42 pages • 1 hour read
Gabriel García MárquezThe Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
Nonfiction | Biography | Adult | Published in 1955A modern alternative to SparkNotes and CliffsNotes, SuperSummary offers high-quality Study Guides with detailed chapter summaries and analysis of major themes, characters, and more.
Key Figures
Gabriel García Márquez
Gabriel García Márquez (1927-2014) was born in Aracataca, Colombia. He went to school in Bogotá before attending the Universidad Nacional de Colombia to study law. It was during this time that he began an earnest interest in writing. Eventually, however, political strife in Bogotá forced his transfer to the university in Cartagena, where he began his work in journalism that would eventually lead him back to Bogotá and working for El Espectador. In 1955, at the time of writing the series of articles that would comprise The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor two decades later, the 27-year-old Marquez was relatively unknown; it was Velasco’s story that launched Marquez’s writing career and clinched his journalistic authority.
Márquez later became a renowned novelist with works such as One Hundred Years of Solitude (1967), The Autumn of the Patriarch (1975), and Love in the Time of Cholera (1985). Márquez was politically active most of his life and was able to use his literary fame to facilitate negotiations between the Colombian government and the guerrillas of the M-19 movement. His writing is known for incorporating a mixture of realism and magical realism, and solitude and violence (in the form of civil strife) are among his major recurrent themes. In 1982, he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.
Luis Alejandro Velasco
Luis Alejandro Velasco is the main character/narrator of the story. As the story opens, he is a young man in his twenties serving aboard the Colombian destroyer Caldas that has been docked in Mobile, Alabama for eight months for a refit. On the way back to the port city of Cartagena, Colombia, the Caldas becomes overbalanced with its hefty burden of contraband; Velasco is the only survivor of the eight who are tossed overboard. After arriving home, he is treated as a celebrity, and his story—a story censored by the Colombian government to omit details of contraband and naval incompetence—is told in multiple venues.
There is much more to the story even after the book ends. After Velasco turned to the newspaper, El Espectador, to provide an uncensored account of his survival, the new account indirectly revealed the corruption and incompetence of the Colombian Navy. The government took its revenge; El Espectador was shut down, and Velasco was expelled from the Navy and retreated into obscurity. Thus concludes Marquez’s full title for the book: The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor: Who Drifted on a Liferaft for Ten Days Without Food or Water, Was Proclaimed a National Hero, Kissed by Beauty Queens, Made Rich Through Publicity, and Then Spurned by the Government and Forgotten for All Time. Marquez wrote of Velasco that “Life has left him the serene aura of a hero who had the courage to dynamite his own statue” (ix).
Velasco passed away from cancer at age 66. His last wish was to have his ashes scattered over the same sea he survived as a shipwrecked sailor.
Velasco’s Shipmates: Luis Rengifo, Ramón Herrera, Jaime Manjarrés
The loss of his shipmates is the first tragedy Velasco undergoes in his ordeal as a shipwrecked sailor, their deaths an initiation into the unfolding trauma. The journalistic context of the writing is distinctly apparent in the narrative’s omission of Velasco’s dismay; a newspaper article would have demanded brevity, necessitating focus on details of survival instead of grief. However, Velasco’s eventual hallucinations of his shipmates evince their importance to him.
Luis Rengifo is one of these shipmates, whom Velasco describes as “a complete seaman” (8). Rengifo received a civil engineering degree in the US and speaks English fluently. He has a saying that Velasco is fond of quoting: “The day I’m sick […] the sea will get sick” (9). Though he is the strongest swimmer among the crew, Rengifo drowns only two meters away from Velasco’s outstretched oar after they are washed overboard by a large wave. He dies with Ramón Herrera, Miguel Ortega, Julio Amador Caraballo, Jaime Martínez Diago, Eduardo Castillo, among three others left unmentioned. On Velasco’s first night stranded out at sea, he has a hallucination of Rengifo’s voice calling out to him.
Herrera is one of Velasco’s friends aboard the Caldas. One of the significant memories that foster Velasco’s will to survive involves standing on a bridge with friends while Herrera impersonated Daniel Santos, a popular Puerto Rican musician at the time. The memory makes Velasco feel “less lonely,” ultimately weaving into the book’s larger theme of hope.
Jaime is Velasco’s oldest friend in the navy. Though he is mentioned less than some of the others, Velasco also hallucinates his presence. Velasco states in Chapter 6 that “I saw him [Jaime] every night” (44). Thus, Jaime, though a hallucination, provides Velasco with an unquantifiable amount of morale and support during his ordeal at sea.
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By Gabriel García Márquez
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