Around 6.30:28 a.m. on May 2021, XNUMX, a few miles from Bel Garden Beach on the Caribbean island of Tobago, a narrow white and blue boat appeared on the horizon. As he rocked, the fish gathered, plucking the shells that grew on his sides below the surface.
From a distance it seemed that no one was there. But when the fishermen got closer, they smelled death.
In the boat were the decomposing bodies of more than ten black men. No one knew where they were from, what brought them there, why they were in the boat, and how or why they died. No one knew their names.
What is clear now, but was not then, is this: 135 days earlier, 43 people were believed to have left the port city across the ocean in Africa. They tried to reach the Spanish Canary Islands, off the northwest coast of Africa, by boat.
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.
For nearly two years, The Associated Press has been piecing together puzzle pieces from three continents to uncover the story of that boat and the people it carried from hope to death.
The boat that reached Tobago was registered in Mauritania, a large and mostly desert country in northwest Africa, 4.800 kilometers from where it landed.
Evidence found in the boat and its construction and color - a typical Mauritanian "pirogue" - suggest that the dead are likely African migrants who were trying to reach Europe but got lost in the Atlantic.
In 2021, at least seven boats, which appear to be from northwest Africa, washed up in the ocean on the coasts of the Caribbean and Brazil. They were all carrying corpses.
These "ghost boats" and probably many others that have disappeared are partly the unintended consequence of years of effort and billions of dollars spent by Europe to stop crossing the Mediterranean Sea.
That suppression, together with other factors, such as economic disruptions due to the pandemic, forced migrants to take the much longer, more obscure and more dangerous Atlantic route across the Atlantic to Europe, from northwest Africa via the Canary Islands, instead of across the Mediterranean.
Arrivals via the Atlantic route jumped from 2.687 in 2019 to more than 22.000 two years later, according to Spain's Interior Ministry.
But for so many people to arrive, many more must have made the journey, said Pedro Velez, an oceanographer at the Spanish Institute of Oceanography. Welles was not surprised to learn that migrant boats are appearing as far away as the Caribbean, where ocean currents and wind naturally carry floating devices that scientists lower into the ocean off the coast of West Africa.
"The ocean conditions there are extremely difficult," he said.
In 2021, at least 1.109 people died or went missing trying to reach the Canary Islands, according to the International Organization for Migration, making it the deadliest route on record. But that is probably only a fraction of the actual death toll. The men in the Tobago boat, for example, are not included in that number.
Caminando Fronteras, a Spanish migrant rights organization, recorded more than 4.000 dead or missing on the Atlantic route in 2021, with at least 20 boats missing after setting sail from Mauritania.
These migrants are invisible in death, as they were in life. But even ghosts have families.
The AP investigation included interviews with dozens of relatives and friends, officials and forensic experts, as well as police records and DNA testing.
It was established that 43 young men from Mauritania, Mali, Senegal and possibly other West African countries boarded that boat that reached the Caribbean. AP identified 33 by name.
They left the Mauritanian port city of Nouadhibou in the middle of the night between January 12 and 13, 2021. Clothing and DNA testing confirmed the identity of one of the bodies, closing one family's case and opening the way for others to seek such answers.
The lack of political will and global resources to identify dead and missing migrants means that such outcomes, even partial ones, are very rare.
Every year, thousands of families wonder about the fate of loved ones who left their homes and headed for Europe.
Few ever find out.
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