Must a Captain Be the Last One Off a Sinking Ship?

Moral Code

The Titanic's captain went down with his ship

Accounts of captains leaving their sinking ships are extremely rare but not unique.

In 1991, Yiannis Avranas, the captain of a Greek cruise liner, was also strongly criticized after leaving the ship as it started to sink off the South African coast. He said he supervised the rescue effort from a helicopter. All 561 people aboard the Oceanos were eventually rescued.

In 2000, the captain of a Greek ferry, the Express Samina, which sank killing more than 60 people, was accused of failing to help passengers flee the sinking vessel.
File photograph of the Titanic The Titanic's captain went down with his ship

A court will ultimately decide whether the captain of the Costa Concordia broke the law by leaving the ship when he did, but he certainly seems to have acted contrary to many people's ideas of how a captain should behave.

Dr Laura Rowe, a historian at the University of Exeter who specializes in naval history, says the expectation that a ship's captain would stay on board until everyone has been evacuated developed in the mid-19th Century.

"At that point, the captain is expected to have a very close affinity with the ship itself. Captains are fully expected to be the last one off, if not to go down with the ship. They are known as the 'father of the ship'," she says.

This relationship was necessary to help enforce discipline, she says.

"The sea is a treacherous place and the crew have to have faith in the captain - if discipline is undermined or breaks down, then the ship becomes a less safe place, and more people risk being injured."

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Must a Captain Be the Last One Off a Sinking Ship?

The captain of the Costa Concordia, which crashed into rocks off the Italian coast and capsized, has been criticised for allegedly leaving the ship while passengers were still on board. Is a ship's captain legally required to be the last one off?

In the popular tradition of the sea, a ship's captain is expected to stay until all the passengers have been safely evacuated.

Fixed in the public imagination is Captain Edward Smith of the Titanic, who was last seen on or near the bridge of the ship as it went down.

In contrast, Captain Francesco Schettino is said to have left the Costa Concordia while many passengers were still struggling to reach safety.

A recording of a conversation between Captain Schettino and an Italian coastguard has been made public, in which the coastguard orders him back on to the ship to count the number of women and children remaining. The captain replies that he is co-ordinating the evacuation from a lifeboat.

Ultimate authority

Edward Phillips, principal lecturer in the department of law and criminology at the University of Greenwich, says a captain who fails in his duty in Italian waters could in theory be prosecuted under either international or national law.

• A captain may be charged with a breach of duty of care, depending on the law in the country where the accident happened
• An international convention of which Italy is a signatory says captains bear responsibility for the vessel's safety
• In international customary law, captains must follow principles of prudent seamanship - which means taking responsibility for the safety of crew and passengers
• There is a strong expectation among seamen that the captain will not leave until passengers have been safely evacuated

Customary international law requires captains to operate under the principles of prudent seamanship, which means caring for the safety of crew and passengers, he says.

A captain's legal responsibilities are also set out in the Safety of Life at Sea (SOLAS) convention, which has been adopted by 161 of 170 member states of the International Maritime Organization. Italy is a member.

The first version of the treaty was passed in 1914, directly as a result of the sinking of the Titanic.


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How Snails Point to the Trails of Ancient Seafarers in Ireland

Laura Holden

Cepaea nemoralis, a common land snail, may have been brought over to Ireland when European travelers came over to settle there.

When a group of French or Spanish travelers sailed the Atlantic to Ireland about 8,000 years ago, they carried along a species of snails that today bear genetic witness to their passage. The snails might have been stowaways — or maybe they were just snacks.

Irish land snails today possess certain genetic markers that are shared solely with snails living in the northern Spain and southern France. A single delivery by humans — whether as cargo or escargot — is the best explanation for the genetic relationship between the two geographically distant species, researchers at the University of Nottingham suggest.

"It's a packed lunch that they would have carried around with them," Angus Davison, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Nottingham. 

... "This work suggests quite strongly that they were taken to Ireland by Spanish people, which is still a bit weird, because why would they do it?" Jones said, "[If this was] anywhere else you'd think they were mad," but in parts of France and Spain, where cave dwellings with millions of snail shells have been discovered, there's strong evidence that snails were a dietary staple. As Jones explained: "What's easier, to chase down a woolly mammoth and eat it, or pick up a lot of snails?"

When those cave dwellers moved, they may have taken snails along. "While they weren't the first humans, this lot came from France ... without stopping along the way," Davison explained. If they stopped en route to go ashore for long, the snails would have died, or been found in other parts of Europe, too. "It tells you about a single event," he said.

Davison and Adele Grindon (then a graduate student at the University of Nottingham) spent two years collecting samples of the snail species Cepaea nemoralis from Ireland, Britain, Northern Spain and Southern France. Then they analyzed the mitochondrial DNA of the specimens — an easy section to sequence, Davison explained. They found seven snail lineages around Europe, one of which was unique to only two places: Ireland and the slopes of the Pyrenees.  

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George S. Patton

Gen. George Smith Patton Jr. was one of the most brilliant soldiers in American history. Audacious, unorthodox and inspiring, he led his troops to great victories in North Africa, Sicily and on the Western Front. Nazi generals admitted that of all American field commanders he was the one they most feared. To Americans he was a worthy successor of such hardbitten cavalrymen as Philip Sheridan, J. E. B. Stuart and Nathan Bedford Forrest.

Patton deliberately cultivated a flashy, distinctive image in the belief that this would inspire his troops. He carried a flashy ivory-handled, Smith & Wesson Model 27 .357 Magnum. He was usually seen wearing a highly polished helmet, riding pants, and high cavalry boots. He was known to oversee training maneuvers from atop a tank painted red, white and blue. His jeep bore oversized rank placards on the front and back, as well as a klaxon horn which would loudly announce his approach from afar.

Historian Alan Axelrod wrote that "for Patton, leadership was never simply about making plans and giving orders, it was about transforming oneself into a symbol." Patton intentionally expressed a conspicuous desire for glory, atypical of the officer corps of the day which emphasized blending in with troops on the battlefield. He was an admirer of Admiral Horatio Nelson for his conspicuous actions in leading the Battle of Trafalgar in a full dress uniform. Patton had a preoccupation with bravery, wearing his rank insignia conspicuously in combat, and at one point during World War I rode atop a tank into a German-controlled village seeking to inspire courage in his men.[59] He was also a staunch fatalist, and was unabashed in his belief in reincarnation, specifically that he may have been a military leader killed in action in Napoleon's army in a previous life, or a Roman legionary.

Patton's final assignment was to command the Fifteenth United States Army based in Bad Nauheim. The Fifteenth Army at this point consisted only of a small headquarters staff tasked to compile a history of the war in Europe. Patton had accepted the post because of his love of history, but quickly lost interest in the duty.

He began traveling, visiting Paris, Rennes, Chartres, Brussels, Metz, Reims, Luxembourg, and Verdun, as well as Stockholm where he reunited with other athletes from the 1912 Olympics. Patton decided he would leave his post at the Fifteenth Army and not return to Europe once he left on December 10 for Christmas leave. He intended to discuss with his wife whether he would continue in a stateside post or retire.

On December 8, Patton's chief of staff, Major General Hobart Gay, invited him on a pheasant hunting trip near Speyer to lift his spirits. At 11:45 on December 9, Patton and Gay were riding in Patton's 1938 Cadillac Model 75 staff car driven by Private First Class Horace L. Woodring when they stopped at a railroad intersection to allow a train to pass. Patton, observing derelict cars along the side of the road, spoke as the car crossed the railroad track, "How awful war is. Think of the waste." Woodring glanced away from the road when a 2½ ton GMC truck driven by Technical Sergeant Robert L. Thompson, who was en route to a quartermaster depot, suddenly made a left turn in front of the car. Woodring slammed the brakes and turned sharply to the left, colliding with the truck at a low speed.

Woodring, Thompson, and Gay were only slightly injured in the crash, but Patton had not been able to brace in time and hit his head on the glass partition in the back seat of the car. He began bleeding from a gash to the head and complained to Gay and Woodring that he was paralyzed and was having trouble breathing. Taken to a hospital in Heidelberg, Patton was discovered to have a compression fracture and dislocation of the third and fourth vertebrae, resulting in a broken neck and cervical spinal cord injury which rendered him paralyzed from the neck down. He spent most of the next 12 days in spinal traction to decrease spinal pressure. Although in some pain from this procedure, he reportedly never complained about it. All non-medical visitors, save for Patton's wife, who had flown from the U.S., were forbidden. Patton, who had been told he had no chance to ever again ride a horse or resume normal life, at one point commented, "This is a hell of a way to die." He died in his sleep of a pulmonary edema and congestive heart failure at about 18:00 on December 21, 1945.

Patton was buried at the Luxembourg American Cemetery and Memorial in Hamm, Luxembourg alongside other wartime casualties of the Third Army, per his request to "be buried with my men."


 

HIV deciphered, scientists hope to find its weakness

LONDON: Scientists have for the first time peeled open the virus that can lead to AIDS from its shell raising giving a priceless insight into how it can be stopped from infecting millions across the globe every year.

A team of researchers from the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine have announced that they have peeled open HIV's outer coating and discovered 4-million-atom structure inside the protein shell.

Captain T. K. Joseph

2012 was the first time that the Day of the Seafarer really got celebrated in India.

Over 2000 seafarers gathered for the function that was held in Mumbai.

Amongst the many speeches and presentations made on the occasion, one remarkable gesture of the seafaring community that stood out strikingly was their acknowledgment of Capt T. K. Joseph’s immense contribution to maritime training. Considered an icon of maritime education for having helped to raise the standard of maritime education in the country during his forty years of dedication to this field, he was presented a memento as a token of appreciation. 

I was honored to have Captain T.K. Joseph as an instructor.  I have great respect for him as a teacher and seafarer.

America’s 10 Million Unemployed Youth Spell Danger for Future Economic Growth

Young Americans today are confronted by an unemployment crisis unlike any we have seen in recent times. To say that these Americans are having a difficult time entering today’s labor market is an understatement. As recent reports have documented, the unemployment crisis facing young Americans takes many forms, including high school students who are having a harder time finding afterschool jobs, twenty-somethings who are increasingly stuck in unpaid internships instead of paying jobs, and college graduates who are settling for low-wage, low-skill jobs such as waiting tables or serving coffee.

While each of these is evidence of the troubles facing young workers, none lays out the full scope of the nation’s youth-unemployment crisis. The reality is that youth unemployment is a much bigger problem than lawmakers have acknowledged. According to our analysis, there are more than 10 million Americans under the age of 25 who are currently unable to find full-time work—a number greater than the population of New York City, a city of about 8 million people.

America’s youth-unemployment crisis will have serious, enduring costs for individuals, society, businesses, and all levels of government. At 16.2 percent, the unemployment rate among Americans ages 16 to 24 is more than twice the unemployment rate for people of all ages. These young people are facing significantly higher rates of unemployment than any other age group, as Figure 1 below shows.

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Captain Coward fled from sinking cruise liner Costa Concordia leaving 300 passengers and crew to their fate

Schettino (centre) faces 20 years in prison for his part in the maritime disaster off the island off Giglio. Others were also at fault, the report found

Three hundred passengers and crew were still on the sinking cruise ship Concordia as its captain made his escape, the official report on the tragedy has revealed.

Among other damning revelations in the 176-page dossier is that the coastguard were not alerted to the incident until they were phoned by a passenger’s mother.

Half an hour after the collision, Captain Francesco Schettino had yet to put out a distress signal.

Captain Francesco Schettino was at the command of the cruise liner in January 2012 when it hit rocks off the coast of Tuscany and sank, killing 32 people

Captain Francesco Schettino was at the command of the cruise liner in January 2012 when it hit rocks off the coast of Tuscany and sank, killing 32 people

But by this time a mother of one of the passengers had informed police of an accident, after receiving a call saying that the ship was in blackout, a ceiling had collapsed and those on board were putting on their life jackets.

Some 32 people died when the Costa Cruises liner ran aground off the Italian island of Giglio in January last year, hours after leaving Civitavecchia on the first leg of a cruise round the Mediterranean.

A catalogue of errors by 53-year-old Schettino are documented in the dossier into the disaster by the Italian maritime authorities.

The captain caused the collision by sailing too fast, too close to shore, and he was distracted by people who had no business on the bridge, it found.

He had failed to consult large-scale maps, and used the wrong landmark on the island to turn the ship. He then delayed sounding the general alarm, and when he did eventually speak to the coastguard, downplayed the seriousness of  the incident.

The report appears to demolish Schettino’s claim that he saved thousands of lives by steering the ship into shore, saying the crash caused the rudder to fail. Instead, a detailed chronology reveals how he left his 4,228 passengers to fend for themselves.

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Policy change has yet to affect HIV-positive sailors

Hospital Corpsman 3rd Class Michael Ousley draws blood from a patient to test for Human Immuno-deficiency Virus (HIV) during a physical health assessment aboard the aircraft carrier USS Theodore Roosevelt

 
WASHINGTON, May 22 (UPI) -- Not a single sailor diagnosed as HIV-positive has been assigned overseas since the U.S. Navy changed its policy toward such medical conditions, officials say.

In instructions issued in August 2012, Secretary of the Navy Ray Mabus said sailors and Marines under treatment for blood-borne illnesses such as HIV and hepatitis C could be assigned overseas and to large-ship platforms.

However, the Navy's Personnel Command is still determining how to implement the change, Stars and Stripes reported Wednesday.

Personnel Command officials declined to say when the policy will actually take effect. Spokesman Lt. Cmdr. Rob Lyon said the Navy had recently completed a review to ensure affected sailors "will have the greatest opportunity to be successful, and any concerns by their receiving commands will be addressed."

Recent medical advances have influenced the change, which is aimed at helping HIV-positive sailors and Marines who are stable and have minimal medical complications.

The new policy allows medical personnel and receiving commanders to reject an assignment request based on "medical risks and needs" and whether the unit could support the sailor's required care.

Some 315 Navy service members were HIV-positive in 2012, including 250 on active duty, said Shoshana Pilip-Florea, a spokeswoman for the Bureau of Medicine and Surgery.

The Army and the Air Force still limit HIV-positive troops from being assigned overseas.

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Worst Effects of Global Warming

Storms and Floods

Experts use climate models to project the impact rising global temperatures will have on precipitation. However, no modeling is needed to see that severe storms are happening more frequently: In just 30 years the occurrence of the strongest hurricanes -- categories 4 and 5 -- has nearly doubled [source: An Inconvenient Truth].

Warm waters give hurricanes their strength, and scientists are correlating the increase in ocean and atmospheric temperatures to the rate of violent storms. During the last few years, both the United States and Britain have experienced extreme storms and flooding, costing lives and billions of dollars in damages. Between 1905 and 2005 the frequency of hurricanes has been on a steady ascent. From 1905 to 1930, there were an average of 3.5 hurricanes per year; 5.1 between 1931 and 1994; and 8.4 between 1995 and 2005 [source: USA Today]. In 2005, a record number of tropical storms developed, and in 2007, the worst flooding in 60 years hit Britain [sources: Reuters, Center for American Progress].

Warmer waters increase the likelihood of violent storms. Hurricane Dolly swept over the Texas-Mexico border in July 2008.


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