On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Columbia. In 1955, eight crew members of Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were swept overboard. Velasco alone survived, drifting on a raft for ten days without food or water. Marquez retells the survivors amazing tale of endurance, from his loneliness and thirst to his determination to survive. "The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor" was Marquezs first major, and controversial, work, published in a Colombian newspaper, "El Espectador", in 1955 and then in book form in 1970. "A master storyteller." Daily Mail "The story of Velasco on his raft, his battle with sharks over a succelent fish, his hallucinations, his capture of a seagull which he was unable to eat, his subsequent droll rescue, has all the grip of archetypal myth. reads like an epic." Independent