A superyacht gave a lifeline to 100 migrants who were thrown into the sea

The superyacht Mayan Queen IV was sailing smoothly through the dark and calm Mediterranean in clear weather in the early hours of June 14 when she received a call about a migrant ship in distress four nautical miles away.

About 20 minutes later, shortly before 3 a.m., the towering $175 million yacht owned by the family of a Mexican silver magnate arrived on the scene. The ailing boat had already sunk. All the crew of four could see were the lights of a Greek Coast Guard vessel scanning the inky water’s surface. But they could hear the screams of survivors.

“Horrible,” said the Mayan Queen’s captain, Richard Kirkby, describing the sea as “pitch black” on that nearly moonless night.

In a matter of hours, the 95-foot Mayan queen, more accustomed to pleasure trips to Monaco and Italy with billionaires and their friends on board, was filled with 100 desperate, parched and sea-soaked Pakistani, Syrian, Palestinian and Egyptian men. played an unexpected role in one of the deadliest migrant shipwrecks in decades. As many as 650 men, women and children drowned.

The incongruous image of the devastated survivors who disembarked the Mayan queen at a port in Kalamata last week underlined what has become the strange reality of the modern Mediterranean, where the superyachts of the super-rich, equipped with swimming pools, Jacuzzis, helipads, and other trappings of luxury, share the seas with the most deprived on smuggler-operated boats that cross precariously from North Africa to Europe.

The world’s waterways have become a reflection of global inequality in recent days. In the North Atlantic Ocean, a Billionaire, his son and other businessmen set out to explore the wreckage of the Titanic on a luxury tourist submarine that has gone missing, sparking an international search and rescue operation.

Days earlier, Greek authorities had repeatedly decided not to provide assistance to an approximately 25-30-meter fishing boat filled with as many as 750 people fleeing the desperate poverty and displacement of war in the Greek search and rescue area. It wasn’t until the ship sank off the Coast Guard that authorities sprang into action and called on the Mayan Queen, one of the 100 largest yachts in the world.

“Once you are notified and in close proximity and you are able to do so, you are obliged to try and rescue,” said Aphrodite Papachristodoulou, an expert in law of the sea and human rights at the Irish Center for Human Rights . She said it was not uncommon to have luxury yachts around.

Why the Greek authorities had to call in a passing yacht to rescue an overcrowded and rickety ship they had been monitoring and communicating with in their search and rescue area for an entire day was less clear, she said.

“The practice of not providing or delaying aid and why the Greeks did not come to the rescue is another question mark,” she said.

A Greek Coast Guard vessel was already on the scene when the Maya queen arrived, and the sailors were out on a raft to rescue dozens of men from the water. The Mayan queen’s crew lowered her life raft with three of her own crew and followed the cries for help, pulling 15 men aboard, the captain said.

A vivid retelling of the events, under sworn testimony by Mr. Kirkby, and obtained by The New York Times, added that none of the rescued wore a life jacket. Some grabbed floating pieces of wood. For hours afterward, the yacht crew remained eerily silent, beaming their brightest lights to better hear and see.

Investigators are still trying to understand exactly what happened when the trawler sank while trying to reach Italy – whether smugglers refused help and panic on the ship caused it to capsize, as the Coast Guard claims, or whether a failed attempt to salvage the ship towing caused the ship to capsize. sinking, as some survivors claim. In either case, it fell to the Mayan queen to take on much of the rescue.

Sailing from Italy, the gleaming yacht carried 100 of the 104 survivors and four Greek Coast Guard officials – as well as about a dozen bodies – to port.

“I’d like to think we did what anyone would do,” said Mr Kirkby, who piloted the superyacht Le Grand Blue, by Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich. He added on Wednesday that due to a non-disclosure agreement and the “controversial” circumstances of the ship’s sinking, he couldn’t say much more.

“I’d hate to see the Coast Guard get a bad reputation,” he said. “They did what they could.”

Mr Kirkby spoke briefly at a cafe in Souda port, where the yacht was docked near a cruise ship taking tourists to the Cretan city of Chania, an industrial Russian ship and a parking lot filled with stationary truck containers. The ship’s crew performed chores and, like the captain, wore T-shirts with a drawing of the yacht on the back and a B, for the family of the ship’s deceased owner, Alberto Baillères, on the breast pocket.

On Wednesday morning, a crew member carried an umbrella up the gangway where the migrants staggered down last week, some of them awaited by stretchers and health workers wearing foil blankets. At the stern of the ship, with the silver-plated letters of “Mayan Queen” and “George Town” twinkling in the hot sun and pumping house music, crewmen worked where the migrants huddled when they reached the port of Kalamata.

According to Boat International, a yacht news site, the Mayan Queen, which flies the flag of the Cayman Islands, is listed in the top 100 of the world’s largest superyachts. It was built in 2008 by Hamburg-based shipbuilder Blohm & Voss GmbH and designed by Tim Heywooda favorite of the hunt set.

“Her power comes from two diesel engines. She can accommodate up to 26 guests, with 24 crew members,” the magazine wrote. “She is built with a teak deck, a steel hull and an aluminum superstructure.”

That craftsmanship was in stark contrast to the condition of the ship that hundreds of migrants, paying thousands of dollars per head, crammed onto in Libya last week hoping to reach Italy.

Witnesses said in sworn testimony obtained by The Times that passengers were beaten with belts and deprived. Smugglers threw food into the water. Pakistani men were held in the hold and hundreds of them sank with women and children in one of the deepest parts of the Mediterranean. Only the lucky ones made it to the decks of the Mayan Queen.

At around 6am on the morning of the wreck, as the sun rose, Mr. Kirkby received a call to transport all 100 rescued men from the coastguard vessel to the nearest port.

He offered dry clothes and water to the men, some of whom, he said, were “in bad shape.” For hours the survivors, wrapped in gray blankets and mourning their losses, sailed on the superyacht. At 11:20 AM, the Mayan Queen and her unexpected passengers arrived at the port.

‘We took them all,’ Mr Kirkby said.

Niki Kitsantonis contributed reporting from Athens.