Stowaways cross Atlantic Ocean hiding on a ship’s rudder
Endure 14-day journey from Nigeria to Brazil
The four stowaways aboard a cargo ship had no idea where they were when they were met by federal police officers last month at a Brazilian port. Told they had landed in Brazil, they were stunned.
They had hopped on the ship while it was docked 3,500 miles away — in Lagos, the most populous city in the West African nation of Nigeria.
They didn’t know where it was going but didn’t care. They were jobless and desperate, they said, and wanted to go anywhere that might offer better prospects.
After rowing out to the vessel, the Ken Wave, they said they climbed into an unlikely space: the 6-foot by 6-foot opening containing the rudder.
Recounting their harrowing journey to The New York Times, they said they spent 14 days crossing the Atlantic Ocean, leaning on cold metal, terrified of falling into the churning waters just below their feet. Sometimes they spotted sharks.
“We were so scared, we just kept on praying,” said one of the men, Roman Ebimene Friday.
On day nine, they ran out of food and water, they said. “We licked toothpaste and drank seawater just to have strength,” Friday said in a telephone interview from a shelter in São Paulo, where he was staying.
“When we informed them we were the federal police of Brazil, they made this face like, ‘Huh, we’re in Brazil?’” said Rogerio Lages, chief of the federal police’s maritime division in the state of Espírito Santo, where the cargo vessel docked.
His unit was summoned to the port of Vitória, about 350 miles north of Rio de Janeiro, on July 10 after a boat ferrying fresh crew members to the Ken Wave spotted the migrants on the rudder, pleading for help.
Two of the men asked to be sent back to Nigeria, Brazilian authorities said, but Friday and the fourth stowaway, Thankgod Opemipo Matthew Yeye, decided to stay and have applied for refugee status.
Friday, 35, who is from Bayelsa, a state in the Niger Delta, a polluted petroleum-producing region, said he had been looking for work in Lagos for almost two years, hoping to help support his widowed mother and his three younger siblings.
He had so little money, he spent nights sleeping under a bridge, he said.
Yeye, 38, said he had a small peanut and palm oil farm in Lagos state that was devastated by floods this year, leaving him, his wife, and two young children homeless and hungry.
Everyday life has been a struggle for many Nigerians in recent years as the nation has battled crises in nearly every region: an Islamist insurgency, a spate of kidnappings, and deadly fighting between farmers and herders over land in a nation whose population is soaring.
There are pockets of wealth in places like Lagos, with its investment banks, art galleries, and elaborate weddings of elites that draw hundreds of guests. But for many Nigerians, unemployment is rampant, helping to fuel a major exodus.
The number of migrants from Nigeria, which has a population of about 224 million people, increased threefold between 2009 and 2019, according to the Center for Global Development.
As of the end of 2020, Nigeria ranked in the top 10 countries with the largest numbers of people living abroad, according to United Nations data.