in Mexico he lived under a different name) was indeed one of them, which is true, then it was much larger.

Upon returning home to El Salvador, Jose was given a loud reception with journalists and local officials. The fisherman finally saw his daughter, hugged his mother, who until the last believed all these eight years that her son was alive. Jose could not get to Mexico - he lived there illegally for too long, and now he was forbidden to cross the Mexican border.

For a long time, Jose tried to find a way to talk to the parents of Ezekil Cordoba - the second fisherman with whom he went to sea a year ago. When he finally got hold of their phone and called, Ezekiel's father was delighted. “We talked with Jose for a long time. He told us about the last days of Ezekiel. And he conveyed to us his words - "Mom, dad, I love you very much and I pray for you."

According to Jose, Ezekiel hoped that they were about to be found and therefore refused to eat raw fish. And when he tried to force himself, he felt sick. He often experienced panic attacks and suffered from hallucinations. Once he even tried to deliberately throw himself into the sea when there were sharks nearby. So Ezekiel was able to hold out for only a month after that ill-fated storm - and one day he simply did not wake up.

After a while, Jose was approached by journalist Jonathan Franklin, who, according to the fisherman's stories, wrote the book "438 Days: The Incredible True Story of a Survivor at Sea." And just a few days after the release of the book, Ezekil's parents filed a lawsuit against Jose - they claimed that Jose killed and ate their son, and only because of this he was able to survive himself.

Ezekiel's parents demanded one million dollars in compensation. “I promised Ezekiel two things,” Jose says. "That I will not eat it after his death and that I will tell his mother what happened." The Salvadorian claimed that his friend knew that he would soon die. And when he died, Jose kept the body in the boat for six more days, hoping that they would still be found and it would be possible to bury his friend. And then he had to throw the body overboard.

“Many people think that this book made my client rich,” Jose's lawyer said at the time. “But he’s actually making a lot less money on it than you might imagine.” Jose did not have any evidence for his words, so he had to retell his story over and over again, with all the details. In the end, he was forced to tell his version of events under the control of a lie detector - and only after that the charges were dropped.

“I think it was just pressure from the Ezekiel family, who wanted Jose to share the income from the book with them,” the lawyer commented on the situation.

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