Too often migrants disappear without a trace and witnesses
The voyage from the struggling Senegalese fishing town of Fass Boye to Spain’s Canary Islands, a gateway to the European Union where they hoped to find work, was supposed to take a week.
But the wooden boat carrying 101 men and boys was getting blown further and further away from its destination.
No land was in sight. Yet four men believed — or hallucinated — they could swim to shore. They picked up empty water containers and wooden planks — anything to help them float. And one by one, they leapt.
Dozens more would do the same before disappearing into the ocean. The migrants still in the boat watched as their brothers faded. Those who died onboard were tossed into the ocean until the survivors had no energy left and bodies began accumulating.
On day 36, a Spanish fishing vessel spotted them. It was Aug. 14 and they were 290 kilometers (180 miles) northeast of Cape Verde, the last cluster of islands in the eastern central Atlantic Ocean before the vast nothingness that separates West Africa from the Caribbean.
For 38 men and boys, it was salvation. For the other 63, it was too late.
Big business across the globe caused this. It’s not like these people leave their homes because dying in the ocean is such a good thing to look forward to.
It’s sadly not widely known, but the infamous Somalian pirates also were just fishermen whose claims were illegally overfished by big international fishing vessels. They took matters into their own hands since their state failed and they tried to police their own waters, which got them labelled as pirates. After the fish dried out, and they were pirates either way, that’s how their way of life started.
And now these people face extinction through climate change.