Men survive journey on ship’s rudder

Three men survived an 11-day journey perched precariously atop the rudder of an oil tanker en route from Nigeria to Spain’s Canary Islands, the Spanish coast guard said, as Europe sees its highest level of irregular migration in five years.

The stowaways, straddling a narrow strip of metal and exposed to the elements, travelled on the Malta-flagged Alithini II, which left Lagos on

November 17, according to the ship tracking site Marine Traffic. The tanker arrived Monday evening in Las Palmas, Gran Canaria – one of Spain’s Canary Islands, located off the coast of North Africa. The ports are nearly 4800 kilometres apart.

In a photograph shared by the

Spanish coast guard on Twitter, the three men sit on the sliver of the ship’s rudder that protrudes from the water. The men were taken to the Las Palmas port to be treated by health services, the coast guard tweeted.

The survivors were from Nigeria, the Spanish government’s delegation in the Canary Islands told the Associated Press. One of them was still in hospital yesterday.

‘‘The survival odyssey is far beyond fiction,’’ Txema Santana, a migration adviser to authorities in the Canary Islands, wrote on Twitter. ‘‘It is not the first and it will not be the last. Stowaways do not always have the same luck.’’

The rescue comes amid tensions within the European Union over migration policy, as countries in southern Europe – France and Italy in particular – argue over who should take in the growing number of migrants who are arriving by sea.

More than 165,000 irregular migrants, many of them seeking asylum, have arrived in Europe this year, the highest number since 2017, when 187,499 were recorded, according to the International

Organisation for Migration.

The journey of the three stowaways is an outlier in recent migration patterns to Europe.

The bloc had seen an uptick in arrivals during the past month, said Charlotte Slente, secretary-general of the Danish Refugee Council, an aid agency that works in dozens of countries. But recently, most asylum seekers have been arriving through overland routes, crossing the Balkans and moving westward through Europe.

Nearly 30,000 migrants have arrived in Spain in 2022, a decrease compared with recent years, according to data from UNHCR, the United Nations refugee agency. More than 14,000 of those have landed on the shores of the Canary Islands, often on packed, rickety boats, many inflatable and not suitable for ocean travel. The crossing is dangerous – 1153 people died or went missing along the route to the Canary Islands last year, UNHCR said. –

AP Spain’s Maritime Rescue Service rescued three stowaways travelling on a ship’s rudder in the Canary Islands after the vessel sailed there from Nigeria. The men were found on the Alithini II oil tanker at the Las Palmas port.