Solitude the Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor

By Paul Gray

Three stories dovetail in this small book. One of them involves the ordeal of Luis Alejandro Velasco, a sailor on a Colombian destroyer. He was swept overboard and into the Caribbean, along with seven other crew members, on Feb. 28, 1955, and endured ten days in a life raft before swimming ashore to what would become a hero's welcome. Once the cheering had died down, Velasco offered to sell his account to El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota. A young reporter named Gabriel Garcia Marquez spent some 120 hours interviewing the survivor and shaping his recollections into a first-person narrative. When this appeared in print, serialized in 14 installments, the paper's circulation nearly doubled, and Colombia's military dictatorship grew embarrassed by some of the details, and then angry. Soon the sailor was forced to leave the navy, the offending paper was shut down, and the reporter embarked on an exile that would lead him one day to the Nobel Prize.

These intertwined circumstances make The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor something more than another raid on a successful author's juvenilia. For Garcia Marquez, who would become world famous through his novel One Hundred Years of Solitude, this early effort in journalism provided a lesson in the bizarre effects that telling a tale can have on characters and author alike. His attempt to reconstruct Velasco's experiences as factually as possible assumed a life of its own; the sailor who braved exposure and sharks fell afoul of the words of his story. And words, paradoxically, rescued Velasco's adventure from oblivion. When these pieces first appeared in book form, in Spanish in 1970, Garcia Marquez noted, "I find it depressing that the publishers are not so much interested in the merit of the story as in the name of the author, which, much to my sorrow, is also that of a fashionable writer."

For all its intriguing ambience, the central story, recalled by Velasco through the medium of Garcia Marquez, needs no enhancing; the interest commandeered by catastrophes at sea is at least as old as the Odyssey. After eight months of repairs in Mobile, the destroyer Caldas prepares to sail home to Cartagena. The sailors bid farewell to onshore companions. "Our girlfriends wept," Velasco remembers, "and drank whiskey at a dollar and a half a bottle." This attention to specifics serves him well during what is to follow and gets him into trouble later on. For the Caldas does not run into a storm, as the official Colombian version of the incident will assert. The ship begins listing dangerously in high winds and water; its decks are stacked with washing machines and other appliances from the U.S. that are being illegally ferried to Colombia. As his world begins turning upside down, Velasco expects to hear the order to cut loose the cargo. It never comes. Instead, a wave takes him overboard.

He reaches a raft and decides, Crusoe-like, "to make an inventory of my belongings." These include a wristwatch, some keys, three business cards from a store in Mobile and no food or water. He guesses that he is some 50 miles from his home port and will be rescued in two or three hours, but still worries, "It seemed an extraordinarily long time to be alone at sea." Ten days later, having swallowed seawater and a few pickings of raw fish, he lands with a cargo of extraordinary impressions.

His first awareness of the presence of sharks alarms him hardly at all: "Nothing appears more innocuous than a shark fin. It doesn't look like part of an animal, even less part of a savage beast. It's green and rough, like the bark of a tree." Starving, Velasco manages to capture a small gull: "It's easy to say that after five days of hunger you can eat anything." He cannot stomach the sight of the dead, bleeding bird, torn apart by his own hands. He experiences alternating highs and lows, sometimes throbbing with the will to survive, then praying for an end to his punishment. His "days of solitude" convince him "that it would be harder for me to die than to go on living."

It is difficult to distinguish the contributions of Velasco, who was 20 at the time of his adventure and called Fatso by his crew mates, from those of Garcia Marquez. When the simple sailor remarks upon his "indefatigable desire to live," the presence of the aspiring author who had read his Faulkner and Hemingway seems self-evident. But these literary touches only add zest to an already astounding saga. Those who care about the career of Garcia Marquez will find much of interest here. And so will readers who want to know how it feels to be at the mercy of nature.