After 438 days, their boat was discovered by villagers in the Marshall Islands. By then Cordoba had died of exhaustion, and Alvarenga survived alone. In an interview with journalist Jonathan Franklin, who later wrote the book “438 Days: the Extraordinary True Story of Survival at Sea,” in which Alvarenga recounted his ordeal.
After the book was published, Cordoba's family filed a $1 million lawsuit accusing Salvador Alvarenga of cannibalism. Alvarenga denied the accusations, successfully passed a lie detector test and claimed that the Cordoba family was trying to get a portion of the proceeds from the book.
Earlier, a ship with Russians on board sank in the Atlantic Ocean. And in the United States, a whale came out of the water and overturned the boat, one person was injured.