Twenty-eight of the forty-three men who left by cayuco on December 15 from Nouadhibou (Mauritania) to the Canary Islandsprobably towards The irondied of thirst, hunger and cold in the Atlantic in the following two weeks after they lost their way when their GPS navigator broke.
In immigration files, each boat has a number that identifies it. It is assigned by the Police. The fixation with the numbers of the institutions involved in assisting migrants is striking. who risk their lives on the Canary Route: it goes beyond how many leave or how many arrive, it reaches up to the last farewell.
Among the most recent tombstones placed in 2023 in the cemeteries of El Hierro, where the bodies that did reach land in the year with the most deaths in memory on the Route rest, It is easy to find inscriptions such as ‘crew member 1’, ‘immigrant K 2’, ‘immigrant F01’ or, simply, ‘F-08’ and ‘J-15’along with a date.
Probably Abdoulaye, Sacko, Kasa, Mamadou, Yakary, Bacary, Kebe and their companions may not know it, but the cayuco they survived is also a number for the bureaucracy, ‘boat 115 bis’, which occupies position 606 among the 610 registered throughout the year in the Canary Islands; 115 only in El Hierro.
Behind these figures are the stories of the men who were on board the canoe, most of them young people from Mali. Several of them were teenagers, almost children, and many came from the city of Kayes and the villages surrounding it, which is facilitating the identification of the missing, because almost all of them knew each other.
Its tragedy is not unique, it has been repeated many times in the Atlantic. It is not even in those final days of 2023, since almost at the same time that they left Nuatchok (Mauritania) another 60 people who were never heard from again, but it illustrates well what happens to the dozens of boats and cayucos that disappear every year in the Atlantic with all their crew on board without leaving a trace, as United Nations reports describe.
This is a reconstruction of what happened to them, made from Maritime Rescue reports, from the testimonies given by the survivors in their first hours on land and also a few weeks later, in the humanitarian center in the north of Tenerife where they were welcomed, as well as the details provided by the families to the NGOs that collaborate in their identification.
A catamaran in the Atlantic
At 1:40 p.m. on December 30, the lives of Abdoulaye, Bacary and the others intersected 315 kilometers southwest of El Hierro with those of the crew of a tourist sailboat.
It was the Knot Working catamaran, from Soul Sail, a German company that organizes pleasure trips from Europe to the Caribbean (among other places) at about 3,000 euros per head, almost the same as what hundreds of young Africans pay for a spot on a boat. patera (United Nations, UNODC report on the Atlantic Route 2022).
The alert issued by the catamaran’s sailors stated that they had in sight a drifting canoe with a dozen very weak people and three bodies (five, it was later discovered). The distance to land was such and the reports were so worrying that Salvamento Marítimo decided to mobilize its two helicopters in the Canary Islands, Helimer 206 and 204, with instructions to refuel first in El Hierro in order to last as long as possible in flight.
206 arrived first, which picked up at 5:46 p.m. the eight migrants in the worst apparent condition, six adults and two minors, brothers. Half an hour later, number 204 was placed on the canoe and the other seven were evacuated, including two minors.
The fifteen received their first medical attention at the El Hierro airport, where it was found that they presented symptoms of hypothermia and, above all, dehydration, in two of the cases severe: one was admitted to the Valverde Hospital and another was referred to the La Candelaria Hospital, in Santa Cruz de Tenerife.
They were also disoriented, so much so that in those first moments they gave different numbers of the days they had been at sea. Some said fifteen, others at least 20. They did report that many of their companions had died on the journey, but they could not offer clear figures either: their first testimonies showed a range of victims between 30 and 40.
To the distress of the families who telephoned from Mali and France, for a few days the doubt remained as to which of the canoes lost at that time it was, because the figures also fit with the group of 60 from Nouakchott. However, after reviewing all the testimonies, both the Red Cross and the NGO Caminando Fronteras are clear that it is the Nouadhibou canoe, which left with 43 occupants, all men. And the death toll amounts to 28.
The GPS breakdown
The survivors have not specified where they were going, although it was probably to El Hierro, due to its position. The westernmost of the Canary Islands For a long time, it was only an accidental destination for migrants leaving for the Canary Islands, the last chance for those left adrift before being lost in the Atlantic.
However, since last September, the majority of the cayucos have set course straight to El Hierro, whether they leave from Senegal (1,400 kilometers) or from Mauritania (760 km), because that route allows them to quickly get away from the coast and avoid being intercepted by maritime patrol vessels, even though it is more dangerous.
The navigator played a trick on the occupants of cayuco 115 bis. He broke down in the first days of the crossing, when they no longer had any visual reference to return, nor were they close enough to the Canary Islands to see the 3,715 meters of the Teidethe highest elevation in the entire Atlantic.
Since when they left they had carried water and gasoline for only five days, which usually takes a journey from Nouadhibou to the Canary Islands, since December 20 their situation became desperate, as the survivors have reported. With nothing to drink, they also ran out of fuel, at the mercy of the currents and wind that push them westward, further and further from land and shipping routes.
In the following ten days, 23 people died, most of them from thirst, in a process that accelerated the temptation to drink sea water. Those who went out in this way, little by little, were thrown into the sea by their fellow travelers as long as their strength held out (five bodies were left limp at the bottom of the canoe, as witnessed by an aerial photo that EFE publishes with this report).
Others fell into the water and were unable to return aboard. The survivors have not wanted to go into details in their testimonies, but the history of the Canary Route shows that some people decide to end their lives like this because they can no longer bear the agony of being lost for days in the ocean and others throw themselves into the ocean. delirium caused by dehydration, sometimes believing he saw land.
Thirst and drift
In the five bodies recovered on January 3 by Guardamar Urania, still in the cayuco to be buried in Tenerife, the traces of dehydration were clearly visible. They were five boys between 18 and 30 years old, who expired in the 48 hours prior to the encounter with the catamaran, according to the autopsies. They were only still on board because their companions no longer had the energy to push them into the water.
Without a certain reference to when and where they ran out of gas, it is not known how far they were able to drift.
However, in the rescue file there are some details that allow us to guess what they experienced: the canoe was dragged 118 kilometers to the southwest in just five days, from the point where the catamaran sighted them on December 30 (25º 36.87N 020º 13.23W), to the place where Guardamar Urania found the canoe with the bodies again on January 3 (25º 06.0N 021º 15.0W).
And this, despite the fact that at some point they were so aware of their situation that they threw a floating anchor overboard to slow down the drift, as seen in the Salvamento photo.
