High Strangeness: Our Haunted Seas

Hardship will drive people to do the unthinkable, and in the early 21st century, some examples of the human drive to flee from hardship are to be found in the endless South to North migration of the oppressed, both in the New and Old Worlds. In August 2004, a newspaper report filed by Joaquín Asención of the El Vocero newspaper highlighted the harrowing, nightmarish experience of nearly forty castaways who had chanced the caprice of the ocean waves for a better chance at a life in neighboring Puerto Rico. A total of eighty-two “boat people” – men, women and children - departed in a rickety boat from the Dominican Republic for what should have been a very short crossing of the unpredictable Mona Passage to a secret landing site somewhere in western Puerto Rico.