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by Gabriel Garcia Marquez
1986, Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 106 pages

On Feb. 28, 1955, a windy gale swept eight sailors over the side of a Columbian Navy destroyer and into the Caribbean Sea. Seven of those sailors drowned that day, but 20-year-old Luis Alejandro Velasco managed to fling himself aboard a small life raft, which became his temporary home on the surface of a vast and desolate sea. When he washed up on the northern Columbian shore 10 days later, he was weak, emaciated and blistered by the sun, having eaten nothing but a couple of bites of raw fish and a mysterious root, and having drunk only a few swallows of salty seawater. But he was alive. The account he later relayed to Gabriel Garcia Marquez, then a young newspaper reporter in Bogotá, offered thousands of eager and curious readers a taste of what it is like to be lost and alone at sea.   

But just as interesting as Velasco’s miraculous tale of survival is the story behind the story. Originally published as a series of 14 daily installments in the El Espectador newspaper, Marquez wrote the story from Velasco’s first person perspective and did not attach his own name to it until some 15 years later. He had spent upwards of 120 hours interviewing Velasco, who had walked into the newsroom with an offer to sell his story to reporters.

Marquez provided a full and lucid account of each grueling day at sea, and the public gobbled up each delicious morsel. The newspaper set new sales records, and many readers scrambled to collect and save all 14 installments of the shipwreck story.

However, there was a backlash. Velasco’s story revealed that the Navy destroyer had been transporting illegal cargo from Mobile, Alabama, including contraband refrigerators, television sets and washing machines. The Columbian government vehemently denied this accusation, but the paper managed to dig up photos provided by other sailors, some of which clearly showed boxes of contraband onboard the ship. The oppressive regime reacted by shutting down the paper months later, and Marquez eventually fled into exile.

Only in 1970, after Marquez had established himself as a world famous novelist, was “The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor” published in book form. It would be another 16 years before it was translated from Spanish into English.

Reading the book today gives fans of Marquez an early sample of his fluid writing, before anyone outside of Bogotá knew his name. He demonstrated the same stunningly lush and eloquent style in “Shipwrecked” as he later brandished in master works like “100 Years of Solitude,” “Autumn of the Patriarch” and “Love in the Time of Cholera,” sprinkling the text with wisps of wisdom that have the effect of fluent brush strokes.

“You have to have spent the night at sea, sitting in a life raft and looking at your watch, to know that the night is immeasurably longer than the day,” Marquez wrote of Velasco’s first morning in the raft.

Velasco provided Marquez with ample material to exhibit his linguistic skills. The sailor watched several of his friends drown as the turbid sea thwarted his futile efforts to rescue them. He spent the next several hours scanning the horizon for rescue planes, and although several would fly overhead during the next couple of days, none of them spotted him, much to Velasco’s despair and frustration. Completely at the mercy of the sea, he resigned himself to a cold night alone in an unfamiliar world.

“The first thing I felt, plunged into darkness so thick I could no longer see the palm of my hand, was that I wouldn’t be able to overcome the terror,” Marquez wrote.

In the days that followed, Velasco would be forced to fend off hungry sharks that arrived punctually beside his raft each day at 5 p.m. A gradually building and increasingly intolerable thirst seared his throat. The sun burned his flesh until skin peeled away in large flakes and blood oozed from the porous flesh. Hallucinations of shipmates plagued his mind. At one point, a gale stirred up massive waves that twice flipped his raft, nearly drowning him. (The storm did not, however, produce a single drop of rain to ease his thirst.)

But, whenever Velasco seemed on the verge of deserting all hope and resigning himself to a lonesome death, some tiny shred of solace would appear to him—a group of seagulls or a lazy turtle—anything that might suggest the proximity of land. These sparse and minute comforts carried him to salvation, awakening his will to live and guiding him to shore, so that he could share his story with the world.