Salvador Alvarenga currently holds the record as the world’s longest surviving castaway, having been lost at sea for a treacherous 438 days. That’s 15 months of being marooned, floating around in the ocean, not knowing if you’ll ever make it back to dry land alive.
The 36-year-old fisherman from El Salvador is now being for $1 million over an act that probably haunts his dreams every night (if it is true). And when I say probably I mean that there’s zero doubt in my mind that the act of survival he’s being sued $1 million for is something that he thinks about a hundred times a day.
Salvador Alvarenga, 36, is the only man known to have survived for over a year at sea.
And when he set sail from the coast of Mexico in November 2012, he thought he was setting out on a two-day fishing trip, having paid 22-year-old Ezequiel Cordoba $50 to accompany him.
But a vicious storm with 10ft waves knocked out the 25ft boat’s communication systems, and washed their supplies overboard.
He suffered hallucinations and tried to throw himself overboard, where sharks were circling. The pair survived for several months by catching fish and birds, and drinking turtle blood and rainwater. But one bird they ate made Cordoba severely sick, and they found a yellow poisonous sea snake inside its stomach.
Cordoba proved to be less resilient than the older man, refusing to eat some of the stomach-churning raw meat that kept Mr Alvarenga alive. He eventually died, extracting promises from Mr Alvarenga not to eat his corpse, and to find Cordoba’s mother and tell her what happened.
Mr Alvarenga befriended the corpse, keeping it on the boat for six days and chatting to it, until he realised his own insanity and threw it overboard.
“I could see my death was going to be very, very slow,” he said.
But against all odds, he survived. Mr Alvarenga washed up in the Marshall Islands, in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, in January 2014. Dazed and emaciated, he was found by a couple living on the island who took him in.
Drinking turtle blood? Who thinks to drink turtle blood, seriously? If I was lost at sea for a thousand days I’d still never think to drink turtle’s blood. That’s some heads up survival thinking right there. Now for the why of the $1 million lawsuit the family of the deceased has filed:
In the end he had to throw him into the sea.
“In the middle of the ocean he had no way of knowing the day, and did not have a calendar, but he believes it was around March and so that is how we shall remember him.”
In January this year Mr Perlera, his previous lawyer, sued him for $1 million after Mr Alvarenga signed a book deal and switched firms.
And now Cordoba’s family have also begun $1 million legal action, accusing Mr Alvarenga of eating their relative.
So the guy survives the most outrageous ordeal imaginable. Lost at sea for 15 months, his friend dies and he’s become so senile he chills with the corpse for several days. Then that family finds out this guy’s inked a book deal that’ll recount the worst experience imaginable and they want in on that money.
Does the family truly believe that after Salvador Alvarenga discovered his shipmate was dying from eating a bird with a poisonous sea snake in its belly that the other guy would think ‘you know, I should eat this human being even though his veins are coursing with the same poison that’s killing him’. While I do think that family deserves some of the royalties from the book I don’t think they’re going about this in the right way at all. (h/t The Inertia via The Telegraph)