RIO HATO, Panama » A Panamanian man and his two friends had been drifting for 16 days in an open fishing boat in the Pacific Ocean when they saw a huge white ship. They would be saved, they thought, and Adrian Vasquez began waving a dark red sweater.

Bird-watchers with powerful spotting scopes on the promenade deck of the luxury cruise ship Star Princess saw a little boat adrift miles away. They told ship staff about the man desperately waving a red cloth.

The cruise ship didn’t stop, and the fishing boat drifted another two weeks before it was found. By then Vasquez’s two friends had died.

"I said, ‘God will not forgive them,’" Vasquez said. "Today I still feel rage when I remember."

On Thursday, Princess Cruises, based in Santa Clarita, Calif., said a preliminary investigation showed that passengers’ reports that they had spotted a boat in distress never made it to Capt. Edward Perrin or the officer on duty.

If it did, the company said, the captain and crew would have altered course to rescue the men, just as the cruise line has done more than 30 times in the last 10 years. The company expressed sympathy for the men and their families.

On Feb. 24 the three men set out for a day of fishing from Rio Hato, the site of a former U.S. Army base guarding the Panama Canal on the Pacific Coast. They were on their way back, happy with their catch, when the motor died.

Vasquez recalled seeing the ship — "It was big. It was white." — on the morning of March 10.

Vasquez remembered jumping up and waving the sweater. He raised it over his head, dropped it down to his knees, over and over and over. Though near death, Elvis Oropeza Betancourt, 31, joined in, waving an orange life jacket.

"We felt happy because we thought they were coming to rescue us," Vasquez said.

Bird-watcher Jeff Gilligan from Portland, Ore., was the first to spot the boat.

When Judy Meredith of Bend, Ore., looked through her scope, she could plainly see it was a small open boat, like the kinds they had seen off Ecuador. And she could see a man waving what looked like a dark red T-shirt.

"You don’t wave a shirt like that just to be friendly," Meredith said. "He was desperate to get our attention."

Barred from going to the bridge herself to notify the ship’s officers, Meredith said she told a Princess Cruises sales representative what they had seen, and he assured her he passed the news on to crew.

The bird-watchers said they even put the representative on one of the spotting scopes so he could see for himself.

Meredith went to her cabin and noted their coordinates from a TV feed from the ship, booted up her laptop and emailed the U.S. Coast Guard what she had seen. She said she hoped someone would get the message and help.

But nothing happened. The ship kept going. And the little boat with the waving men disappeared.

"We were kind of freaking out, thinking we don’t see anything else happening," Meredith said.

"It was very disturbing," Gilligan said. "We asked other people, ‘What do you think we should do?’ Their reaction was, ‘Well, you’ve done what you could do.’ Whether something else could have been done, that’s a bit frustrating to think about."

Oropeza, along with Fernando Osario, died. Vasquez was picked up by a fishing boat off Ecuador’s Galapagos Islands, more than 600 miles from where they had set out.

Princess Cruises said in an email that the investigation was continuing.