Luxury cruise ship Silver Shadow, which ran into a local vessel in Ha Long Bay, Vietnam, on March 16, sustained only "limited minor dents," according to Silversea Cruises. The line reports that the incident is under investigation.

Silversea, which acknowledges in a statement that "there was contact between Silver Shadow and a local commercial vessel," says "guests' safety was never compromised." The ship, which was on a nine-night cruise from Singapore to Hong Kong, reached the port of Ha Long Bay, where tours took place as scheduled. Line spokesman Brad Ball told Cruise Critic in an e-mail that the ship remains fully operational and is embarking on its next itinerary from Hong Kong today. No itineraries will be impacted.

Although Ball did not address the reasons behind the incident, Cruise Critic member oregon50 was onboard and reports, "Today, in Gulf of Tonkin in dense fog the ship had a mild collision with a small freighter. No great damage and only a 90-minute delay reaching destination."

A CNN report, including an interview with passenger Andrew Lock who is onboard, says the collision left a hole in the local vessel (here referred to as a container ship). Passengers headed to their muster stations, but the captain soon announced that the ship was not in danger.

Ball had no further comment regarding the identity of the other ship. 

More from Cruise Critic

• Learn more about Silversea Cruises
• State of the Industry: Moving forward after Concordia tragedy
• The best luxury ships at sea

The diplomatic row between Britain and Argentina over the Falkland Islands escalated a notch today when two ships carrying British passengers — P&O Cruises' Adonia and Princess Cruises' Star Princess — were turned away from the Argentine port of Ushuaia.

A spokeswoman for P&O Cruises said the official reason given for Adonia being denied entry to the port was "due to the ship having been in the Falkland Islands on Saturday." Adonia is on an 87-night round South America cruise.

Mention of Star Princess' visit to the Falkland Islands was also given in a statement from Princess Cruises. The ship is currently on a 14-night South America cruise that departed Rio de Janeiro on Feb. 18, and visited the British territory on Saturday.

Cruise Critic member Scrapchick is onboard Star Princess and commented on the message boards this morning: “We … were due in Ushuaia today after two days at sea since leaving Stanley, Falkland Islands [the islands' capital]. Last night we were told a container ship was in our berth and its crew were on strike so we could be delayed arriving in Ushuaia. At 7AM this morning the captain announced we were being denied entry to Ushuaia, along with the P&O Adonia, because both ships had come from the Falklands.”

The port from which a ship has just departed is usually not a point of contention. But 30 years after the Falklands War, the dispute between Britain and Argentina over sovereignty of the islands is threatening to boil over again. To that end, the Argentine government has recently issued a decree that all ships traveling between Argentina and the Falklands now need its permission to do so.

Although Star Princess visited Buenos Aires before Port Stanley without any problems, according to a report in the Daily Telegraph, both it and Adonia have been forced to bypass Ushuaia for that very reason: permission denied.

The antagonism works both ways. In January, Star Princess was refused entry to Port Stanley, ostensibly because it had a small outbreak of norovirus onboard, but suspicions arose that the ship was turned away because it was carrying some Argentine passengers.

Both ships have continued on to Punta Arenas, Chile, their next scheduled port of call. The cost of the passengers' excursions will be refunded. The next few ships due at either Port Stanley or Ushuaia — which include Holland America Line's Veendam and Silversea's Silver Explorer — are either coming from or headed for a Chilean port, so in theory they shouldn't be affected by the row.

More on Overhead Bin

• Falklands Denies Cruise Ship Due to Norovirus
• Travel Insurance 101
• Norovirus – What You Need to Know

Updated at 7:30 p.m. ET: Italian authorities hope to stabilize the wrecked cruise ship Costa Concordia as worsening weather on Friday could cause it to shift deeper into the sea, delaying plans to pump oil out of the vessel to prevent a possible environmental disaster.

Six days after the 114,500 ton ship capsized off the Tuscan coast, hopes of finding anyone alive in the partially submerged hulk have all but disappeared.

Eleven people are known to have died and 21 people are still unaccounted for out of more than 4,200 passengers and crew aboard when the ship struck a reef just yards from the shoreline.

In the wake of the accident, Carnival Corporation, parent company of Costa Cruises and nine leading cruise lines around the world, announced Thursday plans for a comprehensive audit and review of all safety and emergency response procedures across all of the company's cruise lines.

"While I have every confidence in the safety of our vessels and the professionalism of our crews, this review will evaluate all practices and procedures to make sure that this kind of accident doesn't happen again," said Micky Arison, Carnival Corporation's chairman and CEO, in a statement.

Most cruise ships put emphasis on safety

Attention is now turning to how to remove 2,300 tons of fuel aboard the ship, with bad weather threatening to make the ship even more precarious on the rocky ledge where it is resting.

Environment Minister Corrado Clini told parliament he had urged the ship's operator, Costa Cruises, to take all possible measures to anchor the ship to prevent it from sliding deeper into the sea.

"If the ship slides, we hope that it doesn't break into pieces and that the fuel tanks do not open up," he said.

Clini said there was a risk that the ship could sink to 50 to 90 meters below the reef it is now on, creating a major hazard to the environment in one of Europe's largest natural marine parks

Updated at 3:40 p.m. ET:

Minutes after the Costa Concordia struck a rock, a crew member told the Italian coast guard there was no emergency on board the ship, according to an audio recording aired on Sky TG 24, an all-news channel in Italy.

The crew member is believed to be an officer, but not Capt. Francesco Schettino, NBC News reported.

The conversation started about 30 minutes after the Concordia ran aground and was the first between the coast guard and the cruise liner.

"Good evening Costa Concordia, please, do you have problems on board?," a coast guard official asks the bridge.

The crew member  replies: "We've had a blackout, we are checking the conditions on board."

The coast guard asks: "What kind of a problem? Is it just something with the generator? The police ... have received a phone call from the relatives of a sailor who said that during the dinner everything was falling on his head."

The crew member says some passengers were already wearing life jackets, and repeated there had been a blackout. "We are checking the conditions on board."

REUTERS/Zhurnal Tv via Reuters TV

Costa Concordia crew member Dominica Cemortan gestures in this still image from a Jan. 17 television interview. Cemortan defended the captain's actions, saying he helped to save the lives of passengers.

Italian news reports say prosecutors want to speak to Dominica Cermotan of Moldova. Cermotan, a 25-year-old hostess who reportedly was working for Costa on the Concordia, said on her Facebook page that she wasn't on duty the night of the grounding but was with Schettino, other officers and the cruise director on the bridge. She said she was called to help with translations of instructions for how the small number of Russian passengers should evacuate.

She defended Schettino, telling Moldova's Jurnal TV that "he did a great thing, he saved over 3,000 lives."

"We were looking for them, searching for them (the Russians)," she said in the TV interview. "We heard them all crying, shouting in all languages."

Prosecutor Francesco Verusio declined to comment on whether he was seeking Cermotan as a witness, citing the ongoing investigation.

On Thursday, rescue teams resumed the search for victims from the Concordia disaster before the weather turns and salvage crews need to start pumping fuel from the wreck. The search is expected to focus on the fourth deck, around an evacuation assembly point where seven of the bodies found so far were located. NBC News' Michelle Kosinski reports that the search team has been using sonar to look at the sea floor as well.

A scuba team was poised to go inside the wrecked Italian cruise liner, Kosinski reported Thursday morning.

One of the specialist diving crews said on Thursday the available window to complete the search could be as small as 12-24 hours although the chief spokesman of the rescue services denied that any deadline had been set and said the situation was still evolving.

The Costa Serena, the sister ship of the Costa Concordia, passed the partially-sunken liner on Wednesday evening. International cruise goers put on a brave face as Costa's first Mediterranean tour since last week's tragedy set sail out of the same port near Rome as the doomed luxury liner.

Vincenzo Pinto / AFP - Getty Images

The Costa Serena, background, passes sister ship Costa Concordia on Jan. 18 off the coast of Italy's Isola del Giglio (Giglio island). International cruise goers put on a brave face as Costa's first Mediterranean tour since last week's tragedy set sail out of the same port near Rome as the doomed luxury liner.

Crew members returning home have begun speaking out about the chaotic evacuation, saying the captain sounded the alarm too late and didn't give orders or instructions about how to evacuate passengers. Eventually, crew members started lowering lifeboats on their own.

"They asked us to make announcements to say that it was electrical problems and that our technicians were working on it and to not panic," French steward Thibault Francois told France-2 television Thursday. "I told myself this doesn't sound good."

He said the captain took too long to react and that eventually his boss told him to start escorting passengers to lifeboats. "No, there were no orders from the management," he said.

Identifying victims
On Thursday, seven of the dead were identified by authorities: French passengers Jeanne Gannard, Pierre Gregoire, Francis Servil, 71, and Jean-Pierre Micheaud, 61; Peruvian crew member Thomas Alberto Costilla Mendoza; Spanish passenger Guillermo Gual, 68, and Italian passenger Giovanni Masia, who news reports said would have turned 86 next week and was buried in Sardinia on Thursday.

The first victim was identified on Wednesday as crewmember Sandor Feher, 38, of Hungary. Jozsef Balog, a pianist who worked with Feher, a violinist, told the Budapest newspaper Blikk that Feher was wearing a lifejacket when he decided to return to his cabin to pack his violin. Feher was last seen on deck en route to a lifeboat. According to Balog, Feher helped put lifejackets on several crying children before returning to his cabin.

The children of Barbara and Jerry Heil, a Minnesota couple aboard the ship that have been missing since the accident, said Wednesday in a blog posting that their parents are not among those passengers whose bodies were recently recovered.

Slideshow: Luxury cruise ship runs aground

DigitalGlobe

The Costa Concordia ran aground Jan. 13 off the coast of Italy, resulting in the evacuation of thousands of passengers as the ship began heavily listing.

Launch slideshow

Captain's 'complete inertia'
Schettino, blamed for causing the accident by steering too close to shore and then abandoning the vessel before the evacuation was complete, is under house arrest. Prosecutors said they would appeal against a decision by a judge on Tuesday to allow Schettino to return home, saying he may seek to flee.

"We do not understand why the judge took this decision and we don't agree with it," an official from the prosecutor's office in Grosseto said.

In the ruling, the judge said Schettino had shown "incredible carelessness" and "a total inability to manage the successive phases of the emergency," only sounding the alarm 30 to 40 minutes after the initial impact.

He had abandoned the ship and remained on shore in a state of "complete inertia" for more than an hour, "watching the ship sink," the ruling said.

"No serious attempt was made by the captain to return even close to the ship in the immediate aftermath of abandoning the Costa Concordia."

According to Schettino's lawyer, the captain has admitted bringing the ship too close to shore but he denies bearing sole responsibility for the accident and says other factors may have played a role.

Schettino was always available to provide information to coast guard and rescue services throughout the evacuation, even when he was not on board the vessel, his lawyer says.

Schettino said he did not abandon ship, according to a transcript published by Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper and reported by the Associated Press.

"I did not abandon a ship with 100 people on board ... the ship suddenly listed and we were thrown into the water," Schettino reportedly said during a recorded telephone conversation with Capt. Gregorio De Falco of the Italian coast guard in Livorno.

• Story: Owner of Costa Concordia pledges assistance to passengers

Schettino is accused of multiple manslaughter, causing a shipwreck by sailing too close to shore and abandoning ship before all his passengers and crew scrambled off.

More from msnbc.com and NBC News:

• Protests over austerity cuts, corruption across Romania
• How to right a stricken cruise ship
• Brother keeps hope alive as cruise search is halted
• UK soldiers arrested after Afghan sex abuse report
• Syria's 'Big Brother' looms over a tense capital

Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

Updated at 8 p.m. ET: Carnival Corp., whose luxury liner Costa Concordia capsized off the coast of Italy last Friday, said it was providing lodging, refunds and other support to people affected by the accident, even as some public relations executives criticized the company's handling of the situation.

"I give my personal assurance that we will take care of each and every one of our guests, crew and their families affected by this tragic event," said Carnival Chief Executive Micky Arison in a statement late on Wednesday — five days after the incident that left 11 people dead and 22 missing.

Costa Cruise Lines, a unit of Carnival and operator of the ship, has been arranging lodging and transportation for passengers and crew members to return home, and has offered assistance and counseling as needed. It has also begun refunding passengers their cruise fares and all costs incurred while on board.

The company also said it was contacting every passenger and crew member or their family and will be addressing personal possessions lost on board.

Public relations experts have chastised Carnival for being slow to address the disaster and vague about its response and efforts to prevent similar incidents in the future.

"There are 101 ways they could have more effectively handled the communication around the crisis," said Evan Nierman, founder of public relations firm Red Banyan Group.

Carnival would have benefited, Nierman said, if Arison were on the ground in Italy, being seen talking to victims and crew and taking charge of the situation.

Updated at 5:30 p.m. ET: The children of a Minnesota couple missing since last week's Costa Concordia disaster in Italy said Wednesday their parents are not among those passengers whose bodies were recently recovered.

Family members posted the information on their blog, and said they were praying that conditions at the stricken cruise ship would improve so authorities could resume search operations.

Jerry and Barbara Heil, of White Bear Lake, Minn., are the only Americans still unaccounted for. The Heils were among the passengers still listed as missing, according to an official tally released Wednesday by Italian authorities.

Family members, who had been waiting to hear the identities of five bodies recovered Tuesday, said on the blog that they received confirmation that their parents were not among them.

Italian rescue workers suspended operations early Wednesday after the ship shifted slightly on the rocks, creating concerns about the safety of divers and firefighters searching for the missing.

"We continue to pray and hope for advantageous conditions which will allow the search and rescue operations to continue," the Heil family said on the blog. "While it is certainly hard for us to see the recovery efforts stall due to the unstable conditions present at and around the Costa Concordia, we are also very concerned for the safety of the Italian Coast Guard as they continue to put forth a heroic effort in trying to find those who remain missing.

"We are grateful to all of those who are working so hard to find our parents," the statement said. 

Updated at 3:30 p.m. ET: Francesco Schettino, captain of the doomed Costa Concordia that partially sunk on Friday, said he did not abandon ship, according to a transcript published by Italy's Corriere della Sera newspaper and reported by the Associated Press.

"I did not abandon a ship with 100 people on board ... the ship suddenly listed and we were thrown into the water," Schettino reportedly said during a recorded telephone conversation with Capt. Gregorio De Falco of the Italian coast guard in Livorno.

The transcript also showed the coast guard official urgently commanding the captain to return to the cruise ship after he had abandoned it.

"You go on board! Is that clear? Do you hear me?" the Coast Guard officer shouted as Schettino sat safe in a life raft and frantic passengers struggled to escape the listing ship. "It is an order. Don't make any more excuses. You have declared 'Abandon ship.' Now I am in charge." 

The officer confronted him with an expletive-laced order to get back on board, which has quickly entered the Italian lexicon. The four-word phrase has become a Twitter hashtag and Italian media have shown photos of T-shirts bearing the command. 

Criminal charges including manslaughter and abandoning ship are expected to be filed by prosecutors shortly. Schettino faces a possible 12 years in prison on the abandoning ship charge alone.

Updated at 2:50 p.m. ET: A German woman listed as missing from the Costa Concordia was located alive in Germany.

Gertrud Goergens alerted police in Germany that she was alive and well, according to the Associated Press, citing the prefect's office in Grosetto, Italy.

Goergens was removed from the official list of missing late Wednesday. Twenty-three passengers are still unaccounted for:

Dayana Arlotti, Italy; William M. Arlotti, Italy; Elisabeth Bauer, Germany; Michael M. Blemand, France; Maria Dintrono, Italy; Horst Galle, Germany; Jeanne Gannard, France; Christina Mathi Ganz, Germany; Norbert Josef Ganz, Germany; Pierre Gregoire, France; Gabriele Grube, Germany; Barbara Heil, United States; Gerald Heil, United States; Egon Hoer, Germany; Mylene Litzler, France; Margarethe Neth, Germany; Inge Schall, Germany; Siglinde Stumpf, Germany; Brunhild Werp, Germany; Josef Werp, Germany; Margrit Schroeter, Germany; Maria Grazia Trecarichi, Italy; Luisa Antonia Virzi, Italy.

Three crew members are also missing: Girolamo Giuseppe, Italy; Russel Terence Rebello, India; Erika Fani Soriamolina, Peru. 

Eleven bodies have been recovered, though only one has been publicly identified: Crew member Sandor Feher, 38, of Hungary. 

Hungarian ministry spokesman Jozsef Toth said Feher's body was found inside the wreck and identified by his mother in the Italian city of Grosetto.

Jozsef Balog, a pianist who worked with Feher, a violinist, told the Budapest newspaper Blikk that Feher was wearing a lifejacket when he decided to return to his cabin to pack his violin. Feher was last seen on deck en route to a lifeboat. According to Balog, Feher helped put lifejackets on several crying children before returning to his cabin.

Separately, Rep. John Mica (R-Fla.), chairman of the House Transportation and Infrastructure Committee, said Wednesday he will hold a hearing to review cruise ship safety. The exact date has not been determined, but Mica has requested Coast Guard and Maritime Transportation Subcommittee Chairman Rep. Frank LoBiondo (R-N.J.) to aid in the investigation.

"The Costa Concordia tragedy is a wake-up call for the United States and international maritime organizations to carefully review and make certain we have in place all the appropriate standards to ensure passengers' safety on cruise ships," Mica said in a statement.

Updated at 11:40 a.m. ET: 

The Costa Concordia took a nearly identical route past Giglio Island in August to the one Friday that led to the sinking of the ship, NBC News has learned.

Adam Smallman, editor of shipping magazine Lloyd’s List, said the route taken in August, based on satellite tracking, was “authorized by the company and the coast guard.”

Slideshow: Luxury cruise ship runs aground

DigitalGlobe

The Costa Concordia ran aground Jan. 13 off the coast of Italy, resulting in the evacuation of thousands of passengers as the ship began heavily listing.

Launch slideshow

"Our assessment of the route this vessel took (in August) is it must have come perilously close, and I mean possibly within touching distance of the rock that it hit this time ... which the company is saying wholly unauthorized in terms of its proximity to the island," Smallman said.

The search for missing passengers aboard the Costa Concordia is on hold over fears that the ship is shifting, making rescue efforts more dangerous.

The captain in charge of the specialist divers searching the stricken Costa Concordia tells NBC News that they need to blow four more holes in it to gain access to the bottom of the cruise ship. Asked about the search for bodies -- some 23 people are unaccounted for according to Reuters -- the captain said there was visual evidence suggesting some bodies were at the bottom of the sea.

NBC News, citing officials involved in the rescue effort, reported that on Wednesday the ship had sunk 1.5 meters (4.9 feet) at the front and 1 meter (3.2 feet) at the back, raising concerns that the vessel may break up in the middle.

The coast guard is monitoring shifts with sensors installed by divers at the start of the rescue mission, and that movement is its main concern as it could trap divers. By late afternoon, officials still did not have enough data to reassure them that the ship had stopped resettling.

"The visibility is awful. Yesterday I couldn't see my hand in front of my face," Giuseppe Minciotti, director of a school for cave divers in the northern city of Verona and part of the specialist team deployed on the wreck, told Reuters.

"I grabbed a piece of floating debris, and I couldn't see what it was until I had my head out of the water. It was a woman's shoe," he said.  "We're waiting today for new openings to be made, and we'll see if the visibility is any better in those points."

Coast guard spokesman Cosimo Nicastro said work would focus on an evacuation assembly area on the partially submerged fourth deck, where most of the 11 bodies found so far have been located.

"It's where we have already found seven of the bodies and it's where the passengers and crew gathered to abandon ship," Nicastro said.

Fire services spokesman Luca Cari said the search was suspended at about 8 a.m. local time (11 p.m. ET) after a shift of a few inches, posing a potential threat to diving teams operating in the submerged spaces of the ship.

There was no word on when work might resume. 

The Costa Concordia had more than 4,200 passengers and crew on board when it slammed into a reef Friday off the tiny Tuscan island of Giglio after Capt. Francesco Schettino made an unauthorized maneuver from the ship's programmed course — allegedly to show off the luxury liner to the island's residents.

Rescue workers discovered five bodies on Tuesday, bringing the death toll of the Costa Concordia accident to 11. 

The adult bodies, believed to be passengers, were all wearing life jackets and were found in the rear of the ship near an emergency evacuation point, according to Nicastro.

Schettino, whose actions during the disaster have come under intense scrutiny as details of his role on the night of the disaster emerge, appeared before a judge in Grosseto, Tuscany, where he was questioned for three hours. Schettino remains under house arrest.

Schettino's lawyer, Bruno Leporatti, said urine and hair samples have been taken from Schettino, apparently to determine if he might have consumed alcohol or used drugs before the accident.

Leporatti also told a news conference in Grosetto that house arrest made sense given there was no evidence the captain intended to flee. He cited the fact that the captain coordinated the evacuation from the shore after leaving the ship.

"He never left the scene," Leporatti said. "There has never been a danger of flight."

Leporatti added the captain was upset by the accident, contrary to depictions in the Italian media that he did not appear to show regret.

"He is a deeply shaken man, not only for the loss of his ship, which for a captain is a grave thing, but above all for what happened and the loss of human life," the lawyer said.

Martino Pellegrino, a crew-member on Costa Concordia, described Schettino as "authoritarian," "stubborn" and "egocentric," in an interview with Italian newspaper La Republica on Tuesday.

"Schettino likes to be in control of the ship's wheel," he told the newspaper.

Also on Tuesday, a transcript of a conversation between Schettino and Capt. Gregorio De Falco of the Italian coast guard in Livorno, showed the coast guard official urgently commanding the captain to return to the cruise ship after he had abandoned it.

"There are people trapped on board," De Falco said. "Now you go with your boat under the prow on the starboard side. There is a pilot ladder. You will climb that ladder and go on board. You go on board and then you will tell me how many people there are. Is that clear? I'm recording this conversation, Cmdr. Schettino ..."

Passengers continued to make their way home, with consistent claims that crew members were ill-prepared to handle an emergency evacuation.

"The crew members had no specialized training — the security man doubled as the cook and bartender, so obviously they did not know what to do," passenger Claudia Fehlandt told Chile's Channel 7 television after being embraced by relatives at Santiago's airport.

"In fact, the lifeboats, even the ones that did get lowered, they did not know how to lower them and they cut the ropes with axes," she said.

Msnbc.com staff, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.

More on this story:

• What you sign away when you book a cruise
• Scorned cruise ship captain not alone in history
• Brother keeps hope alive as search is halted

Updated at 8 p.m. ET: The latest concern over the heavily listing Costa Concordia, which ran aground Friday night off the coast of Italy, is whether a fuel leak could lead to an environmental disaster in the region.

"He's got 2,400 tons of diesel fuel on there," Jim Fee, a yacht skipper for three decades, told NBC News. "If the weather changes, if it starts breaking up, if they can't get it off fast enough, this whole area could be contaminated and the tourism industry here would just be shot." 

It could take months, or possibly years, to clean up the damaged ship, Life's Little Mysteries reports:

First, salvage crews will need to conduct underwater inspections to evaluate the damage of the starboard (submerged) side of the hull. The port-side hull and the rest of the ship that's visible above the waterline have sustained substantial damage. How badly the rocks have gouged the starboard hull will determine how the salvage companies proceed.

Then there's the fuel. The large cruise ship was carrying more than 2,000 tons of diesel fuel when it wrecked. There are no apparent leaks, but officials have deployed anti-spill booms around the ship, in case it shifts on the rocks and one of 17 tanks ruptures. Any spill could cause an ecological nightmare in the area.

A Dutch company called Smit, which specializes in salvage operations, will remove the remaining fuel using a system of pumps and valves that will vacuum the oil out of the ship and into transport tanks. This process will take two to four weeks.

Following that, the next step would be to get the ship upright and then clean out the galleys and recover passengers' belongings. If the ship can be patched and stabilized, it will likely be towed away by tugboats.

It's possible that repairs could make the vessel seaworthy again, but that will be decided by the ship's insurer, who will have to assess the full cost of repairs. Based on initial reports, several experts believe it's more likely that the ship will be declared a total loss and chopped up for scrap.

"It may be the ship isn't salvageable and it isn't possible to right it, patch it up and send it on its way, because fundamental damage has been done," Dawn Gorman, editor of the magazine International Tug & OSV, told Life's Little Mysteries. 

Updated at 7:30 p.m. ET: Costa Concordia Capt. Francesco Schettino appeared Tuesday before a judge in Grosseto, Tuscany, where he was questioned for three hours.

Criminal charges including manslaughter and abandoning ship are expected to be filed by prosecutors in coming days. He faces 12 years in prison for the abandoning ship charge alone.

Schettino's lawyer, Bruno Leporatti, said urine and hair samples have been taken from Schettino, apparently to determine if he might have consumed alcohol or used drugs before the accident.

Schettino has worked for 11 years for the ship's Italian operator, Costa Crociere SpA, achieving the rank of captain in 2006. He hails from Meta di Sorrento in the Naples area, which produces many of Italy's ferry and cruise boat captains. He attended the Nino Bixio merchant marine school near Sorrento.

Updated at 3:20 p.m. ET: Rescue workers discovered five bodies on Tuesday, bringing the death toll of the Costa Concordia accident to 11. The adult bodies, believed to be passengers, were all wearing life jackets and were found in the rear of the ship near an emergency evacuation point, according to Italian Coast Guard Cmdr. Cosimo Nicastro.

The discovery came hours after Italian naval divers used explosives to blow holes in the ship's hull in an effort to find 29 missing passengers.

"Virtually all the dry part has been searched. It would need a miracle to find anyone alive in the wet part," a specialist told Reuters before climbing aboard the wreck for a fourth day of search and rescue.

After Schettino, the ship's disgraced captain, was interrogated by prosecutors for three hours Tuesday, a judge in Grosseto, Tuscany, ruled that the captain, who had been detained a few hours after he allegedly abandoned the Concordia, should be released from jail and confined to his home near Naples under house arrest, his lawyer, Bruno Leporatti, told reporters outside the courthouse. 

Prosecutors wanted him kept in Grosseto's prison, and Leporatti had asked that he be freed. 

A transcript of a conversation between Schettino and Capt. Gregorio De Falco of the Italian coast guard in Livorno, shows the coast guard official urgently commanding the captain to return to the cruise ship after he had abandoned it.

"There are people trapped on board," De Falco said. "Now you go with your boat under the prow on the starboard side. There is a pilot ladder. You will climb that ladder and go on board. You go on board and then you will tell me how many people there are. Is that clear? I'm recording this conversation, Cmdr. Schettino ..."

Scorned captain not alone in history

Schettino resisted returning to the ship, saying "I am here with the rescue boats, I am here, I am not going anywhere, I am here."

"You go aboard. It is an order. Don't make any more excuses," De Falco said. "You have declared 'abandon ship.' Now I am in charge. You go on board! Is that clear? Do you hear me? Go, and call me when you are aboard. My air rescue crew is there." 

"But you do realize it is dark and here we can't see anything," Schettino told the coast guard.

De Falco responded: "And so what? You want to go home, Schettino? It is dark and you want to go home? Get on that prow of the boat using the pilot ladder and tell me what can be done, how many people there are and what their needs are. Now!"

Schettino is accused of causing the wreck and abandoning his ship before the more than 4,200 people aboard were evacuated.

NBC News is reporting that the captain had a history of disobeying orders. Schettino, according to Italian news reports, had once left Marseilles, France, in bad weather, against company policy and coast guard orders. The captain was also once reportedly caught sailing too close to the shore in another part of Italy.

Cruise survivors: 'There was so much chaos'

Updated at 5:58 a.m. ET:  Italian naval divers on Tuesday used explosives to blow holes in the hull of a cruise ship grounded off a Tuscan island to speed the search for 29 missing people. One official said there was still a "glimmer of hope" that survivors could be found.

Prosecutors, meanwhile, prepared to question the captain, who is accused of causing the wreck that left at least 11 dead and abandoning the Costa Concordia before all 4,200 people on board were safely evacuated when the vessel capsized Friday night.

NBC News reported that Captain Francesco Schettino had arrived at the courthouse in Grosseto, Italy.

Navy spokesman Alessandro Busonero told Sky TV 24 the holes will help divers enter the wreck more easily. "We are rushing against time," he said.

PhotoBlog: Underwater photos of wrecked ship

The divers set four microcharges above and below the surface of the water, Busonero said. Television footage showed one hole above the waterline to be less than 6 feet in diameter. 

Published at 3:08 a.m. ET: A stricken Italian cruise liner shifted on its rocky resting place as worsening weather disrupted an increasingly despairing hunt for survivors and authorities almost doubled their estimate of the number of missing people to 29.

As the Costa Concordia's owners accused their captain of veering too close to shore in a "salute" to residents of a Tuscan island, the giant ship slid a little on Monday, threatening to plunge 500,000 gallons of fuel below the Mediterranean waters of the surrounding nature reserve.

The slippage forced rescuers to suspend efforts to find anyone still alive after three days in the capsized hull, resting on a jagged slope outside the picturesque harbor on the island of Giglio. Most of the 4,200 passengers and crew survived, despite hours of chaos.

Carnival, cruise sector count cost of disaster

Captain Francesco Schettino was arrested a day after the disaster and accused of manslaughter and abandoning the ship before all of the people were evacuated. Prosecutors say he also refused to go back on board when requested by the coast guard.

Schettino was due to appear before magistrates for questioning on Tuesday morning.

An Italian Coast Guard official, Marco Brusco, said late Monday that the number of people missing had been revised up to 29 -- 25 passengers and four members of staff -- from 16, showing how much uncertainty still surrounded the disaster

He didn't explain the jump, but indicated 10 of the missing are Germans.

'They were really excited'
Two Americans are also among the missing. Jerry and Barbara Heil live in White Bear Lake, a suburb of about 25,000 people 15 miles outside St. Paul, Minn.

Sarah Heil, their daughter, told WBBM radio in Chicago that her parents had been looking forward to their 16-day vacation.

"They raised four kids and sent them all to private school, elementary to college, so they never had any money," Sarah Heil said. "So when they retired, they went traveling. And this was to be a big deal — a 16-day trip. They were really excited about it."

Brusco said there was still "a glimmer of hope" there could be survivors on parts of the vast cruise liner that have yet to be searched. The last survivor, a crewman who had broken his leg, was rescued on Sunday.

Luciano Roncalli, a senior firefighter, told Reuters that all the unsubmerged areas of the liner had been searched.

Environment Minister Corrado Clini said he would declare a state of emergency because of the risk that the ship's fuel would leak into the pristine Tuscan Archipelago National Park. No fuel spillage has been detected so far, he said on an Italian television show on Monday evening.

Should rougher seas dislodge the wreck and cause it to sink or break up, that could scupper any hopes for the owners, a unit of Florida's Carnival Corp., of salvaging a liner which cost hundreds of millions of dollars to build just six years ago.

Investigators say the ship was far too close to the shore and its owners, Costa Cruises, said the captain had carried out the rash maneuver to "make a bow" to people on Giglio island, who included a retired Italian admiral.

Schettino denies charges of manslaughter.

Cruise tragedy conjures memories of Titanic

The father of the ship's head waiter told Reuters that his son had telephoned him before the accident to say the crew would salute him by blowing the ship's whistle as they passed close by Giglio, where both the waiter, Antonello Tievoli, and his 82-year-old father Giuseppe live.

Costa Cruises chief executive Pier Luigi Foschi on Monday blamed errors by Schettino for the disaster. He told a news conference the company would provide its captain with any assistance he required. "But we need to acknowledge the facts and we cannot deny human error," he added.

More from msnbc.com and NBC News:

• Italian shipwreck missing tally leaps to 29
• Al-Qaida raises flag over Yemen town
• Flight diverts to Fla. after 'unruly' couple seeks Champagne in first class
• Israel-US war drill postponed over Iran tensions
• 'Consequences': Iran warns Gulf countries not to replace its oil

Msnbc.com staff, Reuters and The Associated Press contributed to this report.