Lamport & Holts' S.S. Vestris was launched as a luxury passenger liner in 1912. With a gross tonnage of 10,660, the ship had the capacity to carry nearly 600 passengers and a crew of 250.

During World War I, the British used its passenger liners to transport soldiers and war materiel. In January 1918, at the height of the war, a U-boat spotted Vestris in the English Channel and fired a torpedo. It missed. The S.S. Vestris was spared and successfully carried its passengers, medical personnel, from the U.S. to France.

But in surviving the torpedo attack, Vestris might have exhausted its allotment of luck. After the war, she returned to civilian service, transporting passengers between Britain and South America for Cunard. On November 11, 1928, Vestris sailed into stormy seas 200 miles off the coast of Virginia while enroute from New York to Buenos Aires. She developed a list to starboard, which worsened severely as her cargo and coal bunkers shifted.

Eighty years ago on this date, at around midnight, Vestry sent out her first SOS. But the ship could not be saved. Two hours later, she fell on her side and sank, taking down 112 of the 325 people onboard, including Captain William Carey. The rest were able to escape in lifeboats and were eventually rescued.

The sinking of the Vestry led to the convening of an international convention on safety at sea in London the next year. Witnesses who participated in the rescue testified that they found many of the bodies floating face down, even though the victims were wearing life preservers. The problem was with the design of the life preservers. As a result of the London convention, merchant marines of most of the world's seafaring nations changed their requirements from cork to kapok life preservers.

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