Luxuries versus Lifeboats

Puck's response to the Titanic drops the usual crowd and comedy for something closer to a nightmare. A hooded skeleton sprawls across the top of a moonlit iceberg, dripping and enormous, looking down at a broken liner going under in green water while a few lifeboats scatter across the swell. The caption puts the mockery in Death's mouth: "Why all this hue and cry about lifeboats? Have you not your veranda and Parisian cafés, palm-garden, squash-court, gymnasium, swimming-pool, Turkish baths, and à la carte restaurant?" The luxuries the line had advertised are turned into the accusation. A ship built for opulence had not been built to save its passengers, and Puck let the skeleton say so.