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The wreck of the Costa Concordia on Sunday, when a 13th body was found.

There is only one sea story: I jumped. Sea stories are as fueled by jumps as romances are by misunderstandings: “I had jumped… it seems,” says Jim, chief mate on the Patna,  the stricken ship in Joseph Conrad’s Lord Jim. There are seven lifeboats for the four-hundred on board: the Patna’s Captain and three of the crew agree to abandon ship while the passengers are asleep.  As their lifeboat is descending, Jim, rooted on the deck, finds himself jumping into it. He will never understand what made him move, but he falls into “an everlasting deep hole.”

Conrad based Lord Jim on the scandal of the SS Jeddah, which sprang a leak carrying 950 pilgrims to Mecca in 1880, and was abandoned by her captain and crew. He took as his model for Jim the Jeddah’s chief mate, who claimed that he did not jump but was “thrown overboard.” The crew of the Jeddah had betrayed, Conrad believed, “a tradition… as imperative as any guide on earth could be.” A former mariner, Conrad was fascinated by what the sea does to us; how, at sea, we can betray our ideal selves.

Captain Schettino of the Costa Concordia, the Italian cruise ship which hit a reef ten days ago off the coast of the island of Giglio, has his own version of the sea story. “I fell,” he explained to a court hearing when asked to explain how he was in a lifeboat while many of his 4,000 passengers remained on the sinking ship. In an interview given to a travel writer two years earlier, Schettino said that he “would not have liked to be in the position of the captain of the Titanic,” but it is the story of the Titanic,  a ship one-third of the size of the Costa Concordia, and which hit an iceberg one hundred years ago this spring, that is being so strangely re-enacted to its finest details — including the suggestion that wealthy Russian passengers paid to secure a place in a lifeboat. First-class passengers were prioritized when the Titanic went down, with one British couple, Sir Cosmo and Lady Duff Gordon, having a lifeboat for themselves and apparently paying the crew who were rowing to safety not to return to the wreck to pick up drowning bodies. Schettino, like the Titanic’s Captain Smith, put his faith in bigness. “Today ­everything is safer than it was in the past and we are ­better ­prepared,” Schettino explained recently. “Shipbuilding,” Captain Smith told a reporter in 1907, “is such a perfect art nowadays, that absolute disaster involving passengers is inconceivable.”

But it is not Captain Smith, who went down with his ship and therefore became a hero, who Schettino resembles. It is the Titanic’s owner, J. Bruce Ismay, who jumped into a lifeboat along with the women and children, leaving 1,500 passengers on board. “As the boat was being lowered away,” Ismay later explained, “I got in.”

Ismay, like Schettino, became “the most hated man in the world.” His justification for surviving an accident largely seen as having been his own fault was that he was an “ordinary passenger” and not a member of the crew, but the subsequent inquiries described him as a “super-captain.” The owner of the ship appoints the captain, has authority over the captain, and therefore has  ultimate responsibility for the actions of the captain.

Ismay, it was said, had violated the “ancient code of the sea” but “women and children first” is not such an age-old law. Known as “the Birkenhead drill,” it is actually not a law at all.  It was first employed in 1852 when the HMS Birkenhead struck a hidden reef 50 miles out from Simon’s Bay, Cape Town; the gallantry of the men who gave their lives to save the ladies on board turned the tragedy into a tale of chivalry. For years afterwards, schoolboys all over England would recite Kipling’s lines, “To stand and be still to the Birken’ead drill is a damn tough bullet to chew.”

Sea stories are about heroes and cowards. On sinking ships we behave either impeccably or despicably, and it is the coastguard who ordered Schettino to return to his stricken vessel who has become a national idol. In a neat reversal of Schettino’s alleged actions, the hero of the Titanic, Second Officer Lightoller, described how he was ordered by the Captain to “stay” in the lifeboat he was loading with women and children. “Praises be,” Lightoller remembered in horror, “I had just sufficient sense to say ‘Not damn likely’ and jump back on board.” He acted on “pure impulse … an impulse for which I  was to thank my lucky stars a thousand times over in the days to come.”

It is because they are about pure impulse that we are fascinated by sea stories. Any number of brave and extraordinary acts take place as fear sets in and people prepare to die, and it was the baseness of Schettino’s alleged impulse which has horrified the world. Ships get bigger, but instincts stay the same. “I always suspected,” as Conrad put it, “that I might be no good.”

Frances Wilson is the author of “How to Survive the Titanic, or The Sinking of J Bruce Ismay.”

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