It was 10.30am when Forbes Duthie heard a loud bang, but it seemed like nothing out of the ordinary for a big ship in a storm. So the 20-year–old cadet from near Inverness lay in his bunk a little longer, then went for a shower.

A few minutes later Duthie was in no doubt about what had happened to the MSC Napoli. A Turkish crewmate came rushing up the steps shouting at him to pull on his lifejacket as the ship was breaking up and the captain had ordered everyone off.

The noise that had woken Duthie was the opening of jagged vertical cracks on either side of the hull of the 63,000- ton container ship. The boat had effectively snapped and seawater was gushing into the engine room faster than the pumps could cope, immobilising the vessel and leaving it at the mercy of the storm.

At the entrance to the boat deck, the cadet took his place among his 25 crewmates and waited to board the ship’s lifeboat, a fully enclosed, ridged-hulled capsule that hung on winches buffeted by the force nine gale. Once all were aboard, Captain Valentin Velev, the Napoli’s Bulgarian skipper, ordered its launch and the small craft slammed down into the raging sea.

“There were 26 people in there,” said Duthie. “There were people saying ‘give us air’. There was lots of vomiting from all the crew, including myself.”

The following two hours were the most terrifying of the young cadet’s life. Unable to see out from the lifeboat, the men could do little but pray as 40ft waves tossed and battered their cramped and filthy craft. They then had to be winched, one by one, into Royal Navy helicopters flying close to the limit of their capabilities in the storm.

“The relief for me came as soon as I was in the helicopter,” said Duthie. “But my parents had heard the ship was sunk and there was a rescue operation to find any survivors. It must have been a terrible experience but they won’t talk about it. There were tears when I called, they were over the moon.”

The storm that took the 16- year-old Napoli was the worst in Britain for nearly a decade, killing 13 people across the country. The ship was saved from sinking only when an Anglo-French rescue mission towed it onto a sandbank off Devon.

Yet the images that went round the world were not of the relieved crew and the pilots who had risked their lives to save them, but of hundreds of scavengers picking through the Napoli’s scattered cargo at Branscombe on the Devon coast. They made off with everything from BMW motorbikes and oak wine barrels to oil-coated packs of Ferrero Rocher chocolates.

An unseemly episode, certainly, but the fate of the Napoli also raises troubling questions about the sea worthiness and regulation of the 8,000 container ships that plough the world’s oceans — vessels on which globalisation and the boom in intercontinental trade depends.

“It is hard to see how a ship could suffer this type of structural failure if she was

in a seaworthy condition,” said Andrew Nicholas, a partner with the London law firm Clyde & Co. It is representing a consortium of insurers who are preparing to sue the ship’s owners for allegedly running an unseaworthy vessel.

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