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Concordia disaster: Should a captain go down with his ship?

Courage is a virtue and heroism is admirable, but do we have a right to demand them?

If we are cowardly in small things, shall we be brave in large? Have we the right to point the finger until we have been tested ourselves? When we read of the seemingly lamentable conduct of the captain of the Costa Concordia, Francesco Schettino, who left his passengers to their fate, do we say, "There but for the grace of God go I"?

Of course, leadership entails an obligation to be courageous — morally, physically or both. It is the price of leadership; it is why leaders are more highly regarded and rewarded than the rest of us. But even subordinates in certain professions have the duty to be brave, as the rest of us do not. A soldier is expected unquestioningly to put himself in the way of bullets as a civilian is not.

I have witnessed some very fine instances of bravery. Once, as a junior doctor, I was walking through the hospital grounds when I noticed a patient sitting on a bench slashing his wrists with a broken bottle of vodka whose contents he had just drunk. I asked him to come into the hospital where I could sew him up (sobering him up was beyond my powers). He refused and I went to fetch a porter to drag him in by force.

By the time we returned, he had climbed up the fire escape (it was a Victorian building) and clambered over the railings on to a narrow ledge three storeys up, on which he was swaying drunkenly. The porter and I went up the fire escape: the man threatened to jump if we came nearer.

We decided we had to make a grab for him; as we did so, he jumped. We held him suspended by his arms three storeys up. First he shouted, "Let me go, you bastards!" and then, "Help, I'm falling!" — a metaphor for the whole of human life, when you come to think of it.

We were not strong enough to haul him over the ledge or even to hang on to him for long. By the luckiest chance, two policemen arrived at the hospital and, hearing the commotion and grasping the situation, they rushed up the fire escape to our assistance. Without a moment's hesitation, they climbed on to the ledge themselves and hauled the man to safety. If he had put up the slightest struggle, they would all three have fallen to their deaths.

They brushed away my commendation, and even my thanks; in their own opinion, they had only done their duty, what they were expected, and expected themselves, to do. Of course, if they had done otherwise, a man's life would have been lost, and four men would have been prey to a lifetime of painful self-examination. The policemen would have wondered whether they should have saved the man; the porter and I would have wondered whether, in grabbing the man, we had acted recklessly and irresponsibly.

I witnessed another instance of great bravery many years later, when times were changed. It was in the prison in which I worked as a doctor. A prisoner set fire to his mattress in his cell, and years of research by the Home Office seemed to have gone into disproving the old saying that there is no smoke without fire, for the mattress produced the thickest, most acrid, black smoke that I have ever encountered, without much in the way of flame. Moreover, the building being very new and expensive, the architect had omitted to consider the question of ventilation that would allow smoke to escape in the event of fire — unlike Victorian architects. The prison was a penal Costa Concordia.

With no thought for his own safety, a prison officer entered the cell and pulled the prisoner to safety. I have no doubt that he saved the man's life. As I sent the officer to hospital to be treated for possible smoke inhalation, I praised him highly and said I expected he would receive an official commendation.

He smiled pityingly at my naivety and said: "A reprimand more likely." And so it proved: he had not followed procedure, which was to leave it for the fire brigade. The man would have been dead, of course, but at least the official inquiry afterwards could have been assured that he died by the book, that procedure had been followed.

A world in which a man can be reprimanded for bravely saving another's life is not propitious for the widespread practice of bravery. Virtues tend to disappear in the dissolving acid of rationality.

What, then, might Captain Schettino say in his defence? Let us, for the sake of argument, leave aside the possibility that the whole disaster was an error of his seamanship, and suppose instead that it was what some people call "one of those things".

In a world used to the utilitarian zeitgeist, he might say that if he had stayed on board and gone down with his ship, nobody who died would have been spared. We imagine a captain on his deck, as he slips under the waves, but this is quixotic romanticism if in fact no one is saved. A captain's life is worth as much as anyone else's; nobody's interest is served by his needless death.

Can we be sure that if Captain Schettino had kept calm and carried on, fewer people would have died? Can it be wholly his fault if the crew were not properly trained and members of it were not even able to communicate with each other, let alone with all the passengers? He could, of course, have refused his command: but how many of us resign our jobs on a matter of principle? If we were to do so, the unemployment rate would be nearly 100 per cent.

All this is special pleading, ex post facto rationalisation. Before the event, the captain accepted his own authority without difficulty or reservation. He was, however, tried and found wanting, perhaps for reasons partly personal but perhaps partly cultural: not because he was Italian but because he was modern — that is to say, without an unthinking allegiance to a standard of conduct that in some circumstances might be, or might appear, ridiculous or counterproductive but in others is essential to the performance of difficult duty.

I hope it is not taken for lack of sympathy for the victims and their relations to say that, on the scale of human monstrosity, the captain does not climb very high. His place on the scale of human weakness is another matter.

Hard cases make bad law and even worse sociology, though they are the stock in trade of philosophy, and there is no wickedness or weakness under the sun that is without precedent. Captain Schettino's story appears human, all too human: possibly a vainglorious man (but there are worse crimes than vainglory) who panicked at the one crucial moment of his career, and who will now spend the rest of his life in a state of bitter remorse and regret.

Could he have known in advance that he was not up to the mark, that no man was less fitted than he for such an emergency? I hope it is not taken for lack of sympathy for the victims and their relations to say that, on the scale of human monstrosity, the captain does not climb very high. His place on the scale of human weakness is another matter.

As it happens, one of the great books of our literature, Lord Jim by Joseph Conrad, deals with a similar case. The hero, if that is quite the word for him, is mate on an old rust bucket that is taking 800 Muslim pilgrims to Arabia. The boat sinks and Jim saves his skin, an act of cowardice for which he pays for the rest of his life. Marlow, the narrator of the story, describes his fate in words that resonate today:

"Nothing more awful than to watch a man who has been found out, not in a crime but in a more than criminal weakness. The commonest sort of fortitude prevents us from becoming criminals in the legal sense; it is from weakness unknown, but perhaps suspected, as in some parts of the world you suspect a deadly snake in every bush — from weakness that may lie hidden, watched or unwatched, prayed against or manfully scorned, repressed or maybe ignored more than half a lifetime, not one of us is safe."

Theodore Dalrymple. "Concordia disaster: Should a captain go down with his ship?" The Telegraph (January 18, 2012).

Reprinted with permission of the author, Theodore Dalrymple.

THE AUTHOR

Copyright © 2012 Theodore Dalrymple