NAUFRAGE
Why did a dozen people drown in the world's busiest shipping lane?
2 August, 2024. Monday.
They take a bus from Calais to Boulogne-sur-Mer and walk from there to the beach. They spend the night in the dunes, though many do not sleep.
3 August, 2024. Tuesday.
Just after dawn a car arrives with the boat. They inflate it on the beach. They check the wind and tides on their phone and decide the weather is good enough to attempt a crossing. In Calais a fenêtre, a window, is when windspeeds are under 10 knots and waves under 0.5 metres high. Conditions today lie just outside this range. Windspeed: 11 knots. Waves: 0.6 metres high. In these desperate days, weather like this is as good as a greenlight.
Before boarding a few of the men inspect the outboard motor. Rusted and waterlogged, it is designed to support maximum thirty people. There are seventy on the beach. Counting infants, perhaps more. They push the boat into the surf and begin to board, up to their chests in freezing water. Everybody gets soaked. The rubber of the boat has a prosaic chemical smell.
At this point the police drive onto the beach. Red lights flashing discordant, they watch the Eritreans push their boat into the waves, and, for once, do nothing to interfere. It is around 8.00 A.M.
A man is appointed to pilot the dinghy. His position is unique. Known prior to the passeurs or appointed by them on the beach, the pilot often enjoys free passage but, upon arrival in the UK, risks prison and deportation as a trafficker himself. This one has no prior sailing experience. He is now charged with steering seventy souls some twenty kilometres to British waters. Only eight people have lifejackets. They gun the engine and putter out past the surf.
After two hours on the water things begin to look dire. The waves are getting higher, lapping over the wales of the dinghy and flooding the rubber floor. Women begin to cry, sensing the brute disaster that has found its way into their lives. The dinghy’s pilot has no experience driving an outboard motor, and by now the other passengers are begging him for their lives. Go slowly, they say. Mind the waves. Someone with a working phone makes a distress call to 112, the French marine emergency number.
There are few better places to have an emergency at sea. The Channel is the world’s busiest shipping lane. This little stretch of water was replete with ships on the day of the sinking, many not at all far from the dinghy. None prevented the atrocity. Why? Which ships were in the area? Rescue vessels? Fishing boats or warships? Private yachts? Much depends on the answer.
The survivors cannot answer this question for us. Ships whirled around them before, during, and after the sinking. Yet nobody I spoke to could conclusively identify which type of vessel rescued them, which followed at a distance, which bellowed instructions over loud speakers, and which idled nearby. Our witnesses were not experts in ship builds and marine insignia. They were fighting to survive.
One Yemeni man remembers a large grey ship tailing the dinghy at a distance. If it was responding to their distress call, it was much too far away to be of any use. He also told me there was a British vessel nearby, closer than the grey ship to the rear. This British vessel urges the dinghy over loudspeaker to push on to UK waters some two hundred metres away. The British coastguard will only conduct a rescue in its own territory.
It is a scene of great drama: seventy people sinking just metres from rescue, the larger ship impotent before invisible borders. Yet it is difficult to see how the Yemeni’s testimony could be true. The dinghy sank nowhere near the English maritime border. How could a larger ship communicate with the dinghy from hundreds of metres away? Who translated its messages into Arabic and Tigrinya? Perhaps we must conclude that the heightened experience of crisis cannot be reduced to empirical fact?
What we do know is this: shortly after the migrants place their distress call, the dinghy begins to sink in earnest. The boat is so swamped with water it starts to submerge from the motor end. Mayhem. People in the bow are crushed as others flee the sinking rear. Those seated near the motor fall into the sea, clinging to their neighbours or the dinghy itself. Brothers hold their sisters’ hands. Parents hold their children by the wrist. Some begin to swim.
At this point a ship arrives and begins to unload people from the compromised dinghy. Sky News will state that the first vessels to attend the sinking were a research vessel and a fishing boat. Neither were equipped for marine rescue. Given the repeated distress calls made before the boat started sinking in earnest, we must ask why the French and British coast guards were unable to mount a rescue in time.
The civilian ship takes around fifteen people on board, mostly children and their parents. Unable to get too close, given the risk of further sinking the dinghy in its wake, its crew tosses ropes to the migrants straining in the water. Our Yemeni witness grabs a rope himself. Idris is among the first pulled to safety.
At the point of his rescue, his testimony gives out. By the time he was pulled from the water he was only semi-conscious and semi-alive. Idris’s testimony becomes less a narrative of events than a set of fragmentary sense impressions. Feelings of terror. Darkness. Water in his lungs. Skin burning from seawater and gasoline. Massive noise, people shouting. He was, he tells me more than once, ‘between life and death.’ This was his eighth attempt to cross in thirty-five days.
Around fifty-five people remain on the dinghy, now riding slightly higher in the water. With this lighter load the remaining Eritreans feel they have a decent chance of getting to English waters. This is a very common gamble in the Channel: get to sea, take on water, call the coast guard, unload the squeamish, and set off again with an escort.
Some on board thought their chances were good. One woman said she could already see England and was sure they would arrive there in under an hour. Given that the dinghy sunk not far from Cap Gris-Nez, who knows what she saw under those conditions. A man cries out, as if to convince himself more than anyone, that God is with them and nobody will perish that day.
Yet the dinghy does not get far. All at once the bottom of the boat, already hanging half submerged, rips open like rotten cloth. Fifty-five people find themselves suspended on the sea on a husk of crumpled rubber. Those who can swim, swim. Those who can cling to the boat, cling to the boat. Parents hold their children and fight the swells. Friends hold each other, scream for each other.
Waves come in as executioners. Bimi grips the hand of his eighteen-year-old sister. A wave rises and falls and she is gone. Ephraim clutches the boat and an old woman in turn clutches Ephraim. For a long time she holds his waist, he is the thread between life and death, and he will not remember the moment she loses her grip and is swept under.
The coast guard arrives too late. Though they arrive within fifteen minutes of the sinking, survivors will say they floated in the water for what feels like an hour. Helicopters cruise in and hover low above the wreckage. Under the battering wind of their propellers, exhausted survivors strain to keep their heads above the sea.
Eventually more ships come. Around forty-five people are scooped from the sea alive and taken back to France. Twelve more are pulled from the water unresponsive. Some of them are choppered back to Boulogne. Others are laid out on the decks of the rescue ships. The eighteen-year-old girl we have seen swept away by a wave has been returned to the surface. Her brother now sees that she has drowned. ‘God only knows why I am alive,’ he will say.
For many the violence of the sea was a direct extension of politics. Idris ended his testimony with a moral invocation: ‘Why were the English and French there and did nothing for us? Why this violence? Why treat us with no dignity?’ Even as a migrant in Belarus and Russia he had experienced much less violence, and found the charity of the locals far superior that of the French.
Calais, he said, was the most violent place he had ever seen.
4 August, 2024. Wednesday.
The state aches to respond to this horror.
A day after six children have drowned within sight of pretty French coastal towns, a day after most of the Eritrean camp lost friends and family, a day when survivors were still searching hospitals for the corpses of their loved ones or emerging from hospitals themselves — on this day, the French state conducts an eviction of the Eritrean jungle. Not content to have fourteen people drown in their waters, France waits less than twenty-four hours before sending its police to destroy the tents of survivors and ravage the belongings of their dead relatives.
This is how the state speaks. It says to the living: between this and the sea you cannot mistake our message.
Excellent narrative, Tyler. And I ask, what homeland was so terrible that such danger was preferred?