Ah, those Italians. Let’s just blame the bloody Eyeties for the catastrophe of the Costa Concordia and have done with it, shall we? That way we don’t have to think too much about the perils of floating citadels in general.
There was something peculiarly Italian about this disaster. The night his ship went down Francesco Schettino, the 52-year-old captain, was in the bar with a striking blonde on his arm who was not his wife. He stayed glued to her side until the moment the ship struck the submerged rock — which it only did because he had changed course to get in nice and close (he says 300 metres, the prosecuting judge 150) to the tiny island of Giglio, ten miles or so off the Italian mainland, and give a three-foghorn salute to the daughter of the ship’s head waiter, who lives there. In a word: a womaniser and a show-off. How very Italian. But what do you expect from a nation that elected a sex-addict clown as Prime minister three times?
And it did not, of course, end there. When the Costa Concordia started to sink, Schettino became even more Italian. He delayed sending a Mayday message for 45 minutes or so — presumably because his macho Italian pride would not permit any admission of failure. And then in true Italian style he abandoned ship, leaving behind up to 300 of the 4,250 passengers and crew. Just remind me how many gears was it that an Italian tank had in the second world war? Just the one — reverse, wasn’t it? And what of the crew? Yes, the Italian ones at any rate were just as bad as the skipper, according to passenger accounts, and the evacuation as one would expect when it finally got under way was chaotic. The crew, naturalmente, shoved passengers out of the way in the scramble for the lifeboats. The Italian among them, that is.
Well ok, but hang on a minute. Let’s just consider how a British captain and crew of a similar cruise ship might have behaved. As it happens, I have hands-on experience of British passenger vessels and their crews. For a couple of summers in the early Eighties I worked on the Herald of Free Enterprise, which sank on the night of 6 March 1987 with the loss of 193 passengers and crew moments after leaving Zeebrugge harbour.
The assistant bosun, who was no Italian and was getting his head down at the time, had forgotten to close the bow doors. So the car deck flooded and within minutes the ‘Hofee’, as we called her, was flat on her side, lying half-in and half-out of the turgid North Sea, just like the Costa Concordia in the limpid Tyrrhenian Sea. I had been a dishwasher in C deck galley, or plongeur as I described it, the lowest of the low, and they called me ‘the professor’ because I read books or else ‘shirt’ because my white shirt was different to theirs.
The rougher the sea, the better I felt, because the more the vomit, the fewer the plates, and I could hole up in the crew bar to do a spot of reading and knock back dirt-cheap crew-issue booze. We once did lifeboat drill. Needless to say the lifeboat at our muster station got stuck halfway down. ‘Women and children first,’ said Scouse, the chief cook: ‘You must be joking.’
Each time the Herald weighed anchor at a start of a cross channel run, Bert the Chief Purser would announce over the tannoy: ‘Harbour stations, harbour stations, stand by fore and aft.’ And many of the crew, like parrots, would repeat out loud: ‘Harbour stations, harbour stations, stand by for a laugh.’
While boxing off my plates, I often used to think: God, if we sink, we’re fish food. If the power fails and the lifts fail, unless you are near a door that opens on to an open-air deck, you are locked inside the hull — which is invariably the case if you are, say, in your cabin. Portholes? No dice. They do not open.
Unlike flying, which is uncivilised and terrifying, at least in a car or a train you are in touch with the ground and have a fighting chance of exercising some control over your destiny if disaster strikes. The same is true in some ways of a cruise ship. As long as you don’t ever go to bed.
I travel by boat every now and again between Italy and Greece or Croatia, but I remain in the bar or on deck outside the bar. The crew, be they Italian, Greek, Croat or British, are just the crew — human beings quite capable of making errors. It is the ship I worry about more.
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