The devastated family of a teenager who drowned in front of his schoolmates while on the trip of a lifetime have paid tribute to those who selflessly risked their own lives to try and save him.

Matthew Hitchman, 17, died on August 6 last year in Ecuador while white water rafting with classmates from the Royal Grammar School as part of an expedition organised by High Wycombe-based tour agency World Challenge.

The teenager – who had been due to collect his AS-Level results just weeks later – was thrown out of the inflatable raft along with expedition leader, Ian Ridley, when their boat got jammed in some rocks.

The boys had spent the day white water rafting on the Jondachi and Hollin Rivers near Tena and were just approaching the last set of rapids when the boat Matthew was on got stuck in rocks, throwing him and Mr Ridley into the water.

His friends Finn Andrews and Oliver Hall, as well as their guide, Gabriel Garbin and a fellow passenger, Wiktor Suvander, all jumped in to try and save Matthew when they saw him submerged under the water, flailing his arms for help.

Despite their attempts - which saw them presented with bravery awards - Matthew’s foot was stuck in rocks and although they used ropes to try and get him out, he sadly died.

His body was not able to be recovered by specialist rescue teams until the next day.

At an inquest into his death on Wednesday afternoon, Matthew’s father thanked those who jumped into the rapids to try and rescue him.

He said: “Matthew would have been 18 in June and was very much looking forward to university and new, exciting times in his adult life.

“We are all still devastated that he was taken so young. We are always thinking of him and his smile lives on in our minds.

“The inquest has brought back the horror of the accident but we want to take this opportunity to say thank you to all the people who have given us support, particularly the school.

“We would like to pay tribute to all those who so heroically tried to save Matthew, even putting their own lives at risk.”

His devastated friend, Callum Hart, described how they had all felt “happy and confident” until the tragic accident happened.

He said: “There wasn’t a moment where I felt unsafe. They told us what to do if we fell in, they told us how to stay safe.

“When Matt fell in, he was motionless for around five seconds then he started waving his hands in the air. That’s when I knew something was wrong.

“Gabriel acted immediately, he was putting in tremendous effort to rescue him. Oliver and Finn also jumped in to try and save him but they couldn’t.

“I stayed in the boat and started signalling that there was danger. The next phase was a blur. I was just watching helplessly. Gabriel asked for a rope – he asked us to pull the rope but with no success.

“Then I saw Matt’s foot come up floating, lifeless and blue. I knew then I had lost my friend.”

Mr Suvander said Mr Garbin, who was a guide with company River People, had told the group a landslide and flood have “changed the flow of the river” around 10 days before and the group would take the left-hand side of the rapids because it was safer.

Describing how he tried to help Matthew, he said: “I tried to grab him but I got taken away by the current. I got picked up by another boat and I didn’t know what to say except that someone had got stuck. There was nothing I could do except hope that someone could get him loose.

“Too long a time had passed and I realised they still hadn’t got him loose. At this point I was certain it wasn’t possible to survive. I started to cry and I almost threw up.”

Lieutenant Colonel John Adams, who flew to Ecuador as an independent investigator into the accident, said rivers are graded one to six for safety, with six being the most severe. The Hollin River, where Matthew had died, was rated as a three, despite the previous landslide, meaning there was no safety reasons that the boats could not have gone out that day.

Mr Ridley told the inquest every expedition leader is issued with a satellite phone but that day he had left it at the River People office so it did not get wet.

He said: “We had no means to keep it waterproof. But from previous experience of using a satellite phone, you can wait for 15 to 20 minutes for it to acquire a signal.”

Senior coroner for Bucks, Crispin Butler, said that emergency services may have been able to get to the scene quicker had the satellite phone been present, but it may not necessarily have changed the outcome because the people closest to Matthew had struggled to save him.

Recording a conclusion of misadventure, Mr Butler said it was a “tragic coincidence of the boat coming into that particular position in the proximity of the rocks and the specific position Matthew tragically found himself in that he couldn’t extricate himself from” that led to his death.