Dusk stole away the light as Alvarenga arrived on the far side of the Ebon lagoon. He could see people gathered onshore. A crowd of bustling locals elbowed forward to glimpse this mysterious arrival. Four men carried the limp and sunbaked fisherman off the boat and upstairs to the second floor of what Alvarenga took to be a government office building. In the adjacent rooms he saw uniformed men and broadcasting equipment, including powerful walkie-talkie-style radios. “Looks like a police station,” he thought.
A makeshift bed was arranged on the second floor of the building, between the room where Fjeldstad was living and the room where the police kept their gear. Alvarenga could make no sense of his new home. His energy was gone; at best he could walk the ten feet to the bathroom. Fjeldstad gripped his arm but Alvarenga shook loose. His independence and resolve were an intrinsic component of his survival. He could accept the generosity of strangers but survival depended on his own freedom to move.
As Alvarenga lay resting on the floor, islanders brought ramen noodles, coconuts and mosquito coils. Strangers popped into the room, snapped pictures with cell phones and vanished. The mayor’s son was the unofficial interpreter. He had spent entire afternoons of his youth watching Dora the Explorer as she wandered the world, leaving millions of fledgling Spanish speakers in her wake. If Alvarenga had any possibility of bridging the cultural and language gap it was thanks to Dora.
The haphazard communication left Alvarenga baffled. He doubted if he would ever find someone who could fully understand Spanish. He needed urgent medical attention. “I was trying to get painkillers for my back. I wanted something for the pain,” Alvarenga said. “I kept asking for pills, pills, pills! They didn’t understand at all.”
Alvarenga was now camped on the hard, ceramic floor of the Council House, the municipal offices on Ebon Atoll, which sits on the protected inner lagoon and is a sheltered environment, spared the rough waves and huge seas of the open ocean. A single main shipping channel exists for larger boats to enter or leave the port of Ebon, and between the spits of land, small channels form with the ebb and flow of the tides.
The government-owned Air Marshall Islands flies south to Ebon every week from Majuro, population fifty thousand, the Republic’s capital two hundred and fifty miles north across the Pacific. But the runway at Ebon is short, the plane old and the service so irregular that locals jokingly call it Air Maybe. The only telephone on the island runs off a solar panel and a car battery, which means that by noon there’s usually no juice left. A pair of radio operators can patch through government messages and official calls to the world, but the regular islanders of Ebon have little direct communication with the outside world.
The islands of Ebon tend to be tiny, often just a few hundred yards long and flat. The entire chain sits, on average, seven feet above high tide, meaning that since it was settled 3,500 years ago, the natives of Ebon have honed an intimate understanding and respect for the sea. They are accustomed to living aboard boats and with the constant possibility of being caught in a storm and dragged out to sea. Local navigators are some of the most talented on earth. Using a small outrigger sailing canoe known as a walap, the islanders are able to traverse large swaths of the Pacific, including the 2,500-mile journey to Hawaii. Long before the invention of the compass or sextant, navigators from these islands were able to calculate exact coordinates and complete monthlong journeys to reach distant isles. Even today the principal connection among the islands is via small boats. The Marshall Islands are one of the only refuges from Pacific storms in this part of the world. Many sailboats and commercial fishing boats stay moored for months during the raucous winter storm season. This international crowd of “yachties” tends to anchor down in “the Marshalls” as they wait out pounding rainstorms and avoid thirty-foot swells that make even the shortest island-to-island travel extremely hazardous.
“Over the many years I’ve lived in the Marshall Islands, dozens of islanders traveling between atolls in [the nation of] Kiribati have experienced engine problems, lost their way or been blown off course by storms, causing them to drift for weeks or months,” writes Giff Johnson, editor of the local newspaper. “Many, of course, are never again heard from. But quite a few float into the Marshall Islands on small boats, some near death, others in relatively decent health. But they all have incredible stories to tell—which, in all likelihood, are largely true because castaways tend to tell similar survival tales of catching turtles, sharks and birds to stay alive.”
Despite pristine diving, a rich marine life (interspersed with World War II relics) and beaches that look cut from the cover of a travel magazine, few international tourists visit Ebon. A visitor like Alvarenga from Mexico was a once-in-a-lifetime occurrence. Like a trophy fish hauled from the sea, Alvarenga was a curious specimen, an instant public attraction. As he rested on the ceramic floor the first night, surrounded by donated food and Fjeldstad’s sketch pad, a parade of visitors came through. “Everyone was looking, staring, pointing, laughing, really interested,” recalls Fjeldstad. “People on Ebon are naturally pretty curious. They were rushing toward him while he was in a position to not like that.” Alvarenga noticed that the locals chewed a small (betel) nut, and when it was devoid of flavor, spit the remains onto the ground or into a bottle. He gagged when he realized that lost at sea, he had been gathering these same bottles, savoring this very spittle.
Alvarenga began to wonder if he was in jail. The policeman in the building seemed to be stationed not to keep out visitors, as Alvarenga had assumed, but to make sure he didn’t leave. “People came and laughed at me,” Alvarenga said. “They totally cracked up. Kids especially laughed at this hairy thing from the sea. I was skinny and weak and wanted to hide.” Alvarenga was shocked. Why was everyone treating him like a freak show? He appreciated the gifts and there was not the slightest hostility, but what he most wanted was to be left alone, to go back home and return to life as usual.
“There’s a lot of talk these days about a thing called resilience. That’s the in term at the moment,” says Dr. John Leach, a survival psychologist. “You’ve got built-in resilience, so you can bounce back when you get knocked [down] by a survival situation. My argument with that is that if you’ve gone through a survival situation, you’ve gone through a POW camp, or you’ve been taken hostage, or you’ve been through sea survival, you will not be bouncing back to what you were before. You will not be bouncing back to who you were before. Because you won’t be the same person. If you think you are meant to be the same person, you can have problems. You’ve had an experience that has changed you. Coupled with that is that the society, the world you’re coming back to, has certainly changed in their perception of you. They don’t know how to handle you. Normally, most survivors want above all to be treated as normal. But the rest of the world can’t treat them as normal.”
Alvarenga was feeling increasingly stressed. His confused mind was searching for clues that would form into a coherent picture of his predicament. “How am I going to get out of this country? Will I adapt to this system, work for them and become part of the tribe?” Alvarenga dreamed he was trapped for years on Ebon Atoll. In his dream he was an old man. He envisioned his own death on Ebon. The nightmares increased his desire to escape. Alvarenga felt penned up, trapped and suffocating. He was addicted to freedom. Adrift at sea, he had lived without walls. His ceiling a blanket of blinking stars. The moon his calendar. “Without the stars it felt like someone had unplugged the world,” said Alvarenga as he described his first nights indoors. “Even lost at sea, the stars reminded me that everything was okay. Looking at the roof made me uncomfortable.”
“Somebody called on the radio to Majuro to report what had happened,” said Fjeldstad. “That there’s a guy arriving from we don’t know where, but he’s been out for quite some time. They explained that he needed health care.”
The authorities in Majuro didn’t believe the tale. And when the officials in Ebon insisted that the castaway was in poor health, Fjeldstad recounts, “They said, take his blood pressure. We did. It was pretty damn low. But they said, ‘He’ll be fine. We are not coming to get him.’ ” Although a government rescue was not forthcoming, rumors of a castaway began to circulate in Majuro.
Back in Ebon, Fjeldstad was increasingly frustrated by the lack of official help for Alvarenga. He decided to use the only tool available. He took his gripes to the only reporter he knew, Johnson at the Marshall Islands Journal. “I was thinking maybe he could push the government in some way, in the local newspaper,” says Fjeldstad. “Let them know that something happened. But then all of a sudden it exploded worldwide.”
Written by Johnson, the first story went out under the Agence France-Presse (AFP) banner on January 31, 2014, and outlined the remarkable contours of Alvarenga’s story. The story was excitedly read in newsrooms around the world. Reporters in Hawaii, Los Angeles and Australia scrambled to reach the island to interview this alleged castaway. The single phone line on Ebon became a battleground as reporters from around the world tried to coax out tantalizing details from the Norwegian anthropologist. With Fjeldstad’s firsthand reporting, Alvarenga’s story was beginning to take shape. Two fishermen left Mexico. They drifted across the Pacific. Survived by eating raw birds. One man died from extreme hunger. The other survived fourteen months. There were many missing parts but that didn’t stop the press. They filled in what they didn’t know, added glorious details far from the truth and launched a mad rush to sort out a tale both so fantastic and so improbable that it was immediately compared to the fictional movie Life of Pi. But this story was possibly true and perhaps even included cannibalism. The glee evoked by that sinfully dark possibility moved media budgets around the globe.
Alvarenga’s story had enough hard facts to make it plausible: the initial missing person report, the search-and-rescue operation, the correlation of his drift with known ocean current and new details from Ebon suggesting he was extremely weak. A debate erupted in newsrooms and chat boards around the world. Was this the most remarkable survivor since Ernest Shackleton or the biggest fraud since the publication of the fictitious Hitler Diaries? Adding to the confusion, Alvarenga was on a distant isle, shell-shocked and unable to share more than fragmentary details of his alleged expedition.
Ignorant of his growing fame, Alvarenga was going stir crazy after two days cooped up in the Council House. He ached to see a full display of stars. The walls made him anxious. “When are they coming to get me?” he asked. “That was the first time I heard the word Marshalls. I was told a boat from the Marshalls was coming to get me.”
Alvarenga could no longer wait passively; instead he devised a secret plan. He would escape. “I wanted to go to the mountains to be free. I felt like a prisoner,” Alvarenga said. “I started hallucinating that I was stuck in the icebox and really I was stuck in this room.”
But with police and government officials constantly milling around, there was little to do but spend hours with Fjeldstad on the veranda, appreciating the small details of terrestrial life. Fjeldstad recalls, “He was having joyous moments when he would just stare into the atmosphere and sigh happily. We were sitting inside, and children were playing outside, and he was saying, ‘Listen, listen’—in Spanish, of course—he was doing a kind of hand gesture. He was like, ‘Yeah, a child playing!’ ”
Fjeldstad improved the conversations a notch by flipping his phone into Spanish and finding words that Alvarenga would recognize. On his second day ashore Alvarenga began to emerge from his stupor. “He was more mentally aware of his surroundings, and of himself. He was gradually realizing that he was safe. When we told him it was January 2014, he was repeating that to himself. He was shaking his head and saying, ‘A year at sea.’ ”
Having used the moon as his clock, Alvarenga felt lost in the rigid world of solar time. Everything seemed rushed, stressful and arbitrary. He longed for the natural rhythm of sunrise, sunset and the quiet glow of the moon at night. When Fjeldstad left to buy fresh fish and the government officials went off to lunch, Alvarenga saw a chance to escape. “I went down the staircase, down a hall and was headed toward the door. I didn’t look at anyone. I walked calmly. My eyes focused ahead.” His plan was to live in the green hills he could see from his window. There would be food in the woods. And he would be on higher ground, providing at least psychological distance from the ocean. As he neared the main door to the outside world, a few steps from freedom, a policeman stepped forward and blocked Alvarenga’s advance. The officer took him by the arm and escorted him back upstairs. “They were holding me like I was a terrorist or something,” Alvarenga complained. “They gave me a pillow and a bed but also a guard.”
The day after his escape attempt, a national police boat arrived in Ebon to evacuate the befuddled castaway. As Alvarenga was carried toward the patrol boat, nearly the entire 692-person population of Ebon was on hand to gawk and say good-bye. With typical Marshallese modesty, there were more handshakes than hugs. “I was the last one and he was really thanking me, with tears,” says Mayor DeBrum. “I thought he was touched by the love of the people.”
“Alvarenga thought we were there to arrest him. He put his hands together toward me like he was asking if we were going to handcuff him,” says Captain Dennis Jibas, who was in charge of Lomor, the patrol boat. Captain Jibas felt sympathy for the lost fisherman. “The first place I took him was the freezer, asking him if he wanted to eat, and his sign language for yes was a thumbs-up.”
Sleeping in the comfortable and cushioned officer’s quarters, in a room devoid of portholes, Alvarenga was saved the trauma of ocean at eye level. During the rough ocean crossing, Alvarenga stayed belowdecks in a room conveniently located across the hall from the galley. Jibas says, “I personally checked on him and every time I went, he was busy eating: chicken, ribs, salad and rice, ramen, biscuits or anything the duty watch cooked up. This was very surprising to me. I really thought he was going to be seasick.”
After twenty-three hours, Alvarenga noticed a bustle. He looked out the window on the deck and saw a handful of boats at anchor. “Wow! A real port,” he thought. Alvarenga had arrived at Majuro. “Coming alongside our HQ wharf, he showed concerns about the number of people waiting there to see him,” says Captain Jibas. “I don’t think he liked being in crowds.” Who were all these people? Alvarenga sensed that he was again the center of attention, exactly what a restless prisoner planning an escape didn’t need.
Spanish speakers in Majuro were scarce, so when Norman Barth, deputy chief of mission at the United States Embassy, offered his fluent Spanish and volunteered to be translator, the Marshallese were pleased. Barth would be not only a translator but also an interrogator. The press had been speculating about the veracity of Alvarenga’s tale for days; now it was time for officialdom to decide. Was Alvarenga’s story true? What kind of hoax or criminal activity might be lurking behind this unbelievable tale? Was it even possible for a person to drift six thousand miles across the Pacific Ocean and survive to tell about it?
Had they been in Washington, Brussels or Geneva it is unlikely that the Marshall Island officials could have found anyone more qualified than Barth to get to the bottom of this mystery. Although his fluorescent green Hawaiian shirt, baseball hat and khaki pants painted him as a hapless tourist, behind those round-rimmed glasses was a mind honed to detect deception.
Over the course of his US State Department career, Barth conducted more than thirty thousand visa adjudication interviews in Mexico. His job was interviewing visa applicants and separating the scammers from legitimate refugees and legal immigrants. He was not a man easily duped and had spent years interviewing Mexicans. “If he says he’s been drifting for a year, then I think, is this guy an impostor? Is this a hoax? Those are natural questions for a guy like me,” says Barth. “I have seen all kinds of hoaxes and frauds and also all kinds of totally legitimate but incredible stories.”
Barth, US Ambassador Tom Armbruster, a group of Foreign Ministry officials and Damien Jacklick, the director of immigration for the Marshall Islands, all crowded into the tight quarters of the police boat. Alvarenga was overwhelmed. It looked like the prosecutor, judge and jury had all shown up.
Barth, speaking Spanish, decided to go soft on the opening. “I said, ‘Welcome to Majuro. Today is the first day of your rebirth.’ As much as I was hoping that there would be some kind of reaction, there was nothing.” After a few minutes of pleasantries, Barth drilled down on Alvarenga. “There was some confusion. He couldn’t give me his date of birth. He said he was either thirty-six or thirty-seven.” When Barth asked for his full name, Alvarenga was unable to provide exact spelling. He said, “You know, whatever.”
“That was a data point for me,” says Barth. “I thought, I don’t know if this guy can even write. I don’t think he knows how to spell.” Alvarenga could barely keep his eyes focused on Barth, who was giving him the third degree about the spelling of his last name. This was the fourth time he had asked if it was A-L-B-A-R-E-N-G-A or A-L-V-A-R-E-N-G-A. “Fraudsters will often try to play on misspellings and so forth,” says Barth. “That’s one of the reasons I really wanted to get his name spelled properly.”
Alvarenga told Barth he worked in southern Mexico as a shark fisherman for a man named Willy. Alvarenga was unable to give the last name of his boss, the name of the company or any other corroborating details. “I thought, this is your financial basis, whether you catch shark or not? And you’re selling it to this guy Willy for a dollar fifty a kilo? That means you’ve got to get a hundred kilos of shark meat to get $150? More than being on the edge of poverty, he was right on the edge of subsistence. That was another data point.”
“Physically I could tell he was hurting,” says Jacklick, who watched Barth’s interrogation. “It was hard for him to move around. He had problems with his joints; he wasn’t bending his knees much, or his elbows much. I could see him go into this phase were he was reliving the whole situation. It took him a while to come out of it. I knew he was living it again, and picturing the whole thing, and trying to verbally describe it.”
While Alvarenga fell into paranoia about prison and immigration law violations, the stunned officials gathered around the small table on the police boat in Majuro Harbor looked at him with growing awe and deep respect. Rather than arrest him they were more inclined to ask for his autograph or take a selfie with the grizzled survivor. Alvarenga’s tale was so achingly honest that despite the contradictions in dates and details the overall arc was undeniably authentic. It felt like they were hearing history firsthand. It was as if they had been allowed to debrief Shackleton.