After a dinner of vegetables and cookies, Prince, a 14-year-old from Nigeria who did not wish to use his real name, went for a walk in the beach town where he lived and overheard three men talking about their plans to leave for Europe as stowaways on a huge fuel tanker from the nearby port of Lagos. Within seconds, this slight teenager made the most important decision of his life: to join them. He boarded the Ocean Princess I and climbed up to the small compartment over the tanker’s rudder – a tiny space of about two square meters. He thought the journey would take a few hours, but it was 15 days before he reached Spain’s Canary Islands. Without food or anything but saltwater to drink.

He arrived in Las Palmas in Gran Canaria on November 23, weak and cold, his skin cracked and his jaw tight. Now, after two weeks of quarantine, he looks like any happy youngster again. “Sadness was not part of the plan,” he wrote on his Facebook page. Under his fictitious name, he talks about his trip in detail, but as though he were describing any normal episode of his life. This is the first-person account he gave to EL PAÍS.

“On the fourth day, the ship stopped. For a moment, we thought we must have reached a country, but all we saw was water. I was already very weak and hungry and losing my mind. All I could think about was a big plate of rice. It was the first time I drank saltwater. I held onto the ladder with one hand and with the other I collected the seawater. That was how I washed myself too. Until then, we had been more or less fine – there was hope; we were going to Europe. But from then on, everything got worse.[…]