Abandoned by a smuggler on a pebbly beach, 49 hungry and thirsty migrants hid out for days amid a tangle of trees and brush. Then a scouting party returned with devastating news: They weren't in the US.
The illegal migrants -- 47 Haitians and two Dominicans, including two babies -- were hoping they had reached the US Virgin Islands, where travelers can hop on a domestic flight to Miami without passing through immigration checkpoints.
Instead, they were dumped on Norman Island, one of the British Virgins -- 4.5km of open water short of US soil, with nothing to get them there and no population to blend into.
"We gave them food and water and over the next four days more of them came out of the bush," said Tom Warner, who usually tends to yachters at Pirates Bight Bar and Restaurant, the only business on uninhabited Norman Island. "The one-year-old was definitely thirsty ... I gave him a container of water and that baby just wouldn't let go of it."
Once a way-station for pirates, the British Virgin Islands -- comprised of the main islands of Tortola, Virgin Gorda and Anegada, as well as more than 50 smaller islands -- are increasingly attractive to Caribbean smugglers carrying illegal migrants to the US Virgin Islands and Puerto Rico.
Cubans are the elite migrants because unlike all the others, the US "wet-foot, dry-foot" policy allows them to avoid deportation and request asylum if they can reach US soil. And they have discovered that the Virgin Islands corridor provides a practical alternative to the heavily guarded Florida Strait or the rough Mona Passage between the Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico, which last year became a popular route.
From last October through January, 126 Cuban migrants used the new route to reach the US Virgin Islands -- more than double the number that landed during the same period a year ago, said Captain James Tunstall, commander of US Coast Guard for the eastern Caribbean. By comparison, Cubans caught trying to sneak past the cutter patrolling the Mona Passage have declined 40 percent.
On Saturday, authorities detained 28 Haitian migrants, including a baby, who were wandering in bushes after being dropped off on St. Croix in the US Virgin Islands by a boat that a resident saw using a night-vision scope.
"If you squeeze this end of the balloon, it bulges elsewhere," Tunstall said in an interview at the Coast Guard base in San Juan, Puerto Rico. "It's the nature of our work."
The new route swings deep into the eastern Caribbean and runs northwest along the Leeward Island chain before heading to the British Virgin Islands.
The migrants, mostly from Cuba, Haiti and the Dominican Republic, generally fly to the island of Dominica, then hook up with smugglers who take them on chartered sailboats to US territory under cover of darkness, said Chief Inspector St. Clair Amory of the Royal Virgin Islands Police Force.
"These persons who actually organize these operations are making big money," Amory said.
Cubans, who often have access to cash from relatives on the US mainland, generally pay US$3,000 to US$3,500 for the sea voyage, while Haitians and Dominicans pay US$2,000 to US$2,500, he said.
Authorities are having a hard time choking off the new route because the distance between the US Virgin Islands and the British Virgin Islands is as little as 1km in places.
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