As five more bodies were recovered from the wrecked Italian cruiser ship, Costa Concordia, an audio tape has been produced that appears to expose the captain defying orders to return to his vessel.
The discovery of the victims has taken the death toll from the disaster off the Tuscan coast to 11, with 23 still unaccounted for.
As the search for the missing continued, Italian media published a recording of a conversation between Captain Francesco Schettino and the port authorities in which the captain was ordered not to abandon his stricken ship after it hit rocks on Friday night.
At 9.49pm he was asked by a port official over the ship radio: "Concordia, is everything ok?"
The response from the ship was "positive", Il Fatto Quotidiano reported.
But five minutes later the operations room at Livorno port was said to have contacted the liner again after a passenger had allegedly reported a problem and mentioned the word "shipwreck".
The inquiry was reportedly again met with the response: "It is just a technical problem."
The recording of his conversation with Italian coast guard Captain Gregorio De Falco indicated his response was met with fury and an order that he return to his ship.
"You go on board and then you will tell me how many people there are," Captain De Falco reportedly shouted. "Is that clear?"
But Schettino resisted, saying the ship was tipping and that it was dark. At the time, he was in a lifeboat and said he was co-ordinating the rescue from there.
Captain De Falco shouted back: "And so what? You want to go home, Schettino? It is dark and you want to go home?
"There are people who are coming down the ladder on the bow. Go back in the opposite direction, get back on the ship and tell me how many people there are and what they have on board. Tell me if there are children, women, and what kind of help they need."
"You go aboard. It is an order. Don't make any more excuses. You have declared the abandoning of the ship, now I am in charge."
Capt Schettino, 52, was finally heard agreeing to re-board but it was unclear whether he did so.
Prosecutors have accused him of manslaughter, causing a shipwreck and abandoning his ship before all passengers were evacuated.
He could face up to 12 years in prison if found to have abandoned his ship, before any other wrongdoing is taken into account.
He insisted in an interview before his jailing that he stayed with the vessel to the end.
But the chairman of Costa Cruises has blamed him for making an unauthorised deviation from the cruise's route so that he could "make a salute".
Pier Luigi Foschi has apologised for the tragedy which has left dozens of people injured and the 114,000-tonne ship lying on its side.
Some 700 people are involved in the recovery operation but hopes of finding anyone alive have been growing slimmer by the hour, the Press Association reported.
The local police force at Grosseto said it was possible that not all those missing were still at sea however.
"It's possible some have returned home and not made contact," a spokeswoman said. "There were a lot of boats bringing people from the island of Giglio to the mainland so it might be that some people left Italy without saying 'I'm safe'.
"Of course we hope there are still people alive but we can't be certain anyone will be."
Earlier, Italian navy divers set off explosives to create four small openings in the hull of the cruise ship to speed the search for the missing passengers and crew.
The five bodies recovered were all those of adults wearing life jackets and were found in the rear of the ship near an emergency evacuation point, according to Italian coast guard Commander Cosimo Nicastro.
All were thought to have been passengers.