These are some of the most dramatic photographs ever taken in all of maritime history, captured from the decks of a real sinking ship.
We tend to think of infamous shipping disasters like Titanic in the context of movies purely because real footage of those events just doesn’t really exist.
Back then, hardly anybody was whipping out a camera to capture the events as they happened.
But in 1928, as an ocean liner sank in the North Atlantic, somebody actually did.
These are real pictures.
They were taken aboard the passenger ship SS Vestrus.
What began as a routine voyage from New York to South America soon descended into a fight for survival against the Atlantic thrashes, battling lifeboats that wouldn’t launch.
And in the face of an SOS signal sent out too late.
Over 100 lives would be lost.
But in the midst of the chaos, an unlikely hero would save nearly 20 people all by himself.
Most incredible of all, of course, are the photos that survive today.
Ladies and gentlemen, I’m your friend Mike Brady from Ocean Liner Designs, and this is the story of the sinking of the SS Vestus, the doomed liner that was captured on film.
November 10th, 1928.
A late Saturday afternoon.
The day is clear and cloudless and light glints off the Vestus’ windows and port holes.
She had steamed proudly out of port from Hoboken, New Jersey, across the river from Manhattan on her voyage to Barbados and Buenos Airez with intermediate stops at a few ports in South America.
On board, she carries 325 people, 196 crew, and 129 passengers.
Among them are 13 children and 36 women as well as famous race car drivers Norman Batton and Earl D’vor and an eclectic mix of affluent merchants and businessmen and tourists just traveling for pleasure.
Vestrus is not a particularly large ship.
In fact, she’s totally dwarfed by the enormous transatlantic liners that crowd the peers at Chelsea.
But on the inside, she’s extremely pretty.
Vestus was one of three moderately sized singlef funnel passenger liners built for the Lampport and Halt line.
At only 10,400 gross registered tons and just under 500 ft, about 150 m long, the Vestus was certainly no giant.
Yet, at the time she was delivered back in 1912, she and her sisters were among the finest liners on the South Atlantic service.
They boasted palatial public rooms equal to or even in some cases superior to those of the biggest ships of state.
Vestus and her sister ships also boasted state-of-the-art electrical amenities like lighting and forced ventilation.
That one proved particularly popular for voyages through the tropics.
Depending on one’s budget and social status, passengers had a choice between first, second, and third class.
Demand for passage to South America was nowhere near as large as that to the United States.
So ships on those services were typically smaller and more modest.
They lagged behind the other grander ships that call it Southampton and New York.
Vestrus and her sisters brought a new standard of comfort that would see the disparity rectified.
But aside from those gorgeous interiors, probably the most enjoyable part of the whole trip were the views.
On her South American runs, passengers were treated to scenes worthy of a painter’s magnum opus.
Mountains soaring high into the sky dotted with tiny villages, the jungle’s thick green foliage, then Rio de Janeiro, sprawling along the irregular shoreline.
This was ocean travel at its most intoxicating.
But Vestrus wasn’t just a passenger liner.
The Lampert and Halt line profited from bilateral trade between Britain, the US, and South America.
On voyages back to the US, the ship’s holds were stuffed with coffee.
And on the way down, she would carry tons of Americanmade manufacturing goods, machinery, and equipment, the kinds of things developing and industrializing nations couldn’t yet make themselves.
The First World War saw her called up as a troop ship, where she almost met destruction as a Yubot’s torpedo zipped perilously close by in 1918.
But with the war over and after a brief charter to Cunard line, Vestus was back, resumeuming her regular commercial and passenger services after five long years.
Although it wouldn’t be a free and easy return to peaceime life.
2 days into an outbound voyage from New York in 1919, a fire broke out in her coal bunkers.
It raged for four full days, and if the New York Times reporting is to be believed, it spread to her number three hold until a British cruiser arrived on scene and helped extinguish the blaze and escorted her back to port.
Clearly, Vestus, although Lovely, was not a lucky ship, and things would soon get much, much worse.
By 1928, Vestus is an Atlantic veteran with hundreds of thousands of miles behind her.
On route to the River Plate, her holds are filled to the brim with more than 1,000 letters, passenger luggage, and motor vehicles, giving her a hefty 2,942 tons of cargo.
237 of that is dead weight from heavy machinery and metals.
After a light dinner, all on board settle in for the night, hoping to have a solid evening’s rest for their arrivals.
But all is not well aboard the ship.
One passenger, Carlos Quiros, chancellor of the Argentine consulate in New York, had boarded the ship with some reservations around its safety.
He had spotted that the Vestus looked offkilter, later saying she had a list when tied up at the pier before sailing.
Listing on ships back then wasn’t entirely unusual.
Uneven coal bunker loading or ballast tanks could create a slight lean to one side.
Most could simply ignore it from the off.
Others got used to it.
But for Vestus, that list was a portant of imminent doom.
Vestus continues cruising at a leisurely speed under fine conditions until the sun drops below the horizon and darkness fills the sky.
But just a few minutes past midnight and when the ship is off the Virginia coast, the wind shifts from a breeze to a hasty blow.
Some passengers stir awake.
They feel that something is off.
The bulkheads of the ship tilt on a strange angle over to starboard.
It’s not a significant difference from earlier in the day, but it’s enough to keep some disgruntled passengers from returning to peaceful sleep.
Worse still, Vestus now begins to heave and roll as the seas are whipped up by the winds, and a proper storm comes on.
Soon, she’s shipping big waves right over her boughs, and white spray whips the windows of the bridge.
Far below in the ship’s bowels, water begins to pull to starboard inside her holds, slowly collecting on the floor plates and filling the BGE below.
None of the crew realize until the sun chases out the last bits of the night that following morning.
By now, the weather is a sthing of heaving waves and howling winds.
At 9:00 a.
m.
, the chief engineer, James A.
Adams, heads below to inspect the engine room.
The cuffs of his trousers are weted by the water that sloshes at his feet.
Confused, he follows the odd rivullets of water pooling on the floor plates.
And his confusion quickly slips to horror when he sees water pouring in completely unabated through an ash discharger valve and straight into the engine room.
A nearby pipe has also ruptured, spewing a thin stream of water straight onto the deck.
Elsewhere on the port side of the ship, another crew member finds another leak, and the water is naturally collecting over to starboard thanks to the ship’s list.
Vestrus is leaking like a sie.
Water is flowing easily into fireman’s passages in the shelter deck and into the starboard coal bunkers.
Chief engineer Adams urgently reports the flooding to the bridge and Captain Kerry orders half speed, alternating from port to starboard engines with the waves.
The Atlantic wind now blows at her port quarter with full force and her list has worsened by at least 8°.
Everywhere on the ship feels unstable.
Plates slide off the linen tablecloths in the dining room as stewards struggle with the breakfast service.
Chairs groan and slide sideways, toppling over like dominoes.
Unsettled passengers challenge crew members who hurry past, but they have nothing but bllythe words of reassurance to offer them.
What’s happening below deck is not common knowledge, but the situation is deteriorating rapidly.
Stokers are now waist deep in water while cabin stewards heave pale after pale of ocean over the ship’s side.
Vestus’ seaorthiness is badly compromised.
Instead of rolling gently over the waves like she’s designed to do, Vestus now lunges, sending the cargo in her holds, slamming against their restraints.
The ship bucks again, and a number of cased automobiles crashes through a partition over to starboard.
Captain Kerry raises the Voltater, Vestrus’ sister ship, which is within range, but she too is hampered by a broken propeller and the adverse winds.
By Sunday evening, the wooden doors of a starboard side hatch rip from their hinges, and huge volumes of sea water burst through the openings, straight into the starboard bunkers.
Green water sloshes across the decks of the ship and the wind screams at a blistering 65 m 104 km per hour and 11 on the Buffett scale.
A violent storm between 3 and 4:00 a.
m.
the next day.
Water pressure builds inside the bunkers as they slowly flood.
The starboard hatch cover in the cross alley is forced upward and open from a mastrom of waves.
The ship leans over more and more with every surge.
One passenger, EJ Walsh from Brooklyn, sits in his stateateroom, feeling the staggering plunge from each wave and the bulkheads tilting like a cottage roof.
He later recalled how the ship’s list was so bad you had to make your way clinging from one thing to another.
As passengers awaken, blur-eyed from an unrestful slumber, they sense that something is terribly wrong.
Angry mothers bark orders at the bewildered crew to do something.
Then the water level rises so much down in the stokehole that a boiler on the starboard side is dowsed and shut for good.
Vestrus is helpless against the storm.
For hours now, Vestus’ crew has been battling.
The pumps have been thumping away, and then a bucket gang was put together, hauling bales of water up from the stokehole in the engine rooms and out over the side, which was an alarming sight for passengers to say the least.
But it’s a fight they are soon to lose.
The ship is bound for the ocean floor.
At last, Captain Kerry realizes the fight to save his battered ship is over.
The unthinkable is going to happen soon.
Vestrus will sink.
He orders all women and children to be mustered on deck.
Only now, as his ship lists by at least 20°, does he issue the distress call.
At 8:37 a.
m.
, the captain instructs his wirelessman to alert listening ships that something is wrong and to stand by for more information.
But minutes pass and the actual distress call doesn’t come.
Finally, just before 10:00 a.
m.
, Vestus hammers out the SOS.
But in their haste, the crew have given an incorrect position by as much as 35 or more miles.
Late though it may be, that SOS call is received by nearly 60 nearby ships.
Word travels fast.
Around 40 minutes later, the New York agents for the line, Sanderson and Sons, relay an urgent message to the captain.
Wire us immediately your trouble.
Captain Kerry replies starkly.
Hove 2 from noon yesterday during night developed 32° list starboard decks.
Deck underwater ship lying on the beam ends.
It is impossible to proceed anywhere in the sea.
Moderately rough.
Rescue will not be quick, and the nearest help is still many miles off.
At 11:30 a.
m.
, Vestus receives word that an old US Navy destroyer, now in service with the Coast Guard as a cutter, the Davis, as well as an oceangoing tug, are on their way to help.
Captain Kerry stands on the decks, watching the gray seas, and balances his weight against the lunging of his stricken ship.
He has a fearful judgment call to make.
Help is coming, but it will be slow to arrive.
And Vestus is clearly wallowing.
With her voluminous boiler and engine rooms filling unabated, and her carefully calculated center of buoyancy and the critical meta center all out of whack, she moves strangely in the water.
Clearly, the ship isn’t going to make it before help arrives.
She will need to be evacuated, but that means putting women and children out into the small open top lifeboats that will immediately be at the mercy of the big seas themselves.
The chief engineer is put in charge of the starboard boats for the crew.
Captain Kerry will personally oversee the loading of passengers in the port side boats himself.
The list of the ship is now so steep, approaching a terrifying 30°, that looking out through the windows on the starboard side, one can no longer see the horizon, but the dark, violent waves below.
Passengers gather on mass across the upper deck, gazing into the thrashing Atlantic.
They have no clue how far off land is.
It would have been cold comfort to know they’re something like 200 m east of Hampton Roads, Virginia.
The deck plates shudder violently as the Savage Atlantic wraps against the hull of the ship.
Women and children step anxiously into the evenumbered portside boats 2 through 14.
And the relatively inexperienced crew, many of whom haven’t yet conducted recent boat drills, lower them jerkly on trembling falls.
But with Vestus leaning far over to starboard, the portside boats are lifted high into the air.
And lowering them over the side is a difficult proposition.
number two gets away.
Although she bumps and grinds along the hole plates as she goes, but four and six cannot be released from their falls.
With the boats rising and falling with the big waves down at the water line, it must have been a devil of a job getting the hooks free because tension from the movement in the ocean would have been impossible to predict and correct.
Then the ship jolts and the women and children of Lifeboat 4 are tossed into the boiling seas and most are never seen again.
Then another boat heavily strikes its own davit, crushing some of those inside.
Around 1 p.
m.
, Vestus lurches alarmingly.
Far below, a crucial bulkhead has given way.
A steady stream of soaking engineers and stokers coming up from below suggests it was the machine room bulkhead.
This is Vestrus’ death nail, and there isn’t much time left.
Passengers now fight each other to secure a spot on the remaining lifeboats, while those stuck in lifeboat number six sway helplessly, suspended midair.
The Davits refusing to release.
EJ Walsh is one of the lucky few to secure a spot in lifeboat 10, crammed in with another 60 passengers and crew.
His lifeboat slides along the sloping side of the ship, dangling dangerously.
The boat is nearly capsized in the process, and the occupants scream in terror.
But suddenly, it breaks free and slaps the surface of the water safely.
The Davit falls are cut, and the passengers row until they’ve cleared at least 100 yards of the doomed liner.
On the other side, the oddnumbered boats are filled with crewmen and swung out.
here where the ocean surface is closer thanks to the list.
The operation is somewhat easier.
All of them except for lifeboat 9 get away safely.
That boat upends on its falls during lowering and it drops into the ocean.
By 2 p.
m.
the listing Vestus is a sad sight.
After 2 hours of being hung out like an old tower, the number six lifeboat finally tips, ejecting its victims into the ocean.
Their cries are lost as the groaning ship towers above them listing hard over in excess of 30°.
But on deck, as crew member Fred Hansen spontaneously snaps pictures of the evacuation efforts, crew members work hard to get the boats filled and launched.
Amongst the chaos, a 23-year-old quartermaster from Barbados, Lionel Licorice, has just come from the bridge after sticking faithfully at his post.
Glancing at the chaos on the boat deck, he sees the lifeboat 14 is still sitting in its chocks.
The crew haven’t even got to try attaching it to the davits for launching, and it’s fastened to the deck with lines called gripes.
When Vestus goes under, the boat will go with it.
In a swift motion, he lets the gripes loose.
When the ship sinks, the lifeboat should float free and bob to the surface, hopefully giving those in the water something to grab onto.
He supposes he will soon be among them.
The ship begins to roll further onto its side, and Licorice leaps from the railing.
He doesn’t look back, fighting the wild surf until he thinks he’s cleared of the suction.
The Vestus wallows pathetically like a toy boat.
The last of her lights wink out as the steam goes.
The ocean washes clear up her side, shattering windows.
The water roars in and traps some unfortunates who are caught inside, and now they can never make it off.