Thanks to Wikipedia being dark today (a move I support, by the way) I can't do the research to find what I assume would be there - a complete timeline of the Costa cruise ship disaster.
But apparently, after the ship grounded and tilted and began to take on water, the captain of the boat and most of its crew abandoned ship, leaving the passengers behind to fend for themselves.
At some point in time, the Italian coast guard arrived, and the captain of one of those ships ordered the captain of the Costa to get back on board and direct rescue efforts.
The other captain refused.
Now, with that timeline, the cruise ship captain is being castigated as a coward.
No argument there.
But the other captain is being hailed as a hero. Why? He kept yelling other orders for the first captain to get back on his ship. Very good. But that was his job. Nothing heroic about it.
what would have been heroic is if he'd said, "Eff this" and ordered his boat close to the cruise ship so that he himself could get on board and direct rescue efforts from there.
But that's not what he did .
So no, he's not a hero. Just someone who was trying to make someone else do his job.
I will do more research tomorrow to see exactly what happened - I admit all I've been reading are the headlines, and today, the article about "A tale of two captains".
Also, many responders to these articles, have been wondering why the passengers waited for life boats and did not just swim to shore which was "a few hundred yards away." They're also getting criticized for referring to their terrifying experience as "like the Titanic."
For myself, I'm pretty sure they're not referring to the Titanic that went down in 1912, but rather the Titanic movie with Leonard DiCaprio, which had all the scenes of the ship turning over and people trying to crawl up a vertical floor, etc. No need to criticize them for that!
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