SAN SALVADOR, El Salvador — A fisherman who says he drifted at sea for more than a year, surviving on raw fish, turtles and bird blood, is in stunningly good health but psychologically fragile, medical experts said Wednesday as he recuperated in a hospital in his native El Salvador.
Jose Salvador Alvarenga, 37, told doctors he came close to giving up hope of being rescued after several large ships came near his small fishing boat but none tried to rescue him, even though sailors on at least one even waved at him.
“They passed close by, he asked them for help and they didn’t want to provide it,” said El Salvador’s minister of public health, Maria Isabel Rodriguez. “There was one that almost destroyed his little boat because it came so close, but nobody helped him.”
Although he was close to despair, “his desire to live was greater, he thought of his family and said that he wanted to live,” Rodriguez said.
All of the doctors who have seen Alvarenga expressed concern about his mental state, saying he appeared shaken and he asked to be given as much privacy as possible amid an international media furor over his apparent ordeal.
Alvarenga underwent a battery of tests after returning home from the Marshall Islands, where he showed up after what he has described as 6,500-mile journey from Mexico across the Pacific that began when his small fishing boat was thrown off course by bad weather.
The medical team that examined him at the San Rafael hospital in the Salvadoran capital said he was in remarkably good physical health, with no skin lesions from overexposure to the sun and no cardiovascular or kidney issues. His only physical problem, doctors said, was a case of anemia.
“All of the exams have been basically close to normal. It’s incredible,” Rodriguez said.
She and other Salvadoran experts who looked at Alvarenga’s results said they had no doubt about the veracity of his tale, which left many skeptical even in the absence of an alternate explanation for his sudden appearance on the Marshall Islands’ Ebon atoll.
“I don’t think there’s any reason to doubt him,” hospital director Yeerles Ramirez told reporters.
