https://arab.news/6y8xu
NOUAKCHOTT: Around 6:30 a.m. on May 28, 2021, a couple of miles from Belle Garden Beach on the Caribbean island of Tobago, a narrow white-and-blue boat drifted onto the horizon. As it wobbled back and forth, fish gathered, feeding on the barnacles that had grown below the surface.
From a distance, it seemed no one was aboard. But as fishermen approached, they smelled death.
Inside were the decomposing bodies of more than a dozen Black men. No one knew where they were from, what brought them there, why they were aboard — and how or why they died. No one knew their names.
What is clear now, but wasn’t then, is this: 135 days earlier, 43 people were believed to have left a port city across the ocean in Africa. They were trying to reach Spain’s Canary Islands, off Africa’s north-west coast.
They never arrived. Instead, they ended up here, on the other side of the Atlantic. Half a world away, their families were looking for them.
The vessel that reached Tobago was registered in Mauritania, a large and mostly deserted country in northwest Africa nearly 4,800 km away. Evidence found on the boat — and its style and color as a typical Mauritanian “pirogue” — suggested the dead were likely African migrants who were trying to reach Europe but got lost in the Atlantic.
In 2021, at least seven boats appearing to be from northwest Africa washed up in the Caribbean and in Brazil. All carried dead bodies.
These “ghost boats” — and likely many others that have vanished — are in part an unintended result of years of efforts and billions of dollars spent by Europe to stop crossings on the Mediterranean Sea.
An investigation found that 43 young men from Mauritania, Mali, Senegal and possibly other West African nations boarded the boat.
They departed the Mauritanian port city of Nouadhibou in the middle of the night between Jan. 12 and 13, 2021. Clothing and DNA testing confirmed the identity of one of the bodies, bringing closure to one family and opening the way for others to seek the same.
On the morning of May 28, 2021, Lance Biggart got a call from one of his fellow fishermen. A strange boat had appeared.
The 49-year-old Tobago native quickly reached his colleagues aboard his small but speedy boat, the Big Thunder. Dozens of fishermen joined him at the scene, filming the pirogue with their smartphones. Some continued fishing shiny mahi-mahi that had gathered around the corpses, life circling around death.
Biggart remembers being puzzled by how the boat could have survived Atlantic swells.
“A wave came, and the boat rocked so, so badly,” he recalls.
One of the dead men sat by the bow. The fishermen and police wondered if he was the last to die, moving away from the rest of the dead in the bottom of the boat.
Biggart and his colleague were asked by the coast guard to tow the pirogue back to shore. A tractor pulled the boat out of the water.
Men in white overalls carefully removed 14 bodies, three skulls and other large bones one by one, placing the remains in 15 bags. Some victims were missing limbs or heads. The sun had mummified some parts, while the salt and water at the bottom of the boat had left others putrid.
Recovered from the boat were clothing, 1,000 West African CFA francs (under $2) and a few euros. Police also found half a dozen corroded cellphones with SIM cards from Mali and Mauritania. Tobago’s Cyber Crime Unit extracted a contact list from one of the SIMs.
Police in Trinidad and Tobago passed the numbers on to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs, which reached out several times to the government of Mauritania. They never got an answer, they said. Mauritania’s Foreign Ministry did not respond to phone calls or repeated requests for comment by email from the AP.
In the weeks that followed, customers stopped buying Biggart’s fish, fearing the dead were victims of some sort of sorcery. Others made unfounded speculations: Were they Ebola victims whose bodies had been thrown in the boat and set adrift?
As a man of the sea himself, Biggart felt responsible. “I have a friend who went to sea and never came back.”