Ever since Francesco Schettino decided to treat a 114,000-tonne cruise ship like a Jet Ski and buzz Isola del Giglio off Tuscany on Friday the 13th, people around the world have been ripping him.

Ripping his tan. Ripping the way he showed off his chest hair. Ripping his matinee-idol looks. Ripping the attention he allegedly paid to lissome young female passengers.

But mostly ripping the fact that he abandoned the Costa Concordia before making sure all the passengers and crew were safe, refusing to go back on board even as an Italian coast guard captain ripped him up and down.

At least 17 people are known to have died in the shipwreck. Fifteen more are missing and presumed dead.

The Italian press is mortified; the country finally got rid of Silvio Berlusconi and then this guy comes along. The British press is calling him "Captain Coward." The captain is under house arrest and could face a long list of criminal charges.

Almost nobody, as far as I can tell, is expressing any empathy for the man. But my guess is this: Under similar circumstances, at least 95 per cent of the people criticizing Schettino would, in a dark night with a ship sinking under them, do exactly the same thing he did. Give it a spit and a lick and hit the silk.

We wouldn't be proud of it, but that's what we'd do.

In our imaginations, we are all noble and brave. But honour and selfsacrifice are qualities far rarer than we'd like to think.

Look around. People are copping pleas and making excuses all over the place. Politics, business, sports, entertainment. That's why we have coverups.

That's why we have weak nonapologies like, "I certainly meant no offence by calling you a weasel."

If people won't even step forward and say, "My bad. I shouldn't have (lied) (cheated) (injected steroids) (run the red light) (invaded Iraq) (whatever)," then how can they pass judgment on a guy who wouldn't stay on a sinking ship until everyone else was off?

The navy is smart. It doesn't let just anyone command a ship. In the navy, it takes years. Training. Discipline. Duty. And above all, you don't want to let the people you command think you don't have what it takes.

Apparently cruise-ship companies may not be so particular; sailing a bunch of tourists around the Mediterranean doesn't require the same set of values as commanding a warship.

I went looking through the history books for someone at the other end of the command spectrum from Captain Schettino.

History is replete with heroes, possibly because cowards usually don't get remembered. Most of the heroes were naval mariners, but there are plenty of examples of merchant captains, fishing captains and even yachtsmen who made sure everyone else got off first.

Many of them went down with their ships.

The code does not require that. It does, however, require that the commander be the last guy off, and sailors take it seriously.

Consider the hero of Joseph Conrad's Lord Jim.

He is haunted that as a young mate, he and his cowardly captain abandoned a steamer full of pilgrims, failing his own code, failing the code of the sea, failing mankind.

"The real significance of crime," writes Conrad, "is in its being a breach of faith with the community of mankind."