After a migrant boat sank and about 50 of its passengers went missing in the Atlantic Ocean off northwestern Africa, nine survivors endured two days on the semi-submerged wreck before they were found, according to Spanish rescuers.
The rescue happened on Monday near the coast of the Canary Islands, a Spanish archipelago and a destination along a migration route on which, experts say, many other shipwrecks are likely to have gone unreported.
The rescue occurred after a merchant ship reported a sinking vessel 60 nautical miles south of El Hierro, an island in the far west Canaries, said Carmen Lorente Sánchez, a spokeswoman for the Spanish maritime safety and rescue organization.
She said rescuers found nine people on board and took them to the island’s airport. The survivors later told the authorities that the shipwreck had occurred two days earlier and that around 60 people were on board when they departed from Senegal, Ms. Sanchez added.
The Canary Islands received about 40,000 migrants last year, a sharp increase from the previous year, according to the United Nations International Organization for Migration.
Helena Maleno, the founder of Caminando Fronteras, a nongovernmental organization that tracks the deaths of migrants trying to reach Spain, said many people have embarked on unsafe fishing boats to reach Spain from Senegal because of the recent political upheaval in the country. Other people fled the effects of climate change and instability in the Sahel, she said.
“And in many occasions,” she said, “they go missing in the depth of the ocean.”
About 16,000 migrants have reached the archipelago this year from West African nations such as Morocco, Mauritania and Senegal, following the so-called Atlantic route, according to the I.O.M.
While the number of arrivals is close to that of those reaching Italy across the Mediterranean Sea, far fewer deaths are reported by the United Nations on the Atlantic route: 179 so far this year compared with 524 in the central Mediterranean.
Caminando Fronteras has reported 1,500 deaths on the route from Mauritania this year, a figure much higher than that used by the United Nations; the group says it compiles its figure from databases of distress warnings and of missing people.
The Atlantic route is likely to be “at least as dangerous as the Mediterranean,” said Flavio Di Giacomo, a spokesman with the I.O.M. “But it’s much harder to find evidence.”
The length of the route and the low quality of the boats used by the migrants make the journey particularly dangerous, said Jorge Galindo, a spokesman for the I.O.M.’s Global Migration Data Analysis Center. He added that it could take up to eight days for boats leaving from Senegal to reach El Hierro.
But parts of the route are less patrolled than the central Mediterranean, he said, so many boats likely go missing without anyone knowing.
Earlier this month, Brazilian authorities found a boat adrift in Pará State containing nine bodies, alongside documents and objects that they said indicated the passengers were migrants from Mali and Mauritania.
