Yet how could it not? On one side of the Mediterranean were people from across Africa, the Middle East and the Far East, some of whom had been travelling for months to get to the shores of Libya and to embark on this final journey. Word of Italian government policy and European attitudes to what was happening undoubtedly filtered back. The advantages this gave the smugglers were considerable. Not least because the greater the demand the higher the prices they could charge and the more people they could pack onto their boats. The stories of the behaviour of the smugglers obviously also came with the migrants, some of whom had paid up to 4,000 Euros for the crossing alone. But the bargain was rarely straightforward. Rape was commonplace, especially of women – whether accompanied or not. Many migrants made it to Libya only for more money to be demanded from them than they had already paid. Possessions were seized. Some migrants told of the smugglers using a migrant’s mobile phone to video their abuse and torture. The video was then sent to the migrant’s family with a threat of further torture unless they sent more money. The officials who process the migrants once they arrive in Italy get to know where the traffickers’ safe-houses are, but next to nothing can be done inside Libya to punish the gangs.

Although the world sees all these people as ‘migrants’, or ‘refugees’, between and among themselves they are very different people, with different backgrounds and different reasons for finding themselves on this same journey. One demonstration of this is the hierarchy that exists among the migrants even once they are on the boats. Racism between and among the migrant groups is routine. For instance, Tunisians and Syrians look down disapprovingly on sub-Saharan Africans, and not only metaphorically. When the boats set out the best places in the vessel – at the front and on the deck – are occupied by these better-off groups from the Middle East and North Africa. The Eritreans, Somalis and others sit or stand in the hold of the boat. If the boat goes down it is these people who are most likely to drown.

During the summer of 2015 on Lampedusa I got speaking to two Eritreans in their late teens or early twenties, sitting in silence on the edge of the harbour, picking at their feet and looking back over the sea they had crossed. While huge naval vessels scoured the horizon beyond, these two showed me the boat, sitting between the Italian government vessels in the harbour, that they had arrived on the previous week. It was, among the battered old boats that set out from Libya, comparatively seaworthy. It had been spotted by the coastguards and escorted into harbour by a helicopter with accompanying rescue boats. The two Eritreans had travelled at the lowest point, in the dark hold of the boat, but it had stayed afloat and so they had stayed alive.