On February 28, 1955, news broke that eight crew members of the destroyer "Caldas," belonging to the Colombian Navy, had fallen into the water and disappeared as a result of a storm in the Caribbean Sea. The vessel was traveling from Mobile, United States, where it had undergone repairs, toward the Colombian port of Cartagena, where it arrived without delay two hours after the tragedy. The search for the castaways began immediately, with the collaboration of the United States forces from the Panama Canal, which perform military control duties and other charitable acts in the southern Caribbean. After four days, the search was called off, and the lost sailors were officially declared dead. A week later, however, one of them appeared near death on a deserted beach in northern Colombia, after spending ten days without food or drink on a drifting raft. His name was Luis Alejandro Velasco. This book is the journalistic reconstruction of what he told me, just as it was published a month later by the newspaper El Espectador of Bogotá.