Two nights after the last men jumped, lights appeared in the sky. Those awake quickly turned on their smartphones and activated the devices’ flashlights, waving them in the air. Lacking cell reception in the middle of the ocean, they had kept their phones off during the voyage to save battery.

Nothing happened at first. They were being ignored, again — or so they thought.

On the other side of the lights was the Zillarri, a Belize-flagged, Spanish-owned tuna fishing support vessel.

Abdou Aziz Niang, a Senegalese mechanic working on the ship, was almost asleep when one of the deckhands called him up. There’s a pirogue over there, he told him. “That’s impossible. It’s too far out,” Niang replied.

As the sun rose, crew members raised their binoculars again. It was indeed a pirogue, and there were people on board.

“They were so skinny. I saw their eyes and teeth and only bones,” Niang remembers. Niang urged the captain to go faster.

Back on the pirogue, Dieye was washing his face when he saw the Zillarri approaching them.

“What are you doing here?” Niang, the Senegalese crew member, shouted at them in Wolof.

“We left Senegal, but we had problems,” the men replied.

“How long have you been here?” Niang asked.

It had been 36 days.

Now these men — who were fleeing for Europe because industrial overfishing had made their livelihoods untenable — were being rescued by a European fishing vessel.

The Zillarri circled the migrants and the crew threw bottles of water. Survivors scrambled to catch them.

Following protocol, the Spanish captain alerted Spain’s Maritime Rescue Coordination Center about the migrants in distress and shared their coordinates. Meanwhile, Niang called the Senegalese navy. Hours passed as authorities in Spain, Cape Verde and Senegal communicated, and the captain waited for instructions. In that time, Niang witnessed more people dying on board.

Finally, the ship received instructions: Take the rescued people to the closest port, Palmeira, on the island of Sal in Cape Verde, 290 km (180 miles) away.

The crew tied ropes to the boat and began towing it to shore.

Suddenly, the pirogue, rotting from its long journey at sea, started breaking apart. Towing it wouldn’t work, so the Spanish boat began reeling in the pirogue and pulling survivors into the Zillarri. Next came the task of recovering the bodies of the dead.

Despite their efforts, one of the rescued — a teenage boy — died before they made it to shore. He lay stiff next to the others, his eyes and mouth open. Niang poked him and realized the boy wasn’t waking up. “He died just now, it’s unbelievable!” Niang cried out in a cell phone video he recorded at the scene.

Survivors were laid out across the deck on top of fishing nets and given food and water. The crew covered them with blue tarpaulins. Barely able to move, some in shock from the ordeal, they huddled together overnight.

When they arrived the next morning in Palmeira, uniformed soldiers and Red Cross volunteers helped the 38 survivors wobble off the Zillarri. Some had to be carried on stretchers. Under a tent, paramedics hooked them up to IV fluids. A few were hospitalized. They were skin and bones.

With the help of a crane and a fishing net, the crew of the Zillarri lifted a bundle of bodies from the top deck and transferred them onto the asphalt. They would later be identified as the remains of Amsa Sarr, Ndiaga Diop, Pape Mboro, Maguette Dieye, Bogal Thiam, Adama Sall and Pape Sow.

Of the 63 who died during the harrowing journey, only those seven were recovered and buried in Cape Verde. The rest of the dead would remain in the Atlantic.

The survivors couldn’t celebrate. They were alive, yes. But at what cost? Relatives had invested in their journey to Europe, selling possessions to pay for their trip, hoping the young men would get jobs and send money back home. Instead, they were back at square one. They would return with empty hands and terrible news. How would they announce the loss of so many brothers? Who would support the parents, widows and children of the deceased?

As they awaited repatriation to Senegal, the migrants, including minors, were locked up by authorities inside a school. For a week, they slept on mattresses on the floor.

In the classroom-turned-cafeteria, survivors passed one of the volunteer’s cellphones from hand to hand across three long dining tables. They sobbed and took deep breaths as they watched a video shared on WhatsApp by one of their relatives back home; it was a slideshow of those who died, set to melancholy Senegalese music.