You might think a captain who goes against orders so as to flee danger (as Queeg does when he's supposed to be escorting the landing craft) would, when subsequently faced with a life-threatening typhoon, be keen to increase his chances of survival by taking on ballast and heading into the storm, as advised. But no. How to regard this?
First, the advice comes from Maryk, and it's easy to overrate him since the story is implicitly told through Willie Keith's eyes. But let's face it, anyone who knows the difference between "port" and "starboard" is a wizened nautical sage to Mister Keith.
In the book, when Queeg arrives on the Caine and reviews the officers' fitness reports, deVriess gives this more balanced assessment of Maryk – “He's one in a hundred. Used to be a fisherman. He knows more about seamanship than some chief boatswain's mates.” Not all chief boatswain's mates, mind you, just “some.” Maryk stands out, certainly, and he knows his way around a ship, but nobody's suggesting that he should be an instructor at the Naval Academy.
What else do we know about Maryk? He started off as exec by defying the captain and granting leave to Stilwell. In general, his performance as exec is questionable, since he consistently allowed blatant and frequent disrepect from the officers toward the captain. He got through college, but with a distinctly mediocre performance. He consistently allowed Keefer to manipulate him – first accepting Keefer's “diagnosis” of mental illness, then accepting Keefer's encouragement to voice this conclusion to Admiral Halsey, then allowing himself to be talked out of this plan by Keefer.
In summary, Maryk is a not-terribly-bright guy; not stupid, but just average at best. He's got some seamanship knowledge from his civilian work as a fisherman -- but it's doubtful that any vessel in his family's small fishing business approached the mass and power of a 1200 ton, 30000 hp DMS. His strongest asset is his basic decency, but he doesn't have the maturity to realize that undisciplined virtues can become liabilities -- it was that decency that led to his giving Stilwell the pass against Queeg's orders. Keith may consider him to be a ship-handling expert, but the truth is he's not Captain Southard (the expert at the court martial); for that matter, he's not even deVriess.
Now, on to Queeg.
If Queeg was rational and was simply a world-class ass-covering artist, I'd agree that his behavior is puzzling. But he isn't.
The psychiatrists at the court martial gave some insights into his way of thinking. Queeg, for whatever reason, has a compulsion toward perfection. He must be perfect. Any mistake is intolerable, not only because it might make him look bad to others, but even more so because it might shatter his delusion of perfection. So, he shifts his mistakes onto others. He “revises reality in his own mind” (the psychiatrist's words) to leave himself blameless. It wasn't his fault that he steamed over his own towline, oh no! – it was that incompetent crew he inherited from his slovenly predecessor deVriess. He had a perfectly good plan to catch the strawberry thief, and it would have worked – except that he had a wardroom of disloyal, mutinous officers who were undercutting him at every opportunity and who treated the whole thing as a joke. Et cetera.
See a common pattern here? Queeg explains away his mistakes with the excuse that everyone else on the Caine is incompetent. But since he's making excuses to himself, protecting himself from having to admit that he screws up sometimes, he has to really believe this.
So, at long last :) -- my answer to your question. By the time of the typhoon, he's convinced himself that everyone else on that ship is a half-wit – including Maryk. So it doesn't take too much effort to disregard Maryk's advice, especially considering that in reality Maryk's no John Paul Jones anyway (see above).
Does this mean Queeg is crazy? No. It's just his way of approaching what he considers to be a hostile world. As one of the psychiatrists at the court martial put it, "Is it possible for a sane man to commit stupid acts? It happens every day."
Bear in mind that his record before the typhoon was spotless -- over ten years if you count his time at Annapolis, during which he apparently carried out every assignment to the satisfaction of his superiors. And even as captain of the Caine it's not as if Queeg is screwing up every day; instead, long stretches of weeks or sometimes even months go by during which Queeg does everything right while still being a perfectly sane, mean, petty, stupid son of a bitch.
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