ROME >> Italian coast guard and navy vessels Saturday ferried hundreds of rescued migrants toward shore, and elsewhere in the Mediterranean Sea thousands of migrants overflowed from a shelter on a tiny tourist island.

The influx of sea arrivals came in the face of a crackdown by Italy’s right-wing government on people smugglers announced only two days earlier.

The coast guard said in a statement that overcrowding on two vessels and adverse sea and weather conditions had complicated rescue operations that began on Friday in the Ionian Sea off Calabria.

A 310-foot-long coast guard vessel took 584 migrants aboard, while two smaller coast guard motorboats took on 379 and then transferred them to an Italian naval vessel, which was headed to Augusta, a port in eastern Sicily. Separately, a boat carrying 487 people, intercepted by Italian vessels some 60 nautical miles off Crotone in Calabria on Friday, was aided.

— The Associated Press