Following those eight days without distinguishing anything but waves, foam, and horizon, the men on the canoe felt the palpitation that the captain was lost, so when a boy shouted that he saw an island, his starboard companions stood up like a spring to look, and a few more jumped on them. That’s how the tragedy unfolded.
With the first lights of April 29, a Liberian-flagged oil tanker, the Beskidy, was approaching the Canary Islands on its route from Brazil to Cartagena. It was 7:45 in the morning when they alerted Maritime Rescue from the bridge that they had a half-sunken boat in front of them, about 15 meters long, with people signaling for help.
They were the last nine survivors of the 60 men from Senegal, Mali, and Guinea, mostly in their twenties and teenagers, who had set off on the night of April 17th to 18th from the port of the Senegalese town of M’Bour. They were 110 kilometers away from El Hierro. They had been trying for days to attract the attention of passing merchant ships, the Beskidy being the fourth.
When they were taken out of there shortly after by a Salvamento helicopter, the Helimer 206, they told the Red Cross in El Hierro and also the Police that their 51 travel companions had drowned, and that they had been like that for almost two days, perched on the remains of the canoe. It was longer, actually five days.
What happened to them? The EFE Agency has had access to the testimonies, already with medical discharge and some peace, of one of the entities that work in the search for missing persons on the Atlantic Route. They are A.M., 30 years old; K.N., 28; P.F., 21; Y.A. and M.K., 20; and A.F., C.F., M.C.Y., and B.D., four 17-year-old boys.
All nine are Senegalese, they all worked as fishermen or divers in their country before emigrating to Europe in the only way available to people like them, the canoe. The sea spared the nine, but at a high cost, as they lost friends and a brother.
Fear of being lost
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They agree in their account that, on the day everything happened, many on board were already fearing they had gone astray. From M’Bour to El Hierro, there are 1,500 kilometers of navigation, but eight days at sea should have been enough for them to have at least seen the Canary Islands, at least the tallest of them, or so they thought.
In a canoe, you always have to ration supplies and try not to waste gasoline. Without food, people can last a few days; without water, they slowly fade away or delirium sets in; and, without fuel in open ocean, everyone is lost, unless a miracle intervenes.
Most were immersed in these worries when someone on starboard alerted that they saw an island. The survivors claim they could see El Hierro. They were still far from La Restinga, 110 kilometers away, so it is also possible that the first silhouette that appeared on the horizon to them was the 3,715-meter-high pyramid shape formed by Teide, especially at sunrise.
Whether Tenerife or El Hierro, they didn’t even have time to think about it. When many of the boat’s occupants leaned to starboard propelled by the euphoria of those who shout ¡Boza! believing themselves safe and near their destination, the canoe overturned on that side.
Most drowned in the following minutes. Those who were stiffened by the effect of hardly changing position in eight days sank like stones, while those who could swim tried to reach the boat and cling on, but not all succeeded: many were dragged by those desperately swimming and clinging violently, trying to stay afloat.
The eleven who remained clambered onto the overturned canoe, with the keel exposed to the sun. Their fate was to wait for a miracle without food, water, or engine: everything had sunk in the capsizing.
Only a few hours had passed when a swell or a wrong movement by those who had climbed onto the keel caused the canoe to tilt again. Two more boys drowned in that incident, including the brother of one of the survivors.
The nine who endured were clear: if they wanted to have any chance of surviving that ordeal, however minimal, they had to flip the canoe back to its natural position and trust that it would continue to float even if it filled with water, as it was made of wood.
An Impossible Effort
Three bodies, another shipwreck
Left behind were their travel companions. This time there were no women or children on board, only young men, some still teenagers. The 51 missing have added to the list of victims of this 2024 on the Canarian Route.
The United Nations puts the figure at a minimum of 126 people, but social entities like Walking Borders clearly raise it to over 1,200 lives lost, just from January to March.
The appearance on the 7th, 8th, and 11th of May of three bodies of African men on the coast of La Gomera, two in the north and one in the south, has led some to wonder if they are occupants of that cayuco, especially after learning that autopsies determined they had died about three weeks earlier, at the end of April.
Dozens of migrants are treated by the Canary Islands Emergency teams, at the Port of La Estaca, on January 23, 2023, in El Hierro, Santa Cruz de Tenerife, Tenerife, Canary Islands (Spain). / Europa Press
However, experts on the sea currents in the area from the Oceanography and Global Change Institute of the University of Las Palmas in Gran Canaria consulted by EFE consider it unlikely, almost impossible. The body of a person who drowns so far south of El Hierro would never, or probably never, reach the north of La Gomera and would hardly be washed up in the south of that island.
This only means one thing: most likely at the end of May there was another shipwreck near La Gomera, with no knowledge of who, no knowledge of how many. This time without survivors or witnesses, without anyone to tell what happened and provide certainty and peace to the families.
