No One Writes to the Colonel (12 page)

‘A gripping tale of survival’
The Times

‘On February 22 we were told that we would be returning to Colombia …’

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. Márquez retells the survivor’s amazing tale of endurance, from his loneliness and thirst to his determination to survive.

The Story of a Shipwrecked Sailor
was Márquez’s first major, and controversial, work, published in a Colombian newspaper, 
El Espectador
, in 1955 and then in book form in 1970.

‘The story of Velasco on his raft, his battle with sharks
over a succulent 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

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First published in Spanish as
El Coronel No Tiene Quien le Escriba
This translation first published in the United States of America by Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1968 and in Great Britain by Jonathan Cape 1971
First published in Penguin Books 1974
This edition published 2014

English translation copyright © Harper & Row, Publishers, Inc., 1968
All rights reserved

Copyright © Gabriel García Márquez, 1970
English translation copyright © Alfred A. Knopf Inc., 1986

Cover © Thomas Hoepker / Magnum Photos

All rights reserved

The moral right of the author has been asserted

ISBN: 978-0-141-91731-3