I think what we have here is proof of a number of old
sayings. As in, mother nature is a ßitch, and she plays with loaded dice. And that people are
cheap, they want
cheap vacations and they wouldn't pay enough for the
cruise industry, or any
commercial marine industry, to be able to pay proper wages for "seamanlike" professionalism from their employees. There have been any number of video segments and articles in the last few years about how crews from all over the world earn basically nothing but tip
money for the grunt
work on these ships. Professional crew? Cost
money, so the lines employ as few as possible.
No surprises here.
Languages? What do you call someone who speaks three languages? Trilingual.
What do you call someone who speaks two languages? Bilingual.
What do you call someone who only speaks one language? American.
Yeah, well, we're spoiled by our geography, by and large. But again, no surprise that there'd be language confusion on an internationally crewed floating
hotel with an international tourist list.
But threading the needle with a
cruise ship...I'm content to wait and see what the inquiry brings out. Off
Alaska the
cruise ships (not to be confused with ocean liners) routinely snuggle up to the ice for sightseeing, and even into dead end fjords so they can amaze the passengers by rotating in place with thrusters to turn around and get back out. Showmanship. My only question would be, was this the captain's own idea, or part of the "same course 25 times a year" that Carnival reported early on, here in the US nooze.
Arrest for mansalughter? Sure, manslaughter is not murder. It just means he was legally responsible for the ship at the time deaths occurred. The whole "system" is less likely to be chastised for doing so, than for not doing so if it turns out they should have but didn't.
In time the answers will all turn up. I'm betting on "cheap" and "stupid" being among them multiple times. Although if you remember, it was, what, ten years ago? That one of the Cunard Queens squatted off Woods Hole? And fortunately did less damage to the
hull, but ended a cruise and made bigtime news. And Cunard had a reputation for being top class, not particularly cheap or stupid at all at the time.