The bleak calculation made by the passengers on the Ezadeen

Well, thank God they made it. The Ezadeen, formerly a livestock carrier and now adapted for its human cargo of 360 people, has arrived today at Corigliano Calabro near Lecce. The Italian coastguard, which brought the vessel into port, has been conspicuously humane in its treatment of the refugees. The newborns are to have the best of care; the other migrants – abandoned, it would seem, by the crew at some point in the voyage from Turkey – have been given a courteous reception, rather than treated as criminals.

Yet these 360 Syrians follow the 796 individuals, many also from Syria and from Eritrea, abandoned by the crew of their ship earlier this week. And that is in turn part of a larger picture whereby 150,000 migrants arrived in Italy in just this last year; in Europe as a whole it was 230,000. God knows what bleak circumstances forced them to put themselves in the hands of the traffickers but I’m not sure that readers of this magazine, in the same circumstances, would not have at least contemplated doing exactly the same.