These ships are also flashpoints in a global war of ideas. Elon Musk, the world’s richest man and adviser to the US President, has spent years obsessively accusing rescue ship operators of being “criminal organisations.”
Mediator
These divisions are present locally in Sicily too. But the island has long been a crossing point between north and south and retains a mostly welcoming mien.
Crews are offered discounts in cafes and restaurants. One rescue ship was presented with an award by the mayor of Sicily’s capital Palermo.
In summer, the Humanity 1 becomes an “open ship” in which locals can see for themselves what crews do.
Among the visitors was Maurizio, who has run a small pasticceria with his wife for over three decades. As autumn begins, Maurizio makes zeppole, sweet fried dough balls full of sugar, ricotta, or chocolate, in preparation for November’s Fiesta di San Martino. The festival has been observed for over a millennium.
The night before we set sail, Maurizio prepares zeppole with sparkling wine for the crew. As he hands them out, a smile lights the face of Yasmin, the ship’s cultural mediator.
Scandalous
She recognises the dough balls as zapaliya, a dish from her native Egypt. It’s another Mediterranean connection.
But the sea divides, too. The term “San Martino’s summer” refers to the dying autumn breath of the season. For those desperate to cross to Europe, it could be their last chance.
Transit, German-Jewish writer Anna Seghers’ haunting 1944 novel of escape from Nazi-occupied France into the Mediterranean, describes “ships and their cargoes of refugees hounded all over the oceans and never allowed to dock, left to burn on the high seas rather than being permitted to drop anchor merely because their passengers’ documents expired a couple of days before.”
Seghers’ depiction of insouciant indifference to deaths at sea reads as if written yesterday. In 2013, after a shipwreck killed hundreds in the Sicilian Channel, Italy launched a year-long rescue operation which saved tens of thousands of lives.
Back then, deaths at sea were scandalous. The image of little Aylan Kurdi’s body on a Turkish beach in 2015 rocked the world.
Deckhand
Now, though, the nightmare has been normalised, and even cheered on by Europe’s growing radical right. State rescue operations have retreated to coastal waters, whilst volunteer missions are criminalised.
Someone dies in the Mediterranean every four hours. It is no longer news.
At lunchtime on our second day at sea, the crew swim in cool, briny water. It’s a brief respite at the end of a training week which ensures that this group of cooks, medics, engineers, navigators, rescuers, care and protection specialists, and communicators can act as a cohesive unit.
After lunch, the crew rehearse every component of an open-sea rescue in sequence. It’s the final drill before operations begin.
At around 2.30pm, a deckhand throws a raft into the sea. Bravo and Tango, the two rescue boats (RHIBs) are launched off the ship and race to ‘rescue’ it.
Disembark
In Bravo’s bow, Yasmin calls out a list of questions. How many of you are there? How many women? How many children? Is anyone sleeping?
The crew begin distributing lifejackets. As they do, a boat appears at the edge of our line of sight. We see people waving. We are just hours from the Sicilian coast, and imagine they may be tourists.
They are not. The boat, which has perhaps a half-hour of fuel left, sputters to a halt in front of us. On board are 36 people. At least four are unaccompanied children. They have been travelling, exposed to the elements, for three days.
No-one is unconscious, dying, or critically injured. It’s a low bar, but a relieving one. The rescue is quick. The ship’s chief officer, resting after an early shift, sleeps right through it and at first believes her leg is being pulled when told what happened.
Rather than permitting us to return to nearby Sicily, the Italian Coast Guard orders us to the port of Crotone to disembark the thirty-six. It is a day’s sailing away, and keeps the Humanity 1 away from operations for double that.
Dissidents
But the crew is mostly relieved not to be detained, fined, or assigned an even more distant port.
Most of the rescued people are from Syria. Before the fall of the Assad regime at the end of 2024, European leaders were already trying to force Syrians back home.
Now it has fallen, the drive to return Syrians has reached fever pitch. The country remains far from safe.
A few others are Egyptian. Egypt is on Italy’s list of “safe countries”, making their asylum claims difficult. Egypt is at peace, and a just-about-functional economy.
But Egypt is also under authoritarian rule. Its military leader, Abdel Fattah el-Sisi, is a strong Western ally, which provides cover for his state’s routine disappearing of dissidents and crackdowns on dissent. Another Egyptian, who had seen family members killed, had chunks of hair falling out due to stress.
Blazing
Another man clings to his crucifix and speaks nervously. He is alone, and his family is in Lebanon. An Israeli offensive there had just begun, killing around a thousand in its first week.
Laura and Sara, from the ship’s protection team, explain with the aid of a map and a whiteboard what is likely to happen next.
They sketch out possible futures; but it is never possible to predict exactly whether people will be offered protection, forced back, or something in between.
In the late morning sunshine, in the port of Crotone, in the shadow of a cement factory and flanked by Red Cross volunteers and police, the thirty-six are led toward their new lives.
Later that night we sail south, south, south, to the gates where great metal hands hold blazing torches aloft over the sea. We spot the lights of the oil platforms from the top deck at dusk, en route to our first distress call. They seem to guard the entrance to Libya.
Captured
This is the Bouri Field, the Mediterranean’s largest oil reserve, which helps power Europe. In partnership with the Libyan state (insofar as there is one) Italian state energy company Eni drains some 60,000 barrels of crude per day from beneath the seafloor. That’s 24 metric tons of carbon dioxide a day belched into the sky.
The crew can provide them limited care and comfort, a hot meal, and some advice. Ships float past; ferrying in workers and supplies. Some of the Humanity 1’s seafarers have worked on such vessels and know the industry well.
Sometimes after dark the oil workers sing, crack jokes, and howl into the night over the open radio channel.
Humanity 1 arrives at the scene of the distress call at dawn. Off the bow is a white boat, drifting in the morning breeze. We had been told there were sixty passengers, but it is empty.
It is safe to assume that the group were captured by the so-called Libyan Coast Guard and returned to the shores they escaped.
Oil
The previous day, when I told some of the young rescued men that I was a writer, one shouted out that Libya is more dangerous than the sea and the world needs to know what is happening there.
Part of me wanted to reply that the world does know; that torture and beatings and slavery and killings in Libya are all documented extensively, and none of this has stopped European cooperation with Libya’s “coastguard” to capture people fleeing.
The organisation has received hundreds of millions from European taxpayers.
Since a Libyan uprising backed by NATO airstrikes collapsed Muammar Gaddafi’s regime in 2011, Libya has barely been a functional state. What passes for government institutions remain captured by rival militias and gangsters.
The nation’s oil wealth keeps them in business. Europe continues to get what it wants; the free movement of oil, and the restricted movement of people.
Legendary
Funding for Libyan forces is even framed as development aid, on the grounds that the EU is helping to create a more skilled and professional force.
The following evening, we reach the scene of another presumed interception. We can do little but grimly speculate about what may have happened.
At the helm, Captain Joachim steers the ship back past the oil platforms with the bridge lights off, so he can see into the empty black night. A swelling moon is nearly full.
He explains that Humanity 1 was not always a rescue ship. In 1976, she was laid down at Kiel as the Poseidon, named for the Greek god of the sea.
Her decades of discovery earned her legendary status among European scientists. She has deepened our understanding of marine ecosystems across the world.
Hemmed
Photos of submersibles being lowered, guides to identifying Pacific sea mammals, and stickers commemorating past expeditions still adorn her bulkheads.
By the 2000s, the Poseidon found herself increasingly preoccupied with the changing weather. Joachim joined the crew as an officer cadet in 2004. The Poseidon was tracking deepwater ocean currents.
These massive and hidden subterranean forces, separate from surface tides, were not understood or even recognised for most of history. Now they are weakening as the world warms, with risky potential consequences for the water, air and nutrients we depend on.
The Poseidon also dredged layers of thick, sticky, stinking sediment from the sea floor. The sediment and the sea both carried a fossil record of climatic history; and warnings of rapid change.
The Mediterranean, hemmed in by continents and mountain ranges, is unique. This has conferred considerable geographical advantages for the civilisations nurtured by it.
Stranded
But it also makes the areas around the sea particularly vulnerable to drying out. The Mediterranean is warming a fifth faster than the global average. Proliferating algalblooms threaten its wildlife.
Even the big dolphins that play around the bow of Humanity 1 as it cuts through the water are not safe. Along the shoreline, fields of green ribbons sway gently.
Posidonia oceanica, or Neptune seagrass, is a species unique to the Mediterranean. One dense cluster of it, at 100,000 years old, is believed to be both the oldest and biggest living organism on earth.
It is an ally in the climate fight, highly adapted to absorbing carbon, But it is now dying at dangerous rates, risking accelerating the warming process. We can ill afford such losses. In 2024, trees and land all over the world absorbed almost no CO2. Nature’s vast carbon sink may yet collapse not with a whimper but a bang.
So both as researchers and as rescuers, the crews of this half-century old ship have born witness to dying people, dying ecosystems, and dying ways of life. One crew member told me the story of a past mission where rescuers sailed out to a stranded boat full of refugees.
Disillusioned
They found the boat trapped in a swamp of putrid, dead Neptune seagrass.
The fisherman noticed the weather changing around six years ago. Storms became more frequent and violent, he says. The summers were longer and hotter. And his catches were smaller.
Three-fifths of fish stocks in the Mediterranean have been overfished. Just as regulation was starting to improve the situation, climate change began posing a new threat.
In Sicily, fireworms that thrive in warming water are ravaging the catch, threatening to wipe out artisanal fishing. On the West African coast, many people in fishing towns have turned to smuggling migrants to Europe, as fish stocks dry up and multinational corporations drive them off the coast, making their work untenable.
The EU is now taking some action to help stabilise fishing. But his fisherman is from Libya. In 2011, he recalled being optimistic as Libya’s Muammar Gaddafi was overthrown, and quickly disillusioned as the country sunk into militia rule.
Frustrated
One day, the fisherman had enough. He loaded up his boat and struck out for Italy, he says. He got around twenty miles before the boat’s engine failed, and rough waves made navigation impossible.
On the horizon, he saw Humanity 1, and limped towards it to request aid. Aboard, the fisherman told this story, interspersed with anecdotes about cooking, Greek mythology, and Middle Eastern history.
The crew were instructed by Italian authorities to immediately proceed to disembark the fisherman in Sicily ’s Porto Empedocle.
Italy ’s 2023 Piantedosi Decree mandates rescue ships to return to port as soon as they have conducted a single rescue, in a bid to keep ships from operating for as long as possible.
The Humanity 1 had sailed hundreds of miles to rescue a single man. Some of the crew are frustrated to leave the area of operations, where larger groups of people may be in need. Others remind us that every life matters.
Unfolding
The wind howls. Waves smash against the hull. Cutlery threatens to launch itself across the galley. These waves are less than three metres high; a long way short of a storm.
But they are enough to spark seasickness among many of the crew, and provide a forbidding reminder as to how people in a small boat might feel.
Stories from the sea come in, over the radio and the internet. A boat full of people running aground on an islet in the Sicilian channel. Twenty people dead in a shipwreck out of Sfax. Twenty-two people rescued by another ship after a smuggler forced them into the water at gunpoint.
The Mediterranean translates as the “middle sea”. But other historic names for it have highlighted its inland character, defining it first in terms of the landmasses that flank it.
In the lull between operations, we are painfully aware of those landmasses, of the events unfolding to our north and south.
Dump
In Tunisia, Kais Saied had just been re-elected in a contest where his opponents were jailed. A year earlier, a speech in which he attacked sub-Saharan African migrants with rhetoric reminiscent of Great Replacement conspiracies had sparked pogroms across the country.
Migrants and Black Tunisians alike were afraid to leave their homes. They were beaten, jailed, and expelled into the desert. Others fled, and found themselves attacked by Tunisia’s coastguard and border forces.
Italy and the European Union rushed to pump money into Tunisia’s border forces.
As we sailed, Tunisia, assisted by Europe, had just assumed responsibility for a larger “search and rescue region”.
Meanwhile in Poland, Donald Tusk, a supposedly liberal prime minister, had suspended the right to asylum. Just before arriving in Sicily I had been on the border between Poland and Belarus, where security forces on both sides routinely abuse, beat, and dump people crossing in the inhospitable forest.
Camps
And in Turkey, a story broke about the state forcibly deporting people on an industrial scale, including back to Syria, and Taliban-run Afghanistan.
Over €11 billion of EU funding had been poured into the Turkish migration system, including to an archipelago of detention centres where, as ever, detainees report constant humiliation and violence.
In another time, such revelations may have provoked scandal. Instead, EU Commission president Ursula von der Leyen, poised to pick her new cabinet following summer elections, announced that she was looking at more deportation hubs outside Europe.
In Italy, Giorgia Meloni was putting something similar into practice, launching a pilot scheme to incarcerate migrants in offshore camps in Albania ahead of deportation.
The camps launched with much fanfare. One enterprising businessman even opened a Meloni-themed restaurant in the nearest port town. The scheme fell flat, as an Italian court ruled the scheme unlawful.
Unravelling
All this happened in a little under two weeks. And we had sailed on October 7th, 2024, the first anniversary of the Gaza calamity. The genocidal violence unfolding in the eastern corner of the Mediterranean – backed to the hilt by Europe – was never far from our minds.
Another rescue ship, Open Arms, had sailed to deliver food to Gaza earlier that year, and in a separate incident, several of the operating organisation’s aid workers were killed by Israeli forces.
After the twentieth century’s midnight, after the end of the Second World War, Europe had vowed to make “never again” mean something.
The Refugee Convention was established, formalising and defining the millennia-old idea of a right to sanctuary. And a slate of international commitments to universal human rights, the rule of law, peace where possible, and law-governed war where not, were established or strengthened.
At sea, we could feel that framework unravelling.
Grindingly
In May 2024, in record temperatures, over fifty refugees died crossing the desert near Aswan, Egypt.
As environmental breakdown bites, more people are moving, and more people are facing danger as they do. Most stay close to home, but some go further.The fisherman of Misrata, or the Syrians we brought aboard, would not call themselves climate refugees. Few do; reality is more complex.
But one cannot ignore, for example, the impact of drought and livestock deaths (up to 85 per cent in parts of the country) in the run up to the Syrian civil war.
There are strong relationships between environmental and social upheaval, and movement, in all the countries where people attempting the passage to Europe are coming from; whether in south Asia or the Sahel.
As some areas are slowly and grindingly attrited into inhabitability, others explode. As our ship returned to Syracuse, violent floods were killing hundreds in Valencia, Spain.
Climate-vulnerable
Another rescue ship, the Sea-Eye 4, berthed in the port of Burriana, quickly became a centre for organising the distribution of food, aid, and clothing to people affected.
Crews are keenly aware of these links. Sarah, the RHIB lead on Tango, the smaller rescue boat, was studying for a masters’ degree in environmental ethics whilst on board.
Yet amidst a crisis of environmental collapse, displacement, and militarism, powerful states are making the situation worse not better.
Just after we docked at Syracuse, the US election was won by Donald Trump on pledges of mass deportations and withdrawal from international climate diplomacy.
A few weeks later at COP29, the annual international climate change conference, a deal was agreed to fund adaptation and protection in the most climate-vulnerable countries, where displacement is already widespread.
Unifying
But the sums committed were paltry and inadequate, leaving frontline countries feeling betrayed.
In Europe, the EU’s leaders raided their Green Deal budget in early 2024 to fund border surveillance and defence; a stark illustration of the bloc’s priorities.
States’ destructive response to the current series of crises is to grab resources, build walls, and deepen the old colonial divide between Europe and Africa in doing so.
It is ironic that they are doing so whilst people on all sides of the Mediterranean are undergoing a similar, shared, experience of climate threat which could and should be
unifying.
Sharing
We returned to port just before the Fiesta di San Martino, for which the pastries were being prepared in anticipation when we embarked.In Sicilian depictions, San Martino is often depicted on a horse offering his cloak to someone in need.
Maurizio the baker brings his pastries, and other gifts, to Ciao Maristi, the social centre opposite his bakery which helps newcomers socialise and integrate with Sicilian life.
His wife says people do not always want or need their help, because the real problem is not enough decent work for either residents or newcomers.
For some, such scarcity is a reason to throw up walls. For others, it is an argument for sharing what they can.
Safety
After all, the same viciously anti-immigration government which insists that Italians must come first is also assiduously slashing Italians’ labour conditions and public services.
And for a long time, the island has relied on networks of social solidarity in difficult times. In a hot November, plants wilt around Arethusa’s fountain and her ficus macrophylla.
It is coming to the end of another year, the hottest in human history, in which thousands more people have been committed to the open ocean grave of the central Mediterranean.
It seems unlikely that next year will be different. But people will continue to seek safety and opportunity, and people will continue to come to each others’ aid.
The ship sails on.
This Author
Nathan Akehurst is a writer, researcher, and campaigner looking at the intersections between climate politics, migration, human rights and security. This article has been funded, in part, through the Ecologist Writers’ Fund. We ask readers for donations to pay some authors £200 for their work. Please make a donation now. You can learn more about the fund, and make an application, on our website.
