THE CASTAWAYS.(narrative of three Mexican fishermen's 5,000-mile odyssey)

Very early on the morning of October 28, 2005, in the town of San Blas, on the central Pacific Coast of Mexico, five men boarded a small boat. The day started out looking promising: hurricane season was waning, there were few clouds, and the surface of the broad Bay of Matanchen was calm. Three of the men were practiced commercial fishermen who'd been hired by the boat's captain to catch sharks near the Islas Marias, an archipelago sixty miles off-shore. Assuming all went well, they'd be at sea for two, maybe three days.

Nearly ten thousand people live in San Blas. It is one of the oldest ports in Mexico, and its industrial ambitions seem to have peaked during the late nineteenth century. Today, the town might thrive as a destination for tourists--beyond the serious surfers, bird-watchers, and "Lonely Planet" types who've been coming for decades--if it weren't for an inconvenient abundance of jejenes, a maddeningly aggressive species of sand flea. More than half the working population depends upon the ocean for its livelihood. A workweek tends to run seven days and yields a subsistence wage. An estuary a quarter mile wide connects the bay to a turbid cove known as the "U," where most of San Blas's fishing fleet is moored, and where, on a shore littered with old tires and empty motor-oil bottles, mom-and-pop wholesalers in cinder-block sheds with corrugated plastic roofs receive and clean each day's catch. Traffic in the "U" is heaviest around 4 A.M., when the boats venture out, and in the late morning and at dusk, when most return. Small cockpitless fishing boats are generically referred to as pangas, and the typical San Blas panga is a skiff twenty or so feet long, made of fibreglass, with a faded yellow or turquoise paint job. About a third of the boats have hand-lettered numbers on their sides, suggesting that they've been registered with the port officials. That the rest have no numbers, or markings that are no longer legible, is one indication that the authorities barely monitor their comings and goings. The fishermen (they are exclusively men) range from preteens to indeterminate post-middle-age. They wear baseball caps, sun-bleached everything, and plastic sandals. Usually, a San Blas skiff has three benches spanning the gunwales, carries a crew of three, and is propelled by an outboard motor of between forty and a hundred and twenty-five horsepower. At speeds above ten knots, the prow levitates like a seabird struggling to gain altitude.

A fisherman in San Blas, in the course of trying to earn two hundred pesos (about twenty dollars) for a day's work, isn't inclined to make other people's business his own. Although the shark-fishing panga was several feet longer than most local boats, had a draft a few feet deeper, wasn't from San Blas, and was outfitted with twin two-hundred-horsepower motors, it apparently didn't arouse attention. Painted gray, the boat bore no name or number. In the weeks and months after it failed to return, no one came forward who could describe it in detail.

The boat had arrived in San Blas from Mazatlan, a few hours up the coast. Its captain was Juan David Lorenzo, a heavyset man in his mid-thirties who had a background in electronics--in Mazatlan, he ran an Internet cafe and sold computer supplies--and had some experience as a sports an-gler but not much, evidently, as a shark hunter. In San Blas, Lorenzo understood, he could find men who were adept with a cimbra, a laborious-to-deploy-and-retrieve longline that's well suited to shark fishing. Among journeymen fishermen, shark specialists command particular respect, for their skills and courage and, not incidentally, the fact that a shark is among the most valued fish in the sea. Even in a marginal Mexican pueblo, a fisherman who has never met an Asian person, and probably never will, knows that a bowl of shark-fin soup sells in Hong Kong for more than a hundred dollars.

When Lorenzo began inquiring about potential crew members, one name bound to come up was that of Salvador Ordonez, a friendly five-foot-four-inch Oaxacan. Salvador, who was thirty-six, had been a fisherman since the age of nine, when he left home and hitchhiked to the Yucatan, where he found work lobstering in the waters off Cancun--or so he said. At sixteen, he'd begun fishing for sharks in the Sea of Cortez. He settled in San Blas in the mid-nineties and was known for his predilection, after a beer or two, for narrating his exploits as a shark hunter. In turn, Salvador recommended Lucio Rendon, a frequent fishing and drinking partner. Lucio was twenty-seven and lived with his grandmother in El Limon, a hamlet thirteen miles from San Blas. Most of his fishing trips originated from Boca del Asadero, an estuarial port five miles away, a commute he ordinarily made by bicycle over a laughably rocky road. The third man hired was Jesus Vidana, also twenty-seven. Like many fishermen, he often travelled considerable distances to find work. He had a wife and young son in Las Arenitas, a pueblo four hours by bus to the north. Especially during shrimp season, he kept close to home, but in slack periods he would stay for weeks at a time in port towns like San Blas, sending money to his family whenever he had money to send and somebody he knew was headed toward his village.

At dawn on the day of their departure, Salvador, Lucio, and Jesus met Lorenzo's boat at the concrete pier, or muelle, of San Blas. (A famous Mexican pop ballad from the nineties, "En el Muelle de San Blas," mythologizes the true story of a fisherman's wife who lost her mind after her husband was lost at sea.) Already on board was a fifth man, a friend of the captain's, who made it plain that he had no interest in small talk. After introducing himself as El Farsero--rough translation: trickster or joker or, less charitably, someone in-different to truth--he said, "You don't need to know anything more than El Farsero." He was slender, tall, light-skinned, and manifestly not a fisherman. He seemed to be tagging along out of nothing more than curiosity, though his reasons were impossible to discern, because he spoke only to the captain. If he had a sense of humor, he kept it hidden. The three fishermen, for their part, observed the fundamental protocol: it was the captain's boat. They might have the expertise required for the trip to succeed, but the captain called the shots. Whether or not they agreed, they would defer to him. They addressed him as Senor Juan.

At the pier, the panga took on fuel (ten plastic gasoline containers, fifty litres each) and ice for preserving the catch. Its interior was compartmentalized by horizontal dividers: fish here, ice there, gear there. A mile into the bay, it cruised past San Blas's signature totem, a stack of rock sixty feet high that looms like an iceberg and provides a perch for pelicans and blue-footed boobies and a white stone statue of Our Lady of Fatima. A statue of the Virgin of Guadalupe stands atop an islet of boulders a hundred yards away. Each May 13th, fishermen in pangas and shrimp trawlers assemble there for a Mass conducted by the parish priest of San Blas. Believers--Salvador, for one--toss roses and plastic crowns into the water and entreat the saints to protect them at sea.