On February 28, 1955, the destroyer Caldas, which was traveling from the United States to Colombia, suffered an accident. In order to rescue the shipwrecked, the American forces of the Panama Canal searched the area near the wreck. After four days of searching, they found no survivors and the search was abandoned. A week later, Luis Alejandro Velasco appeared, who after spending ten days adrift in the waters of the Caribbean, managed to reach land. With this book, Gabriel García M?rquez discovered himself as a narrator. However, the original intention was to write a report about a man who spent ten days adrift on a raft rocked by the Caribbean Sea. The future Nobel Prize winner for literature and then young reporter García M?rquez heard the story of the events from the mouth of its protagonist, and transformed it, perhaps unintentionally, into a prodigious literary exercise, a concise and vigorous narrative in which the pulse of a great writer beats. The serial publication of the report in El Espectador de Bogotá caused considerable political uproar --the existence of illegal smuggling on a Colombian Navy ship was revealed, which cost the lives of seven sailors and the more fortunate shipwreck of Velasco-- and exile for its author, who found himself forced to start a new life. ENGLISH DESCRIPTION The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor is a work of non-fiction by Colombian writer Gabriel García Márquez. The novel is about a shipwrecked sailor "Velasques" who struggles for ten days to reach the coast. In 1955, Garcia Marquez was working for El Espectador, a newspaper in Bogota, when in February of that year eight crew members of the Caldas, a Colombian destroyer, were washed overboard and disappeared. Ten days later one of them turned up, barely alive, on a deserted beach in northern Colombia. This book, which originally appeared as a series of newspaper articles, is Garcia Marquez's account of that sailor's order.