Barbados: The white, mastless ghost ship rolled in the Atlantic swell as the rescue boats approached it 130km off Ragged Point, one of the most easterly places on the Caribbean island of Barbados.
The yacht was unmarked and when Barbadian coastguard officers boarded it, they made a gruesome find. The boat's phantom crew was made up of the desiccated corpses of 11 young men, huddled in two piles in the small cabin.
They had been partially petrified by the salt water, sun and sea breezes of the Atlantic.
The sea-battered yacht was towed into the port at Willoughy Fort, Bridgetown, and the bodies, by now wrapped in plastic bags, were heaved on to the quay. The mystery of the dead men soon provoked curious speculation.
An air ticket from Senegal Airlines and a tragic note written by one of the men as he was preparing to die have, however, helped investigators.
For, although the floating coffin appeared off the coast of the Americas, those on board had set off four months earlier from the Cape Verde islands, off the African coast, and had been heading for the European soil of the Canary Islands.
The evidence reportedly points to them having been cut adrift in the Atlantic and left to drift off to a slow, painful death.
"I would like to send to my family in Bassada [ a town in the interior of Senegal] a sum of money. Please excuse me and goodbye. This is the end of my life in this big Moroccan sea," the note said, according to a Barbados paper, the Daily Nation.
- (Guardian service)