Castaway: two Pacific islanders, a screaming naked fisherman and three omelettes
Coconut farmers describe for the first time the moment when Jose Alvarenga regained contact with humankind after drifting 6,500 miles across the ocean from Mexico – and the meal they cooked him
The two coconut farmers had just finished tending the trees on their tiny and otherwise unpopulated tiny Pacific island when they were startled by what sounded like shouts.
Intrigued, the husband and wife stepped outside their palm hut and were confronted by the extraordinary sight of a naked white man stumbling across the neighbouring speck of land, clutching a knife and screaming wildly in a foreign language.
It was the moment when Jose Salvador Alvarenga, a castaway who had apparently been at sea for more than 14 months, finally regained contact with humankind in one of the most remote spots on the planet.
Amy Libokmeto and Russell Laikedrik who found the castaway (Jonathan Pearlman)
Amy Libokmeto, 38, and Russell Laikedrik, 49, described that remarkable encounter for the first time in an exclusive interview with The Telegraph.
Despite his savage appearance and his knife, the figure they were faced by was weak and shaking and the couple immediately realised that he must have washed ashore.
But they could never have dreamt that the man with the wild hair and unkempt beard was a 37-year-old shark fisherman who had not seen land since drifting 6,500 miles across the Pacific from Mexico.
“We saw a man, naked, screaming,” said Ms Libokmeto, speaking from the only telephone on Ebon atoll, the southernmost tip of the Marshall Islands. “We knew he wasn’t a local because of the colour of his skin and hair. He was limping and swaying at every step.
“The other island is so close that we could see his face and he was rocking left to right and about to collapse. I thought he maybe fell overboard from a ship and swam ashore.”
The couple made their way across the shallow strip of coral and urged him by sign language to drop the knife. Exhausted, he collapsed into the sand.
The two helped the stranger to his feet and walked him towards their home, but he stopped to clasp his hands together and give thanks to God in what they would later learn was Spanish.
Despite the tropical heat, the man was shivering and clearly incredibly weak. They brought him a T-shirt and shorts, gave him water and made a fire to warm him.
Mr Laikedrik began to cook pancakes. “From my perspective he looked like he was starving,” his wife said. “When we were feeding him, he was not satisfied with one pancake. Then we gave him another and another. We gave him three pancakes.”
During that first meal, Mr Alvarenga tried to explain to the couple how he had arrived. “He showed with sign language that he came in with a boat. He pointed to the ocean side of the island. We knew what he was saying and I told my husband to go and find his boat.”
When the castaway’s strength had recovered, she and her husband took him by boat to the main island in the atoll. A Norwegian researcher used the only solar-powered phone to alert authorities in Majuro, the capital of the Pacific country of 60,000, and from there the first word of his incredible story was relayed to a disbelieving world.
The remarkable tale of survival and endurance is so outlandish that it prompted inevitable scepticism, yet there seems to be no other explanation that is not even more implausible.
With a true-life plot line that veers between Cast Away, starring Tom Hanks, and Life of Pi, the fantasy adventure of an Indian boy stranded on a lifeboat for 227 days with a Bengal tiger after a shipwreck, it is tailor-made for the Hollywood treatment.
Mr Alvarenga’s incredible voyage began from Costa Azul, an isolated collection of shacks at the end of a dusty track on the coast of Mexico near the border with Guatemala.
From his string hammock, stretched between two posts and covered by an awning of thatched palm leaves, he fell asleep on his last night there to the sound of the Pacific lapping gently a few yards away.
He had spent the evening in usual fashion, knocking back tequilas in a makeshift beach bar with his fellow fishermen. Then he grabbed a few hours of slumber before heading out the next morning to catch blacktip sharks with a new young shipmate, whom he knew only by his first name, Ezekiel.
The supposed boat of castaway Jose Salvador Alvarenga (AFP)
The supposed boat of castaway Jose Salvador Alvarenga (AFP)
They were supposed to go out for a day, but they never came back. With his boat’s engine wiped out by a storm, Mr Alvarenga had drifted across the vast expanse of the ocean, surviving on turtles, fish and seabirds caught with his bare hands. He ate their flesh raw for food; he drank their blood when there was no rain, and his own urine when there was no blood. He also saw his shipmate die.
Mr Alvarenga comes from poor rural El Salvador, but more than a decade ago he had left behind his wife and baby daughter – after a bar-room brawl and threats of revenge, according to some reports – and headed for the United States in search of work.
He made it no further than Costa Azul where his new friends gave him the affectionate nickname “La Chancha” (“The Pig”) because of his burly physique. He learned the ways of the sea and soon became one of the best fishermen among them.
That expertise was to be crucial for him, as were those extra pounds. The fishermen of Costa Azul verified much of the account given by Mr Alvarenga after he was ferried to Majuro from Ebon. Several hours into his fateful fishing trip, he and Ezekiel had landed a decent haul – about 1,500 pesos (£70) worth of shark – when they were engulfed in a storm and their 75hp motor died.
Mr Alvarenga radioed for help. “He said the engine had broken on the boat and he sounded desperate,” recalled Hector Arebalo Castellonos, who was monitoring communications. Another fisherman recalled Mr Alvarenga cursing the broken engine over the radio. They were the last words his friends heard from him.
His was one of three boats lost at sea that day.
Jose Salvador Alvarenga at a press conference in Majuro (AFP)
Jose Salvador Alvarenga at a press conference in Majuro (AFP)
Mr Alvarenga and Ezekiel both survived the storm, but drifted westwards into the empty expanse of the Pacific. “We threw that first catch of shark overboard,” he recalled. “They were starting to stink, but soon I was cursing myself.”
They caught turtles, fish and birds as day merged into day, with nothing to see but endless water, no distraction, no apparent hope. About four months into their journey, Ezekiel, weakened and depressed, lost hope and simply refused to eat.
“There was enough food, but he wouldn’t eat it,” said Mr Alvarenga . “He was getting skinnier and skinnier. He just sat on the other side of the boat and decided to pass away.”
After slipping the body of his deceased shipmate into the sea, he contemplated taking his own life – a memory that he recalled by drawing his hand across his throat in a slicing motion.
“But I couldn’t feel the desire, I didn’t want to feel the pain. I didn’t want to starve myself. I didn’t want to cry for myself. I would rather cry for God.”
And so he mustered the courage to survive, armed only with a knife, as the fishing gear had all been lost in the storm. For the following nine months, he saw no sign of land. He did spot other boats, and frantically waved his arms at them, but none of them noticed him.
Though the sea was generally placid, he experienced a two-day storm during which waves crashed across the boat and filled it with water. It was the only time he thought he would die.
“I did not feel any pain in the boat – only when there was no water to drink,” he said. “I would start to imagine water. I knew that I could not drink it from the ocean. Whenever I got really hungry and thirsty a bird would come.
“And I dreamed vividly, about my parents, about bread, about fruit, about playing football,” he added wistfully.
Then just after he had finished a particularly vicious battle with a seagull and was drinking its blood, he spotted trees on what turned out to be Ebon atoll.
“I cried, 'Oh God’. I got to land and had a mountain of sleep. In the morning I woke up and heard a rooster and saw chickens and saw a small house. I saw two locals screaming and yelling at me.”
They of course turned out to be Ms Libokmeto and Mr Laikedrik.
As the news of his reappearance spread so did the immediate doubts about his account. His condition and strength surprised local doctors, who are used to treating fishermen who drift ashore after weeks or even months at sea.
Survivors are typically, though not always, emaciated and fragile, but Mr Alvarenga’s only serious pain was in his joints and his skin was not too cracked or burned. His account sometimes appeared unclear and he mixed up details, such as the date of his departure from Mexico and his age and that of Ezekiel.
Ezekiel Cordoba (Nina Lakhani)
Ezekiel Cordoba (Nina Lakhani)
Such confusion is unsurprising for someone who spent more than a year adrift at sea, much of the time alone. But Ezekiel Cordoba’s family would certainly like some clarity.
When The Telegraph visited them, they had just learnt his fate. His grandmother Dominga Mendoza sobbed inconsolably. His three brothers, also fishermen, said they did not blame La Chancha, but wanted him to come and explain. “We just want an explanation about what happened to our brother’s body and why he refused to eat the raw turtles and fish,” said Romeo Cordoba.
Mr Alvarenga’s own personal life, meanwhile, has turned out to be complicated. When the media tracked down his family in El Salvador, they discovered his estranged wife and Fatima, a 13-year-old daughter with no memory of the reputedly hard-drinking father who left when she was a baby.
His parents were elated to receive a phone call from the son they had not seen for years. “It is a divine miracle,” said Maria Julia Alvarenga, his mother. “We will make him a big meal, but we won’t feed him fish because he must be bored of that.”
But Fatima was more reticent when she spoke to her father for the first time in her life, even having to tell him her age. “I will be happy to see him, but it will be awkward because I have never spent time with him,” she said later.
A cousin said that Mr Alvarenga had moved away to escape a feud after he was stabbed, punched and kicked in a late-night fight. Mr Alvarenga, meanwhile, told friends in Mexico he had fought in a guerrilla army in El Salvador, giving him the survival skills they believe saved his life.
Officials in both Mexico and El Salvador have said they plan to issue passports to allow Mr Alvarenga to head back across the Pacific, by air this time.
But for now he is going nowhere, as his health has deteriorated.
After fighting thirst for more than a year, he is struggling to drink sufficient water and is being rehydrated by intravenous drip.
When he finally does reach home, Jose Alvarenga will have an incredible story to tell friends and family.
Fishermen are of course famous for their tall stories. But nobody who knows him believes that this is another one of those.
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