You can dress a ship in brass and bunting and call her safe, but the sea is an unforgiving bookkeeper. It tallies every shortcut and comes calling when the ledger runs red. The SS Vestris sailed out of Hoboken on the afternoon of November 10, 1928, as if routine could ward off reality. Within forty-eight hours, that confidence had been rolled flat by gray Atlantic seas, bad decisions, and a culture more concerned with appearances than seamanship. The wreck never became a tourist myth or a Hollywood hymn. It became something harsher. A cautionary story about how ordinary negligence kills ordinary people in extraordinary ways, and about how reform is almost always written in the handwriting of loss.
