

The volunteers of Sea-Watch say they’re lifesavers. Italian officials call them smugglers. We were on board for a standoff at sea.

The waters were calm off the Libyan coast late on the evening of May 14, but the travelers were nervous. They were 65 people huddled on a blue rubber boat, most from West Africa and all intent on getting to Europe.

Many on board doubted they would make it there — at least not on this flimsy craft. But the smugglers were reassuring as they shoved the boat out toward its fate: “Sea-Watch is coming.”

Sea-Watch or, really, Sea-Watch 3: one of the last of the volunteer rescue boats scouring the Mediterranean in search of migrants, now under intense scrutiny from some European officials.

The oldest passenger on the rubber boat was a 40-year-old from the Ivory Coast, Mohamed Fofana, who was making his third crossing attempt. The youngest was just 5 months old, a Ghanaian boy named Yussif. But the price the smugglers demanded for a spot was the same for young and old: 3,000 Libyan dinars, or roughly $2,100.

CreditThe New York Times

And that didn’t buy much. As the craft bobbed in the water off Libya, one of the smugglers stayed on long enough to explain how to keep the small motor running. Then he swam back to shore.

Now it all depended on a rescuer.

The timing, the smugglers told them, was optimal. “They prayed with us,” Mr. Fofana recalled later, “and they told us: ‘Sea-Watch is coming. Sea-Watch is still coming.’”

Earlier in the week, the 50-meter salvage vessel had left Marseilles, France, headed toward the Libyan coast on another mission. We joined the crew to see what these missions look like in the face of increasing pressure from Europe to seal off migration routes.

At the height of the migrant crisis in 2015, more than a million migrants crossed the Mediterranean and record numbers drowned along the way.

As governments struggled to handle the influx, some Europeans rushed to offer aid. State and N.G.O.-run naval rescue missions greatly expanded and Sea-Watch put its first ship into action.

Others rushed to the barricades, and populist movements began to swell. The problem, elected officials soon learned, was a political live wire.

The migrants were fleeing poverty and, often, violence and political oppression. But after failing to stem the human tide, European governments hit on a new approach: They outsourced the job to Libya, a country in the midst of a civil war, outfitting it with patrol boats and giving it money for migrant detention centers.

In doing so, they indirectly funded the militias running these notoriously brutal facilities, many of whom are also profiting from human trafficking.

The flow of migrants dried up, but a new crisis has emerged in these detention centers and Europe has not been eager to address its role.

Some migrants still take to the seas, though. And some rescue ships still look for them. This is the story of how some of them crossed paths, and of the standoff with the Italian government that followed.

Neil Collier is a video journalist. Before joining The Times in January 2016 he was a producer for Al Jazeera in Doha and San Francisco. Before that, he was a broadcast journalist for BBC Arabic in London.