It was all over in fourteen terrible minutes. By the time RMS Empress of Ireland, pride of the Canadian Pacific Railway’s Atlantic fleet, settled to the bottom of the St Lawrence River on 29 May 1914, more than 1000 people had lost their lives. It was, and remains, Canada’s worst maritime disaster.
Built at Govan, Scotland, and launched in 1906, the Empress set new standards of speed and luxury on the Britain-Canada run. Between June 1906 and May 1914, the ship transported almost 200,000 people across the Atlantic to and from her home port of Liverpool. She carried emigrants and their children to new lives in Canada and the United States, business travellers, tourists, military personnel, noted scientists and even Nobel prize winners.
Struck amidships below the waterline by the Norwegian collier Storstad, in dense fog, the wound was fatal. The stricken Empress began rapidly filling with water and began listing to starboard. Hundreds of passengers, newly boarded at Quebec City and unfamiliar with the layout of the ship, were trapped below decks. Those who made it out found themselves in near-freezing water and died of exposure in mere minutes if not picked up in the few lifeboats that were launched.
Salvage operations began in June 1914 and ended in September, after recovering many bodies, much of the mail, and a valuable cargo of silver ingots. Re-discovered by scuba divers in 1964, the Empress became the most pillaged shipwreck in the world, until it was declared a protected site in April 1999.
Though overshadowed by the Great War, the ship was never forgotten by those who once sailed her. Using diaries, letters and interviews with former Empress passengers and crew, the author provides a vivid, first-hand impression of life aboard one of the finest ships of the Edwardian era. Lavishly illustrated with some two hundred photos and paintings, the pre-1914 colour illustrations (almost one hundred in all) helped bring the ship to life—for me, at least--in a way I had never imagined possible.
Derek Grout is the author of RMS Empress of Ireland: Pride of the Canadian Pacific's Atlantic Fleet. 29 May 1914 marked the date of the biggest Canadian maritime disaster in peacetime. Despite the scale of the disaster, and the fact that the ship had an excellent safety record with eight years in service, the Empress has been sadly overlooked. This lavishly illustrated luxury edition seeks to remedy this on the centenary of the tragic event.