Why does “the captain go down with the ship”?
In: Other
The captain doesn’t have to go down with the ship but the captain is responsible for everyone on the ship.
It is a very bad look if you do what the captain of the Costa Concordia did and “fall into a lifeboat” to safety instead of coordinating things on board to see that as many people as possible get of alive. Or did what the captain of the MV Sewol did and order everyone to stay put while escaping with your life.
You won’t get punished when you leave when there is nothing more that you can do to help, but since that was not always easy to establish after the fact, people tended to look at surviving captains suspiciously.
Especially back before the Titanic when not having enough boats for everyone on board was common, the captain leaving while there were still living people on the ship might mean that he was taking a chance of survival away from someone who was nominally in his charge.
You really don’t want to get the reputation of being someone like the captain of the Méduse.
that combined with chivalry and some amount of what we would today would call toxic masculinity evolved into what we got when the troopship HMS Birkenhead where the soldiers being transported stood in formation on the deck of the sinking ship as their families went to the available rescue boats “women and children first”.
For a captain to not stay on the ship to the last moment would be seen as dishonorable, dereliction of duty and cowardly.
Especially since whatever caused the ship to sink was likely going to be the captains fault anyway so even in survival they would only have to look forward to a court case and punishment and shame and dishonor. You might as well go down with ship at that point.
Nowadays ships usually carry enough lifeboats and investigations afterwards are better at assigning blame and figuring out if there was really nothing else that could have been done by the captain when he left the ship and we recognize that people are not perfect and focus as much on preventing future accidents as punishing those as fault.
So the captain doesn’t go down with the ship anymore and is not expect to, but if they are not in the last boat leaving they better have a good reason and a good explanation why they though that there was nothing else they could have done when they left.
Latest Answers