The voyage at sea was supposed to take a week. But the boat carrying 101 men and boys was getting blown further and further away from its destination.
FASS BOYE, Senegal (AP) — The voyage from the struggling Senegalese fishing town of Fass Boye to Spain’s Canary Islands, a gateway to the
“They tied him up,” Dieye says. “He was the first to die.”
Into their third week, they ran out of water. There was nothing left but the ocean. Those who tried to quench their thirst with saltwater died. Those who took only tiny sips survived. The hunger tortured them as much as the thirst.
“Sometimes I sat at the ledge of the pirogue,” Bathie Gaye, a 31-year-old survivor from Diogo Sur Mer, Senegal, recalls, “so if I died, I wouldn’t have to tire the others — they could just push me over.”
Fernando Ncula, a 22-year-old from Guinea-Bissau, was one of only two foreigners on board. His friend succumbed to thirst and hunger around day 25, Ncula recalls.
When he opened his eyes the next morning, his friend’s body was gone. Others had thrown it in the ocean. He was the only outsider left, and became terrified he would be thrown overboard, too.
“Why are you not tired like the rest of us?” Ncula remembers being interrogated. They tied him up.
Unable to move, and without food or water, he fell in and out of consciousness for two days. Finally, an older man took pity on him and cut him loose. His savior later died, too.
Death seemed inevitable; waiting for it was unbearable. As they reached the one-month mark, people started to jump in a desperate attempt to swim to safety, or perhaps to put themselves out of misery. Thirty men and boys died that way, survivors say.
Two nights after the last men jumped, lights appeared in the sky. It was the Zillarri, a Belize-flagged, Spanish-owned tuna fishing support vessel.
“They were so skinny. I saw their eyes and teeth and only bones,” Abdou Aziz Niang, a Senegalese mechanic working on the ship, remembers. “How long have you been here?” he asked them.
It had been 36 days. Now these men — who were fleeing for Europe because industrial overfishing had made their livelihoods untenable — were being rescued by a European fishing vessel.
Finally, the ship received instructions: Take the rescued people to the closest port, Palmeira, on the island of Sal in Cape Verde, 290 kilometers (180 miles) away.
They were alive, yes. But at what cost? Relatives had invested in their journey to Europe, selling possessions to pay for their trip, hoping the young men would get jobs and send money back home. Instead, they would return with empty hands and terrible news.
Without jobs, the survivors are back where they started. They are still looking for ways out — even if that means gambling their lives again.
Among them is Boye. Boarding another boat could leave his wife a widow and his two children fatherless. But “when you have no work,” he says, “it’s better to leave and try your luck.”
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