That accounting does not exist in the public record in the form available for this article. The eleven dead remain, in the primary reporting, a count and a category — “the others,” “his colleagues,” “the crew.” They deserved more than that when they were alive. They deserved more than that in the record.
The Jascon-4 story, in its public form, is Harrison Okene’s story. That is partly because he survived and can tell it, and partly because the footage made his survival the spectacular fact that organized the media attention. The eleven who died are the shadow the story carries with it wherever it goes — acknowledged in the telling, present in Okene’s own guilt and grief, and less than fully recovered from the gap that the lack of documentation creates. Telling the survival story honestly requires keeping that shadow visible.
The ship’s cook survived. The story belongs to him, and to them, and to the sea that kept one and took eleven on a Sunday morning more than a decade ago off the coast of Nigeria. It belongs to all of them equally, even if only one of them can still speak.