The Record
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 Voyage
She left Quebec City at 16:30 on 28 May 1914 with 1,477 aboard: 1,057 passengers (of which 87 first class, 253 second class, 717 third), 420 crew, and the mail. Among the passengers were 167 members of the Salvation Army travelling as a single contingent to the Army's international congress in London; their Canadian Staff Band, instruments aboard, were to perform in London the following week. Among them also was the Canadian actor Laurence Irving, the son of Sir Henry, and his wife Mabel Hackney.
She dropped the pilot at Pointe-au-Père at 01:30 on 29 May in a drifting fog bank. Kendall set her on her usual down-river course toward the Gulf of St Lawrence, at half speed, sounding her whistle. Coming up-river toward Quebec on the same course was the Norwegian collier Storstad, bound from Sydney, Nova Scotia, with 11,000 tons of Canadian coal for Montreal, under the command of Thomas Andersen with his first officer Alfred Toftenes on watch.
Kendall and Toftenes saw each other's lights from roughly seven miles. Each bridge altered course at distance to produce a port-to-port passing. The Storstad's reinforced coal-carrier bow and the Empress's starboard quarter were now converging rather than diverging. Kendall saw the Storstad disappearing into the thickening fog and rang full astern; Toftenes continued on his changed course in the belief he had adequate clearance. At 01:55 on 29 May 1914 the Storstad's bow struck the Empress of Ireland on her starboard side between the funnels, penetrating her below the waterline to a depth of five metres.
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.
The Legacy
The Mersey inquiry, the same Lord Mersey who had adjudicated the Titanic inquiry two years earlier, conducted joint hearings with a Canadian inquiry in Quebec in June 1914. Both found that the primary fault lay with the Storstad for continuing her altered course into the fog rather than stopping her engines. A Norwegian inquiry held in Oslo in July reached the opposite conclusion, faulting Kendall. Neither Canadian nor Norwegian finding was binding on the other country. Both shipping lines paid partial damages out of court.
The First World War began on 4 August 1914, two months after she sank. The Canadian press that had been covering the loss as the dominant national story of 1914 turned to war reporting. The CPR withdrew her sister Empress of Britain from passenger service and converted her to a troop ship; Empress of Ireland herself, already on the bottom, was never raised. By 1915 the Empress of Ireland had effectively disappeared from public memory outside Canada.
The wreck lies on her starboard side at 40 metres, three kilometres from the current Pointe-au-Père lighthouse. The site was declared a protected historical monument by the province of Quebec in 1999 and designated an underwater archaeological reserve in 2001. She is the worst peacetime loss in Canadian maritime history and among the three deadliest in the twentieth century; the Site historique maritime de la Pointe-au-Père museum, operated by the Canadian government, conserves and displays artifacts raised from her. She is remembered in Canada; outside Canada, largely not. That is the second fact of her history.