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The call that would lead to one of the most poignant images of the humanitarian emergency in the deadly waters off the Canary Islands came at 4am Monday morning.
The command centre of Spain’s Salvamento Marítimo (Maritime Safety and Rescue Society) in Las Palmas told Domingo Trujillo, the captain of the search-and-rescue vessel Talía, that a small inflatable boat, packed with people, was adrift 97 nautical miles (180km) off the coast of Lanzarote. Among those onboard, they added, was a woman who was due to give birth at any moment.
As soon as the alert was received, the 32m-long (105ft) Talía and its crew of eight left the Lanzarote port of Arrecife, bound for the drifting boat. When they arrived five hours later, Trujillo and his colleagues found the small inflatable packed to the gunwales with 64 men, women and children. They also saw that the pregnant woman, lying in the bow, had now given birth.
“We’d arrived for the tail end of the birth because the baby was still naked,” Trujillo said. But what struck him most was that those on the dinghy were as calm as the sea around them.
“It was extraordinary because everyone was pointing to show us that there was a woman there,” he said. “Normally rescues are pretty tense because everyone wants to kind of save themselves as best they can. But this one was quiet and calm, like everyone was trying not to make a fuss or upset her.”
Given the placid sea and the cloudy but sunny skies, the captain decided it was worth getting the other people off the boat first so that there would be more space to help the mother and her newborn. When everyone else had been transferred to the Talía, mother and baby were brought aboard and taken to the sick bay.
“Because she was Muslim, we asked permission to remove her clothes so that we could take a look at her and we brought someone she knew from the boat to be present and to make her feel a little more comfortable and less alone,” said Trujillo. “We checked that the placenta was out and that she’d stopped bleeding. We did what we could to make her comfortable in the sick bay bed and put the baby on her breast.”
Knowing that the journey back to Arrecife would take another five hours, the command centre recommended a helicopter evacuation of the mother and her baby once they were closer to port.
“We kept a close eye on her for three and a half hours, checking her vitals and blood pressure and giving her water and juice and lots of smiles,” said the captain. “We told her what a beautiful baby she had and made jokes and did other stuff to try to make the journey a bit easier. We got her and the baby ready for the evacuation and the helicopter arrived when we were about an hour from Arrecife.”
Once on land, the pair were transferred to Lanzarote’s Doctor José Molina Orosa university hospital. On Friday, a spokesperson for the hospital said mother and baby – a girl, despite initial reports – were still there and were doing well.
The mother, who is believed to be from Mali, has been discharged but remains in a room with her daughter who is being monitored as a routine precaution because the pregnancy was not medically supervised. A photograph of the little girl’s first moments in the world – taken by the Talía’s chief engineer, Juan José Calo Franco – was quickly picked up by the Spanish and international media this week.
Last year, 46,843 people reached the Canaries on the increasingly perilous Atlantic route from Africa, up from 39,910 in 2023. The inflatable boat rescued on Monday is though to have set off from the coast of Morocco, as it was found in Moroccan waters.
According to the Spanish Red Cross, one in seven of last year’s arrivals – 6,971 people – were children.
The dangers of the journey undertaken by tens of thousands of people were laid bare in a recent report from the Caminando Fronteras migration NGO, which estimated that at least 10,457 people died or disappeared while trying to reach Spain by sea from 1 January to 5 December 2024.
The NGO said the death toll was a increase of more than 50% on 2023 and the highest since its tallies began in 2007. It attributed the rise to the use of ramshackle boats, dangerous waters and a lack of resources for rescuers.
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Trujillo said births on the small boats, known as pateras, are not uncommon. His first was almost 20 years ago, his second during the early days of the Covid pandemic in April 2020, when he had to clamp and cut the umbilical cord. For all those experiences, however, he laughs off the idea that he is Salvamento Marítimo’s resident godfather.
“More like the midwife!” he said. “But this happens quite a lot, even if it doesn’t get the same attention as this case. I drive a boat. I’m not a doctor or a nurse; none of us here are. But if the situation demands it, you have to make the effort and become what you’re needed to be.”
The 57-year-old captain, who has been working in search and rescue for almost 23 years, is pleased to be able to talk about something positive for a change.
“I’ve been doing this for a long time and we come across every kind of situation. Sometimes you get there and people are missing or dead and there are bodies and it’s all chaos. You might find a boat with five or six people on it, or with 200 people on it. It’s really sad, and I don’t know what the solution is, but it leaves its mark.”
The other day, Trujillo was supervising a rescue from the bridge of the Talía when he looked down and saw a little girl of seven or eight was gazing up at him.
“She was staring at me because I was the only one who wasn’t dressed in white with gloves and a mask and a helmet on,” he said. “She was just looking at me and looking at me. I saw the fear on her face and so I stuck my tongue out at her and smiled and she started to relax a bit.”
He would like, over the coming days, to be able to visit the mother and daughter he found floating on the waters of the Atlantic early on Monday morning, just to see that they are safe.
“I want to see them in a very different situation to the one we met in,” he said. “That was really tough and it was very sad to see the mother lying there, bleeding. I want to see the baby in her arms all clean and wrapped up. I want to see that the world does sometimes work and that people in need are looked after.”
