An inadvertent lesson from a nautical scoundrel The wreck of the cruise ship Costa Concordia off the Italian island of Giglio is a disaster on an extraordinary scale. The Costa Concordia is the largest ship ever built in Italy. It cost $450m and weighs over 200m pounds. Of the ship's 4,200 passengers, 11 have been confirmed dead, and dozens more are missing. But there is a contrast to other recent large-scale failures, whether of US military generals, eurozone politicians or global investment bankers: international public opinion has settled on one man to play the role of scapegoat and scoundrel. Captain Francesco Schettino opened a 50-metre-long gash in the port side of the Costa Concordia when he made an unscheduled pass too close to Giglio after dark last weekend - reportedly to impress a local crew member. He was slow to recognise the damage, and dinner was announced on board as scheduled. When the boat began to list and then fell on to its starboard side, Schettino was hard to find. Leaked Italian Coast Guard transmissions indicate that he left ship with some of his senior crew while hundreds of passengers were still waiting to be rescued. Abandoning passengers is punishable under Italian law by 12 years in jail. Mr Schettino, who is under house arrest, reportedly claimed to have fallen into a lifeboat and been unable to get back on board. He has become an international symbol of vanity, negligence and pusillanimity. The Daily Mail calls him Captain Coward. The New York Post calls him Chicken of the Sea. He denies wrongdoing. In one respect, the criticism of Mr Schettino appears unjust. The decision to race the boat past Giglio Porto has been cited as evidence that the captain was reckless, even a daredevil. Whether he was or not, this sort of display - known as an inchino, or "taking a bow" - was common practice in the cruise industry. The Italian newspaper Il Giornale reported that it had been done 52 times previously in Giglio, and that the official blog of Costa Crociere described the inchino done by Mr Schettino himself before the port of Procida. Meanwhile, the daily Corriere del Mezzogiorno showed photos of an unidentified cruise ship passing between two pillars of rock - which swimmers are known to frequent - off the Isle of Capri. It is in reacting to the accident that Mr Schettino fell short. All sea captains once understood that, under certain rare circumstances, the job required staying aboard - and even going down with - the ship. Failure to do so meant dishonour. But for many people over the last half-century, sea travel has changed from a dangerous necessity into a pastime. There never came a moment when people reassessed whether this meant a change in what it meant to be a sea captain, too. For the Livorno coastguardsman Gregorio Maria de Falco, who urged Mr Schettino to get back on board and tend to the "women and children," being a ship's captain was still a calling, with a solemn code. For Mr Schettino, being a ship's captain was a job that involved keeping the party going and the passengers entertained. The dangers of sea travel are the very last thing cruise lines want their customers to think about. And, so relatively safe has cruising become, they and their captains can hardly be accused of negligence for paying less attention to such matters than sea captains of yore. Now that disaster has struck, we profess to prefer Mr de Falco's way to Mr Schettino's. But in fact, every single weapon that advertising and government have at their disposal has been deployed to Mr Schettino's thrill-seeking and to demean Mr de Falco's calls for responsibility as fogeyish. "Women and children" indeed! Captains have a code of honour because sea travel is fraught with dangers. The code of honour disappears when the dangers do, and no one feels any poorer for it. But it was hard to repress a sense, in listening to that Coast Guard tape, that Mr De Falco sounded like a freer man than Mr Schettino. Following a code is not just drudgery. It is the alternative to getting bossed around, to submitting to rules and hierarchies. This is true in general: "To live outside the law you must be honest," as Bob Dylan put it. And it is true in a specific way of Italy, where a policeman asked for direction might give the advice (and permission) to drive the wrong way down a one-way street. Italy's preference for unwritten rules is what makes this highly bureaucratised society seem nonetheless extremely free. Binding duties to others create the possibility of doing without supervision. For a long time now it has been fashionable to assume that we have no duties to anyone, beyond maximising our own consumption. That is why the hand of authority is beginning to weigh heavily on us.