What I Am Reading: "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" by Gabriel García Márquez

I’m taking sailing lessons this weekend, and I read this short book to help set the mood. One might not think that a story about a castaway surviving ten days in a raft would set the mood for sailing, and one would be right. A dramatic, large-scale shipwreck would have been preferable.

Mainly, I picked this up because of the identity of the author; but this is not a Gabriel García Márquez novel, it is a piece of longform Gabriel García Márquez journalism from early in his career. It is a first person retelling of the account of Luis Alejandro Velasco, who was swept off a Columbian destroyer at sea and survived ten days in a raft until he drifted to shore (the use of “shipwrecked” in the title is thus misleading). He survived on nothing but a few bites of fish and a strange root that happens to appear at one point. This work, originally serialized in the newspaper Márquez was working at, revealed for the first time that the destroyer was illicitly carrying large contraband items (refrigerators and such), which contributed to the accident. Velasco became a minor celebrity after the incident.

Márquez himself summarizes the book bluntly in his introduction:

“I have not reread this story in fifteen years. It seems worthy of publication, but I have never quite understood the usefulness of publishing it. 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. If it is now published in the form of a book, that is because I agreed without thinking about it very much, and I am not a man to go back on his word.”

(P.S. Longform has a whole section on castaway stories.)