The captain goes down with the ship The captain goes down with the ship "The captain goes down with the ship" is an idiom and maritime tradition that a sea captain holds ultimate responsibility for both his ship and everyone embarked on it, and that in an emergency, he will either save them or die trying. Although often connected to the sinking of RMS "Titanic" in 1912 and its captain, Edward J. Smith, the phrase precedes "Titanic" by at least 11 years. In most instances, the captain of the ship forgoes his own rapid departure of a ship in distress, and concentrates instead on saving other people.
RMS Titanic in popular culture gave a fairly short first-hand account in her posthumously published "Titanic Survivor" (1997). "Carpathia"s 1912 captain, Arthur Rostron, published an account of his own role in his 1931 autobiography "Home from the Sea". Various other authors of the first wave published compilations of news reportage, interviews and survivors' accounts. However, as W. B. Bartlett comments, they were "marked by some journalism of highly suspect and sensationalist variety ... which tell[s] more about the standards of journalistic editorialism at the time than they do about what really happened on the "Titanic"." The British writer Filson Young's book "Titanic", described by Richard