Goes fishing, ends up adrift for 438 days, survives, and on return faces accusations of cannibalism

Salvador Alvarenga set out on his boat with the intention of spending the day fishing. It was November 2012, and he went to sea with Ezequiel Córdoba, a 22-year-old who had just started as his apprentice. But within a few hours, the engine on their boat gave out. A relentless storm dragged them out to sea. He didn’t return to land for 438 days.

He recently recounted his story on the podcast Tenía la duda (I had a doubt, in English), by Podimo, where he relived a tale that sounds more like a castaway novel than a real-life account. “It was a mistake to go out that day, but I just wanted to fish,” he admits. From that point on, it was a fight to stay alive: he caught fish and birds as best he could and drank his own urine to avoid dehydration, according to RAC1. This tragic story, which ultimately led to the death of Córdoba, was covered by the Huffington Post.

Córdoba eventually stopped eating, stopped drinking, and gradually faded away.

“Hunger consumed him. He died in my arms,” Alvarenga recounted, his voice still trembling. For more than a week, he lived with the boy’s body. He didn’t know what to do. “I talked to him even after he died. I needed him to keep from going insane,” he confesses. When he couldn’t take it any longer, he let the body go into the sea.

More than a year lost in the middle of the ocean

After the death of Córdoba, the days passed without change for Alvarenga.

Water everywhere and no sign of land. Until one day, something started to smell different. The water tasted less salty, the birds were more abundant, and the waves seemed to move differently. “I thought it was a mirage,” he recalls. But no. Through the fog, the silhouette of an island appeared. With the little strength he had left, he rowed to the shore of Ebon Atoll in the Marshall Islands. There, two people found him, in a terrible state, disoriented, covered in wounds, and with a beard that spoke for itself. They alerted the authorities.

His story spread around the world, but not everyone believed it. Some accused him of cannibalism, claiming he had eaten his companion to survive and that the timelines didn’t add up. No evidence was found to support these claims. The fact that he appeared alive, more than 10,000 kilometers from the starting point, further reinforced his version.

Alvarenga says that what saved him was not physical strength, but his mind. “The old fishermen always told me that the sea can destroy you, but it can also make you strong if you don’t give up. And I didn’t give up.” He even learned to carefully track the behavior of birds, explaining that “when I saw them flying in circles, I knew land wasn’t far.”

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