The eighth day he was out on the ice, Scott Gilmour’s eyes started to feel like jelly. They wobbled around in his sockets, and when he looked out, the world seemed like it was smeared with goo. Gilmour and his two companions had been facing headwinds for hours, walking on ice as hard as steel. They needed to find a…

The shortest distance from Cuba to the United States is about 90 miles across the Florida Strait. By the standards of human-powered sea travel, it’s extremely doable, and it has been done for decades by refugees aboard the most makeshift of watercraft, driven by desperation. In the peak years, tens of thousand of…