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When Muammar Qaddafi ruled Libya, Italy struck deals with him so that its navy could return migrants who had attempted the trip. But after his death in 2011 the bargain broke down, and in 2012 the European Court of Human Rights declared that these “push-backs” to Libya breached human-rights law.

Since then the EU has responded to one crisis after another, rather than settling on a consistent plan. In 2013 the Italian government started Operation Mare Nostrum, a search-and-rescue effort that plucked 150,000 people from the seas in a single year. After other European countries, notably Britain, argued that saving migrants inspired more of them to attempt the trip, it was replaced with a scaled-down version, closer to the Italian coast. But the number attempting the crossing fell only slightly, and the number of deaths increased.

Next, the EU took aim at the smugglers. In May 2015 it launched Operation Sophia, with patrolling warships seeking to destroy suspected smuggling vessels close to the Libyan coast. Though they often get involved in rescues, the effect has been to make the route riskier without much reducing the number trying it. This year 3,173 migrants are known to have died or gone missing in the central Mediterranean, up from 2,794 in 2015 (the real numbers will be higher).

Once one group of people-smugglers has been identified and arrested another will pop up, says Calogera Ferrara, an Italian prosecutor in Palermo. And their methods also shift in response to changing policies. As their wooden boats have been destroyed, they have switched to flimsy rubber dinghies, which are hard to spot on the horizon and carry barely enough fuel to reach international waters, where the migrants on board have a chance of being picked up. One of the men rescued by Dignity 1 says that the smugglers gave him a satellite phone with which to call the Italian coastguard, and told him to throw it overboard afterwards so it could not be traced back to them.
The routes African migrants take to reach the Libyan coast form a web across the continent (see map) along which are strung safe houses, brokers and drivers, loosely linked by personal connections. Many pass through Agadez in northern Niger, the last settlement before the Sahara desert. A dusty city of 120,000 souls, it was founded a millennium ago for caravans of camels carrying salt and gold to west Africa. Now its trade is in people.