Ships Do Not Sink Because of Water Around Them, Ships Sink Because of Water That Gets into Them

On 10 August 1628 the Swedish warship Vasa, the pride of the royal navy and decorated with hundreds of carved figures, set sail on her maiden voyage from Stockholm harbour. A light breeze caught her sails, and she heeled over, took water through her open gun ports and sank within a mile of the quay, in front of crowds who had come to see her off. The sea around her was calm. She sank because she was too narrow and too heavily armed on her upper decks, so that she had no stability. The proverb of the topic, that ships do not sink because of the water around them but because of the water that gets into them, could have been written for her.

The meaning is plain enough. The sea is always there, and a ship is built to float on it. The danger arises when the sea enters through a breach, a flaw in design, a hatch left open or a seam that has failed. The same applies to a person, a company or a state. Pressure from outside is a constant condition of life. What destroys is the weakness within that allows the pressure in.

Ships have repeatedly confirmed the point. The Tudor warship Mary Rose sank in the Solent in 1545 in front of Henry VIII, apparently after a turn in a light wind when water poured through gun ports that had been left open, though historians continue to debate the exact cause. The Titanic was struck on the night of 14 April 1912 by an iceberg that opened a series of her forward compartments, and she was designed to survive the flooding of four. Investigations later pointed to brittle rivets and a design that allowed water to spill over the tops of the bulkheads. Water outside is harmless until it finds its way in.

Organisations fall for similar reasons. In January 2009 the chairman of Satyam Computer Services, Ramalinga Raju, confessed that he had inflated the company's accounts by more than a billion dollars over several years, comparing himself to a man who had ridden a tiger and could not dismount. Satyam was a well known firm in a booming industry. It was brought down by a falsehood inside. Enron in 2001 and Lehman Brothers in 2008 also collapsed from concealed internal rot. In each case a rising tide of apparent success had covered the damage.

In each case a rising tide of apparent success had covered the damage.

Empires and states, too, tend to fail from within. Edward Gibbon argued in the eighteenth century that Rome fell largely because of internal decay in civic virtue and the rise of a corrupt, overextended administration, and not only because of the barbarians. Jared Diamond has examined societies that collapsed, from the Norse in Greenland to the Maya, and found that environmental stress and hostile neighbours were common, but the decisive factor was often how the society responded, what it chose to preserve and what it refused to change. The pressure from the sea is a constant, and the character of the hull is what matters.

The proverb applies to the mind, and this is perhaps its most important use. The Stoic Epictetus taught in the first century that men are disturbed not by things but by the views which they take of them. A person faces insult, failure and loss, but the suffering depends largely on the thoughts he lets in. Aaron Beck's cognitive therapy, developed in the 1960s, rests on the observation that depression is maintained by a negative triad of thoughts about the self, the world and the future. Treatment consists in identifying and repairing these internal leaks. The storm cannot be stopped, but the hold can be kept dry.

Resilience, then, is a matter of keeping the hull sound. For an individual this means habits of sleep, relationships, purpose and reflection that strengthen him against shocks. For an organisation it means honest accounting, a culture where bad news can be reported and a leadership that fixes small cracks before they widen. For a nation it means institutions that correct errors and a citizenry that trusts them. A ship in good condition can ride out a gale that would sink a neglected one. Regular maintenance, honest inspection and small repairs matter more than heroic rescues, since a hull rarely fails on the day of the storm but on the day it was neglected.

Yet the proverb must not be taken as saying that the sea is never to blame. There are storms that sink well made ships. The Edmund Fitzgerald went down in a gale on Lake Superior in 1975, and the tsunami of 2004 wrecked everything in its path, regardless of the soundness of the buildings. A pandemic in 2020 overwhelmed health systems that were sound by any ordinary standard. To say that failure is always internal is to blame the victim and to ignore external forces such as war, famine and economic shocks that overwhelm even the well prepared.

There is a moral danger, in particular, in applying the proverb to individuals suffering from conditions imposed by society. A farmer crushed by a drought and a debt, or a woman caught in a violent household, may be told that her trouble lies in her mindset. In such cases it is the water around them that is lethal, and the hull, which they did not build, was never meant to resist it. The wiser reading of the proverb asks who made the hull, and whether it was built to withstand the sea that its passengers must cross.

That question points to a final complication. A ship is designed by the people who ship it, but sailors on board did not choose its design, and the flaws that finally let the water in may have been planted a long time before. In the case of the Vasa, the king himself demanded the extra gun deck. The responsibility for leaks is thus distributed between those who sail and those who commissioned, and the water, which enters at one place, can be traced back through a chain of decisions that nobody on deck can see.