To understand why so many people packed onto an aging, poorly maintained ship, you have to understand Haiti in 1993. Usable roads were scarce. Fuel for buses and aircraft was scarcer. Ferries were the connective tissue of the country, linking coastal towns to the capital in a way that the broken road network could not. Many of these vessels were in dangerous condition, prone to engine failures that regularly caused deaths. Then the situation got worse. After the military coup that overthrew President Jean-Bertrand Aristide in September 1991, an international embargo cut off Haiti's imports of fuel and spare parts. Boat companies were, in the words of one report, systematically permitted to ignore government safety regulations. The Neptune was a product of this collapse: 150 to 163 feet long, steel-hulled, three decks, and deteriorating. Its captain's name was reported as either Julio Antoine or Benjamin St. Clair. Even that basic fact remains uncertain.

The Neptune departed Jeremie bound for Port-au-Prince, its decks loaded not only with people but with cargo and cattle that poorer passengers brought aboard to sell in the capital's markets. Halfway through the journey, off the coast of Miragoane, a heavy rainstorm struck. The ship began to pitch and roll in the rough seas. What happened next was a catastrophe of physics and panic. As the vessel lurched, passengers rushed to one side of the ship. On a properly loaded vessel with adequate ballast, the shift might not have mattered. On the Neptune, overloaded and undermaintained, the crowd's movement was fatal. The ship capsized and sank. An estimated 1,500 people drowned in the dark Caribbean waters, making it one of the deadliest peacetime maritime disasters in recorded history.

The Neptune went down on the night of February 16. The disaster was not officially reported in Port-au-Prince until the morning of February 18, two full days later. The delay was not a cover-up but a consequence of Haiti's broken infrastructure. The coastline where survivors struggled ashore had bad roads and what one account described as a scant telephone network. There was simply no fast way to relay the news. When word finally reached the capital, the sea around the wreck site was still littered with bodies and debris. The U.S. Coast Guard led the search-and-rescue operation, but two days of lost time meant that the effort recovered far fewer survivors than it might have. By the time rescuers arrived in force, the Neptune had already surrendered most of its dead to the current.

The Neptune disaster is haunted by numbers that refuse to resolve. Was it 800 passengers or 2,000? Were 1,500 killed, or fewer? Without a manifest, without a functioning regulatory system, without even a consistent record of the captain's name, precision is impossible. What is certain is that these were ordinary Haitians, people traveling to sell goods in Port-au-Prince, families visiting relatives, workers seeking opportunity in the capital. They boarded a ship that a functioning government would never have allowed to sail, in a country where the alternatives had already been stripped away by political upheaval and economic embargo. The Neptune sank because of a storm, but the conditions that made the sinking so catastrophic were entirely man-made.