The boat that carried them out was small enough to be ignored.
It crossed the harbor at Lagos after midnight, pulled in under the stern of a loaded tanker, and four men climbed the hull.
Then they sat down and waited.
The engines did not turn over for another fifteen hours, and the ship only got under way at five that afternoon.
They were aiming for Europe.
Which raises the question of what four people can actually hold on to out there.
The one place on a hull you can reach
A ship’s rudder is not a room. There is no hatch into it and no sealed compartment to climb inside and pull shut behind you.
What exists is a shelf. The rudder trunk sits above the blade, and the narrow ledge around it is the only part of the hull a swimmer can reach without equipment, which is exactly why anyone trying this ends up there.
Their ship was the Ken Wave, a Liberian flagged tanker roughly 620 feet long, and the ledge sat only a few feet above the water.
Two small nets were already strung across the space when they arrived. Earlier stowaways had rigged them, and the four men inherited somewhere to lie down. The nets came loose repeatedly and had to be retied while the ship was moving.
So they tied rope around their waists as well, and slept in shifts.
Ten days of food
They had brought provisions and they rationed them hard. Everything was gone by day ten.
On day eleven Roman Friday knotted a cellophane wrapper to a length of line, dropped it over the edge, and hauled up whatever seawater it held. All four of them drank it. When that was not enough they licked toothpaste from the tube.
Yeye described the thirst without any drama at all, saying his mouth was dry and completely cracked, and that for the first time in his life he understood what water actually meant.
By day twelve one of them was vomiting and drifting in and out of consciousness. He had no strength left to hold on. Friday, the only one who still did, took hold of him and kept him on the shelf.
Three thousand five hundred miles
Nobody out there knew where the ship was going. That is the flaw in the method, and it is why men who plan for Spain arrive in South America.
The Ken Wave ran from Lagos to the far side of the Atlantic, about 3,500 miles, and took the full fourteen days over it. That averages close to ten knots, an unremarkable speed for a loaded tanker and an extraordinarily long time to spend clinging to the outside of one.
Barely a word passed between them the whole way.
Friday said they had taught themselves never to make a noise, because if the crew found them the crew might put them over the side. Whether that fear was warranted is a separate question. Silence was the plan, and they held it for two weeks.
The fourteenth day
Then the tanker slowed. A supply boat was coming alongside to restock the crew, which is routine work, and it meant a port was close.
What came around the stern instead was a dinghy. Brazilian federal police were in it, and the first thing handed across was a bottle of water.
An officer leaned over and told Friday he was in Brazil, and Friday asked him to say it again. The port was Vitoria, on the southeastern coast.
The two men who stayed gave the full account of those fourteen days some months later. Cargo crosses the planet more or less invisibly, whether that is a tanker nobody watches leave or a driverless freight line hauling coal across Inner Mongolia, and people occasionally cross it the same way.
Four men went up at Lagos, and all four arrived alive.
It had happened on this route before
Eleven months earlier, three Nigerian men were taken off the rudder of the tanker Alithini II at Las Palmas in the Canary Islands, after eleven days at sea. They had boarded at Lagos too.
Same port, same part of the ship, same shelf above the blade. Crews are told to check the rudder trunk before departure, much as an overheight trailer gets measured before it is waved onto a highway, and it still does not catch everyone.
Of the four, William and Zeze asked to go home and were flown back to Nigeria. Friday and Yeye applied for asylum, moved to Sao Paulo, and were taken in by a Catholic mission that gave them Portuguese lessons and a bed.
Yeye had been a minister and a farmer until flooding took the farm. Friday had been sleeping rough in Lagos for three years, and told reporters in Brazil there was no work at home and no way to feed his family.
That is what he weighed against fourteen days above a propeller.
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