RMS Empress of Ireland

1914

St. Lawrence, dense fog, fourteen minutes Location: St. Lawrence River, near Pointe-au-Père, Quebec · Coordinates: 48.63°N 68.42°W · Casualties: 1,012 · Survivors: 465 · Depth: 40 m · Cause: collision — Rammed by the Norwegian collier SS Storstad in dense fog on the St. Lawrence River at 01:55 on 29 May 1914. The Storstad's reinforced bow penetrated the Empress's starboard side between the funnels. Water flooded the lower decks within minutes; most passengers were asleep. · Fate: continental shelf · protected · Type: passenger liner · Canadian Pacific · Tonnage: 14,191 tons · Crew: 420 · Flag: United Kingdom · Canadian Pacific · Launched: 1906 Canadian Pacific liner, outbound from Quebec City for Liverpool. Rammed in fog on the St. Lawrence by the Norwegian collier Storstad at 01:55 on 29 May 1914, she sank in fourteen minutes with most passengers trapped in their cabins. 1,012 dead; more paying passengers were lost than on the Titanic. The Great War began two months later and the wreck was forgotten outside Canada. The Vessel The RMS Empress of Ireland was a twin-screw steel-hulled passenger liner built by the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Company at Govan, Glasgow, and launched on 27 January 1906 for the Canadian Pacific Railway's Atlantic service. She was 170 metres long, 14,191 tons, designed specifically for the Liverpool-Quebec route that CPR had been operating since 1903 as the British imperial link between the port of Liverpool and the settlers of western Canada. She and her sister Empress of Britain were the visible face of the CPR's "All Red Route" between Britain and its Pacific dominions: from the Liverpool docks by her, across the Atlantic and up the St Lawrence to Quebec, then by CPR transcontinental rail to Vancouver, then by the Pacific Empress liners Empress of Japan or Empress of China to Yokohama and Hong Kong. The CPR publicised the route as the fastest passage between London and Shanghai; the Empress of Ireland carried the imperial mail on the Atlantic leg of that journey. By 1914 she had completed 95 round trips on the Canadian run. She carried 1,057 passengers and 420 crew when she sailed, on average; her passenger list was almost evenly split between Canadian settlers returning west from visits to Britain and British emigrants moving west for the first time. Her master, Henry George Kendall, had just taken command from the previous captain and was on his first westbound voyage in her. The Disaster The injury was immediately fatal. The Storstad's bow tore open both boiler rooms and the starboard coaling bunkers at the turn of the bilge. The sea entered at a rate of hundreds of tons per second. Within four minutes the list to starboard had exceeded the angle at which her lifeboat davits could be worked. Most of the passengers were asleep; the ship had been running at night in normal trim, and the loudest sound heard on the starboard cabin decks was the roar of water entering through what had been, moments before, the lower portholes of the F-deck cabins. She sank in fourteen minutes, bow-first, in 40 metres of the St Lawrence. The sinking was fast enough that the wireless operator Ronald Ferguson had time to transmit a distress signal but not to receive any reply; the acknowledgement from the Pointe-au-Père station arrived as she was already on her side. The Storstad, damaged but afloat, launched her own boats and joined the rescue; the mail steamer Lady Evelyn and the pilot cutter Eureka reached the scene at around 03:00. 1,012 of the 1,477 aboard died. Of the 138 children in third class, only four survived. Of the 167 Salvation Army contingent, nine. The total passenger loss was 840, which is more than the 829 passengers who died on the Titanic two years earlier; the Empress's total casualty count was lower only because she had fewer crew aboard. 465 survived. The Canadian press called her loss "the forgotten Titanic" within days.