FOREWORD

In May of 1914 the world did not appear to be on the verge of cataclysm. March of that year saw Babe Ruth play his initial game as a professional. Charlie Chaplin appeared in his first film, and a few months later, the Tramp made his debut. The last-known passenger pigeon did die in the Cincinnati zoo, bringing that once-numerous species to its final end, but apparently few saw this as an omen of things to come. Richard Patrick Russ was born, though he would not change his name to Patrick O’Brian and begin living the famous lie for some time. William S. Burroughs and Sonny Boy Williamson made their appearance on the planet, as did Dylan Thomas, Hedy Lamar, Jackie Coogan, and Dorothy Lamour. Given that list of luminaries (and it is far from complete), one would think it was in fact an auspicious year. A year that marked great things to come. But then, 1914 also saw the introduction of the “hobble skirt” (wide at the hips but so narrow at the ankles it made a normal stride impossible). Like the fashion world, mankind stumbled, guilelessly, into the summer of that year and the opening weeks of the War to End All Wars. In the next few years over sixteen million would die as a direct result of that conflict and twenty million more would be wounded.

It is not surprising, given the early date—May 28—that the passenger liner Empress of Ireland departed her berth in Quebec City with the usual fanfare, goodbyes, and excitement. She was not new to the route, having crossed the Atlantic numerous times, and her captain, though new to the ship, was an experienced officer of good reputation and many years’ experience. Twelve hours later the Empress was lying on the bottom in relatively shallow water and over a thousand people, who had waved to friends as they boarded, were dead. Her position, unlike more famous wrecks, was never a great mystery, and she has been reachable by divers from fairly early days. Had she sunk by daylight, land would have been visible, and had the waters been warm, a strong swimmer could have reached the shore.

The loss of the Empress of Ireland followed on the heels of the sinking of the Titanic two years earlier, on April 15, 1912, and preceded, by three years, the loss of the Lusitania, May 7, 1915. Over 3,700 lives were lost from the three ships, 1,012 from the Empress alone. (A fourth sinking, less well known, was the SS Eastland, which rolled over in her berth in Chicago, drowning over 800 passengers and crew.) From the vantage of a century later, the sinkings of these passenger liners in the early years of the twentieth century seem like a warning of the limits of technology and science, but then usable radar had not yet been developed, which almost certainly would have prevented two of the accidents. (Several inventors, including Marconi and Tesla, had suggested that radio waves could be used to detect and determine the course and speed of ships but no one seemed to take this idea seriously for many years.)

The sinking of the Lusitania, by a German submarine off the coast of Ireland, evokes, even today, deep feelings of anger and outrage, though divers have established beyond all doubt that she did carry war munitions. She was the swiftest, and briefly, largest liner of her time but went to the bottom in fewer than twenty minutes after being struck by a torpedo.

The Titanic, certainly the most famous loss of a ship in modern times, has been the subject of countless movies, books, and documentaries. The largest ship of her day, and advertised as unsinkable, her loss became a story of hubris, tragedy, and oddly, romance. The sinking of the Titanic seemed to signal the end of an era, with images of those first-class passengers in black tie, kicking bits of the iceberg about the deck and having a good laugh. Every film seems to have a romance, the most recent featuring the young Kate Winslet and Leonardo DiCaprio engaged in their doomed love affair. The fact that the Titanic took almost three hours to sink lends itself to drama in a way that the other tragedies do not, and also preys upon some dark part of the human imagination. The Empress and Lusitania took fourteen minutes and eighteen minutes to disappear beneath the surface, which has made them challenging subjects for dramatists (though, in the case of Lusitania, it has not stopped them from trying).

There is a certain sad irony that, only days before the Empress of Ireland was lost, the British Parliament had passed the bill establishing Irish Home Rule. The Empress lost her country and her life in a few short days. The assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand, which set in motion events that led to World War I, occurred exactly one month later and the outbreak of that terrible conflict was only two months distant. The loss of a thousand lives on the Empress, though a terrible tragedy and news all over the world at the time, became quickly insignificant when men were marched, by the tens of thousands, across no-man’s-land and into the waiting machine-gun fire. The sinking of the Empress of Ireland was lost in a whirl of more momentous events. Machines designed to kill were so much more efficient than those that merely killed by accident.

That the Empress went down in the middle of the night (2 A.M.) and so quickly meant that many of her passengers never reached the decks and even fewer made it into the boats that were launched before she listed too far to make further launchings possible. The officers of the Empress had spotted the Norwegian collier Storstad at a distance of five miles, and the officers of the collier had seen the Empress at the same time. Had they followed the established rules for approaching ships, when the fog set in, they would likely have passed each other safely. Both captains deviated from these rules and it is apparent that both men subsequently lied during the inquiry. If one were to believe the two captains, both ships were at a standstill, or nearly so, when the bow of the Storstad penetrated the side of the Empress to a depth of twelve feet. Captain Kendall of the Empress claimed that he called out to the Storstad to keep moving forward so that her bow would partially plug the hole she had created in the liner’s side. Captain Andersen of the Storstad reported that he attempted to do just that, but because the Empress was moving so quickly, her bow was torn free of the other ship. The Canadian inquiry exonerated Kendall and placed the blame on poor weather and the actions of the Norwegian ship and her captain. A Norwegian inquiry found the opposite. Had both ships altered course to pass port to port, collision would almost certainly been avoided.

Today the sinking of the Empress of Ireland is far less well known than the Titanic and the Lusitania. It happened in Canadian waters and Canadians, unlike their American cousins, are not great constructors of myth or creators of heroes. The founders of the American republic are mythical figures; the men who created Canada out of the various British colonies were simply men, and some very flawed men at that. Patton, Bradley, and MacArthur were mythic and heroic, whereas Canadian general Curry, who was very likely a military genius, is a man who returned to Canada after World War I to bad debts and some dubious financial dealings. He was human.

The Empress of Ireland and her loss have never attained the mythic stature of the loss of the Titanic or Lusitania, yet there was horrible loss of life, tragedy, and human complicity (and, like Titanic, the Empress had watertight bulkheads that did not save her). In some ways the tragedy is even greater, for the accident should have been easily avoided.

The great loss of life on the Empress will always make her memorable, at least to maritime historians, and the number—1,012 dead—will always horrify the rest of us. It is, however, worth noting that deaths on America’s roads are so much greater than this (over 34,000 last year alone) that it makes one wonder why we should even notice the loss of a thousand lives, it is so paltry by comparison. Somehow, sinkings, and the great loss of life in a single event, will always have a hold on the human imagination. Images of the great ships slipping beneath the sea, and the passengers thrown into the frigid waters, are the stuff of nightmare, and the fear of drowning is so very primal that we are all in its grip. In the history of maritime tragedies the Empress of Ireland will always loom large, and it is fitting that we should remember her and the people who did not survive. These accidents changed the design of ships and all of their safety precautions so that such accidents seldom occur, and when they do, boats and rafts, with capacity for all passengers, can be launched in minutes.

The loss of these classic liners taught us another lesson—which should never be forgotten: we are only human and the sea remains a great, indifferent God.

S. Thomas Russell

S. V. Watersmeet

August 2013