Book: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

Author: Gabriel García Márquez
Publisher:

This story is the true account of a man’s instinctive struggle for survival. Written by the well-renowned Gabriel García Márquez and published originally in 1970 in Spanish under the title of Relato de un náufrago by Tusquets Editores, Barcelona. The translation I happened to read is by Randolph Hogan.

Luis Alejandro Velasco, a young sailor and one of the crew members of the destroyer Caldas, of the Colombian navy experienced a shipwreck (1955) and Luis happened to be the only man who survived. This book is a ‘journalistic reconstruction’ of what he told García, from the time he had in Mobile, Alabama, to his watching his shipmates die, to his very last minutes aboard the Caldas, and as his shipmates drowned in the Caribbean, when this is only the beginning of a greater horror. The days and nights that he spent in the Caribbean alone in the raft reveal the psychological vulnerability of man in such infernal situations. Thirst, hunger and most importantly survival in the sense of saving oneself from the creatures that one dare won’t mess with leads one to that primordial state where all he is governed by is the instinct. As for this man, he keeps oscillating between hopefulness and hopelessness; not being able to give up all hope or any hope for that matter. At one time, he could clearly imagine an old friend of his from the navy on his fourth night at sea, alone.

“ This is the moment, I thought. And in fact it seemed to be the most dreadful moment of all, the one the instructor had described to us: when you lash yourself to the raft. There is an instant in which you feel neither thirst nor hunger, in which you don’t even feel the relentless bite of the sun on your blistered skin. You don’t think. You have no sense of what your feelings are. But still you don’t lose hope.”

He finally catches a sea gull after almost five days of hunger, which he eventually is unable to eat. And his encounters with the sharks and his hope of reaching land on witnessing an old dark sea gull soon disappears and he is disillusioned, in the raft, hoping to die.

After having survived ten days without food and water, he finally reaches land and that land happens to be his own country, Colombia. García has expressed through his prose as lucid and vivid an account as seems possible, yet the great thing and perhaps also the most terrifying about the story is that it’s true.

“ I did nothing heroic. All my effort went toward saving myself. But since salvation came wrapped in a glow and with the title of hero as a prize, like a bonbon with a surprise inside it, I had no choice but to accept my salvation as it came, heroism and all.”