Short And Interesting Story Of Survival

• Date: 18.11.2008
• Book: Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
• Author: plappen

Review

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 1986


In February 1955, a destroyer of the Colombian Navy, the Caldas, was traveling through the Caribbean on its way back to Colombia. It had spent the previous six months in Mobile, Alabama for repairs. A couple of hours away from port, eight members of the crew were swept overboard (the official reason was because of a storm). As soon as the ship reached port, a diligent search was undertaken for the missing crewmen, which was called off four days later, without success. A week later, a man washed up on a beach in northern Colombia. His name was Luis Alejandro Velasco, a member of the Caldas crew. This is his story.

In the immediate aftermath of the incident, Velasco was the only one to reach a lifeboat. The current prevented him from reaching his shipmates, one of whom was just a few feet away, and he watched as they slipped under the water, never to return. He had no food or water, and with no land in sight, he had no idea in which direction he was traveling. In the first couple of days, he saw a search plane overhead, but it was too high to see him. As the days went on, his skin broke out in blisters, because of the constant exposure to the sun. Every day, at around 5 PM, he was visited by a group of sharks looking for dinner. He watched as they engaged in a feeding frenzy just a few feet away from him, whenever a school of fish got too close. He had started to hallucinate, so he wasn’t sure if that was actually land he was seeing in front of him. The current was carrying him toward some cliffs, so he jumped out of the lifeboat, and managed to swim the last couple of kilometers to land.

Upon his rescue and recovery, he immediately became a national hero. He was kept away from the public, and allowed to speak only to pro-government journalists (at that time, Colombia was under a military government). He made a small fortune as a product endorser, and was enjoying his 15 minutes of fame. Weeks later, he walked into the offices of a national newspaper, where Marquez was a journalist, looking to tell the whole story (until then, only bits and pieces of the story were known). It ran as a 14-part series, and was a national sensation. Things got difficult for the government when it was revealed that a) the Caldas was carrying cargo, which b) so overloaded the ship that it was unable to turn around and go back to look for the missing crewmen, and c) the cargo was contraband (like stoves and refrigerators); all of which were absolutely illegal under Colombian law.

I really liked reading this true story. It’s short and an interesting read, and it’s a very good tale of human survival under horrendous conditions. Well worth it.