TWO years after the Titanic went down, another shipping disaster to rival that tragedy took place when the Canadian Pacific Railways-owned liner RMS (Royal Mail Services) Empress of Ireland sank in the St Lawrence River.
She collided in heavy fog with the Norwegian collier SS Storstad, which was sailing from Sydney, Nova Scotia to Quebec and loaded with coal on 29 May 1914.
Of the 1,477 passengers and crew on board, 1,012 died – of which 840 were passengers (eight more than the Titanic).
The Empress was built by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering at Govan on the Clyde in Scotland.
She was launched and christened on 27 January 1906 and made her maiden voyage in June of that year from Liverpool.
Proving to be fast and reliable, she had the capacity to carry 1,580 passengers.
The Empress of Ireland left Quebec city at 4.30pm on 28 May, under the command of newly-promoted Captain Henry Kendall, who was in charge for the first time.
She was bound for Liverpool.
Early next morning, at 2am, she was proceeding down the channel close to Pointe-au-Pere, Quebec in dense fog when the SS Storstad crashed into her starboard side, causing immense damage. She started taking on water immediately, listing badly.
Most of the passengers and crew in the lower deck drowned quickly.
However, many in the upper deck cabins, aroused by the collision, made it out to the boat deck and into the lifeboats, four of which were launched straight away.
However, within a few minutes of the collision, the listing to starboard was so bad that no more boats could be launched. Within ten minutes, the ship lurched violently onto her starboard side.
Many climbed onto the port side, thinking the ship had run aground. It is thought there may have been as many as 700 passengers and crew in this position, but a few minutes later, her stern rose briefly while the hull sank out of sight, sending those seeking refuge on her port side into the freezing water.
Of the 138 children on board, only four survived, while 279 women perished, leaving just 42 surviving.
The captain was thrown into the water when the Empress lurched to the side.
He was dragged under when the vessel went down but managed to swim to the surface, grabbing a piece of wooden grating until a nearby lifeboat picked him up.
He then took command of the rescue operation, picking people from the water until the lifeboat was full and then transferring them to the Storstad. He spent two hours travelling back and forward, collecting any survivors he could, before giving up when it was apparent no more lives could be saved.
Canadian Pacific filed a lawsuit against the owners of the AF Klaveness for $2,000,000. The ship was included as part-payment and later sold for $175,000. A footnote on the Norwegian vessel: She was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U62 on 8 March 1917 off the south-west coast of Ireland.
There is an interesting story of one survivor from the Empress of Ireland – Frank Tower, who was nicknamed Lucky Frank. There is no verification that this story is true; neither can it be discounted.
The story goes that Frank, who was allegedly on the Empress and survived, had also being a stoker on the Titanic when that ship went down two years earlier, (again this is not verified), but he was on the Lusitania in 1915 when it was torpedoed.
He survived by swimming to a lifeboat and swearing never to go to sea again. If true – and this story has featured on Ripley’s Believe It or Not and is referred to in Clive Cussier’s book The Sea Hunters – Frank Tower is now more or less a legend.
Other tales of the Empress and her passengers include the ship’s cat Emmy, who had sailed all of her journeys but refused point blank to board this time, despite being cajoled and finally carried on board. She immediately ran from the ship and watched from the roof of the shed at Pier 27 as the vessel sailed from Quebec. This shed would later become the morgue for the bodies of those who died.
The last survivor was Grace Hanagan Martyn, who was born in 1906 and died in St Catherines, Ontario on 15 May 1995, aged 88. More than 100 Salvation Army members, who were on their way to a conference in London, perished in the tragedy, including the select army band.
Another legend associated with this story is that the captain, Henry Kendall, was cursed in 1910 by the notorious London murderer Dr Hawley Harley Crippen who, along with his lover and partner in crime Ethel Le Neve, were arrested on board the SS Montrose, which was then captained by Kendall.
Crippen, realising the captain had effected his capture, wished his next ship would sink. That ship was the Empress of Ireland.
A Canadian inquiry into the collision began on 16 June 1914, presided over by Sir John Bigham, a well known advocate of safety at sea, who had also filled this role after the Titanic disaster and would later do likewise at the Lusitania inquiry.
The cause was disputed by crew of both ships, and although there has been much speculation as to the cause of the accident, the main theory concerns the position of both craft when they hit the fog.
Captain Kendall’s submission states that he stayed close to shore, encountered fog, reversed his engines to stop for about eight minutes and then his ship was rammed by the Storstad, which was doing a 90-degree starboard turn. Another contention, despite Kendall’s evidence, is that he had turned north-northeast towards the centre of the channel and right into the path of the collier.
Whatever happened has never been clarified, and if both captains’ evidence was to be believed, then both ships were stationary with their engines stopped when the collision took place, which is highly unlikely.
The Canadian inquiry found in favour of the Empress, while a later Norwegian inquiry overturned that verdict and found in favour of the Storstad.
The Empress of Ireland lies just 40 metres (130 feet) underwater in the St Lawrence River.
Soon after the tragedy, a salvage operation commenced, recovering bodies and valuables from the wreck. One of the main items recovered was 212 bars of silver bullion, worth $150,000 ($1,100,000 in today’s money).
When this operation was completed, the wreck was left alone until 1964 when a group of divers visited the site and removed other materials.
From then on, divers searched the wreck at will, even though the authorities passed laws restricting the practice in 1998. Many recreational divers have perished trying to enter the wreck; and more were successful in those attempts.