Just two years after the Titanic, and a year before Lusitania, another passenger ship sank with an even greater loss of life, yet few remember the tragic tale. The Empress of Ireland sank in Canada’s St. Lawrence River in the spring of 1914 after colliding with another ship in a dense fog bank in the dead of night. Sadly, the outbreak of World War I a few months later overshadowed its tragic fate. How did this catastrophe unfold?
Although not as grand as the Titanic, the Empress of Ireland was the pride of the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company. Built by Fairfield Shipbuilding in Glasgow, Scotland, the Empress was christened and launched in 1906. For the next eight years, it would safely carry tens of thousands of passengers across the Atlantic Ocean.
The Empress of Ireland accommodated 1,542 passengers in four class sections on seven decks and was operated by a crew of 373. She was 570 feet long and could carry 310 First Class, 468 Second Class, 494 Third Class, and 270 Steerage.
At 4:27 PM on May 28th, 1914, the Empress departed from Quebec City for a six-day voyage to Liverpool, England starting down the St. Lawrence River with 1,477 passengers and crew. British families who had established themselves in the Americas, frequently booked return passages to the UK to visit loved ones and show off new children and grandchildren.
The Empress was under the command of a newly appointed Captain, Henry George Kendall.
It was a pleasant spring afternoon as Capt. Kendall gave the orders to depart. As a new Captain, this was a day he worked his whole life to achieve. Having risen through the ranks, this was to be his first voyage as master of his own ship. He set a course downriver to the mouth of the St. Lawrence and the Atlantic beyond.
Unlike Titanic, there were few famous people on board, just the actor Laurence Irving and his wife, actress Mabel Hackney, returning to Britian from a successful Canadian tour. Many of the passengers, including 170 members of the Canadian Salvation Army Band, were excited to be heading to a large musical convention in London.
Passengers milled about on deck in the long daylight hours or in the gangways, learning their way around the ship. Parents allowed older children to roam freely. Diners enjoyed the late sunset coming in through windows, then some fresh air in an after-dinner stroll on deck. As night closed in, passengers and crew settled in to their staterooms and cabins for their first night underway.
Like a harbor, the St. Lawrence River requires pilots to operate from the bridge. Pilots were taken on and off at Point-au-Père, Quebec, near Rimouski. One of the Empress’s last tasks that night before heading into the open water of the Gulf of St. Lawrence was to disembark its river pilot. Having done so, she was still close to southern shore of the river.
Also on the St. Lawrence that night was the Norwegian freighter Storstad inbound from Sidney, Nova Scotia. She was carrying a full load of black coal to Montreal and sat low in the water. The Storstad was heading upriver, about to pick up her pilot for the voyage to Montreal, so also hugged the southern coastline.
The ships first sighted each other’s mast lights near 2:00 AM on May 29th.
Till now, it had been a calm, clear night near on the river near Point-au-Père. On the bridge of the Empress of Ireland, Captain Henry Kendall estimated the approaching ship was roughly eight miles away, off his port bow. If the Empress held its course, the ships would pass each other port to port.
But this would take the Empress closer to shore and off his intended course towards the gulf. He still had ample time for a turn to port, cross the Storstad’s bow, and set his course for open water. The two ships should pass starboard to starboard, still comfortably apart.
Within moments of adjusting course though, a creeping bank of FOG formed on the river, swallowing both the Empress and the approaching ship. Heavy fog was common on the St. Lawrence when warm, moist air encountered the frigid river water, producing a thick fog so dense that visibility was near zero.
Worried by the fog and the other ship, Captain Kendall gave three blasts on his ship’ smoke stack whistle. This indicated to the other ship that he was ordering his engines full astern, slowing the ocean liner to a crawl. Kendall kept her bow pointing on its course up the river and waited for a sign the other ship was safely past.
Onboard the Storstad, the captain was asleep and First Mate Alfred Toftenes was in command of the bridge. He saw the large ocean liner before the fog rolled in and was also concerned with its proximity. Not realizing the Empress intended a starboard-to-starboard passing, and believing they would be passing port to port, he ordered a turn to starboard, unknowingly taking it directly into the Empress’s path. When the fog rolled in, he woke his captain.
Back on the Empress or Ireland, tense minutes passed on the bridge.
The next thing the crew saw were two masthead lights appearing out of the fog. They were only a hundred feet away to starboard and heading straight at them on a collision course! Captain Kendall shouted his next order, “Hard to starboard!” attempting to swing his stern away from the approaching ship. The move was not successful. At this point, the two ships were too close to avoid impact.
The Storstad’s bow cleaved into the Empress hull midship between the liner’s steel ribs, below the waterline, leaving a gaping hole 16 feet wide. The Storstad’s bracing was designed to break through ice, making her bow a lethal weapon. The fact that she was fully loaded with coal meant she was deep in the water and punctured the Empress well below the waterline. She penetrated Empress of Ireland a fatal depth of 25 feet.
The river’s current and the Storstad’s momentum pulled it away from the doomed Empress. Sixty thousand gallons of icy water a second began pouring through the huge gash. The Empress’ list to starboard was almost immediate, with the quickly-submerging hull forcing even more water into the jagged opening.
The Empress of Ireland had watertight doors in its bulkheads below decks, but they required manual operation by the crew. Captain Kendall quickly ordered them closed, but the incoming water rapidly overwhelmed the crew and they had no time to seal them properly.
Water poured into the starboard side so fast that most of the people sleeping in starboard cabins did not stand a chance. Many passengers had their port holes open for a fresh night breeze. This unfortunately allowed their cabins to flood when the port holes suddenly dipped below the icy water. If there was any mercy for the starboard side passengers, it was that their drowning deaths came quickly.
At around 6 minutes following the strike, the power failed, plunging the ship into darkness.
The gangways were now filled with panicked, screaming passengers. There was also no time to muster women and children first. Following the Titanic’s sinking, the Empress was equipped with enough lifeboats for all. However with the fast and severe list to starboard, only a few were able to launch. The listing quickly became so extreme that only five boats could be successfully launched off the starboard side. A few attempts of the port side boats resulted in them skidding down the side of ship and capsizing, toppling passengers in the dark, icy river.
After 10 minutes, the liner had lurched completely over and now lay on her side. Some 700 passengers managed to climbed out port side doors and portholes, crouching precariously on her port side hull. As the stern rose, those survivors were thrown into the freezing water. A mere 14 minutes after the collision, the Empress of Ireland sank beneath the St. Lawrence River.
The captain of the Storstad had immediately ordered his ship to lower its lifeboats to rescue survivors. By the time the last of the nearly-frozen survivors had been fished from the dark river, the death toll was staggering. Of the 1,477 on board, 1,012 died, including 840 passengers, eight more than the Titanic. The 170 members of a Salvation Army Band all perished. Captain Kendall was thrown from the bridge and survived the sinking. He was rescued by a lifeboat.
Young William Clark worked as a fireman aboard the Empress. He was in the engine room stoking the steam boilers with chunks of black coal when the Storstad struck. Clarke somehow managed to climb up to the decks. The events of that night were all too familiar to Clark, as he worked as a stoker on the Titanic’s maiden voyage and survived that historic sinking as well. He later gave up on his life at sea.
Word spread quickly on the river that a ship had gone down and survivors were being brought ashore. In the port of Rimouski, Quebec, no one could have imagined it was the Empress of Ireland that had sunk. The few survivors able to withstand the frigid river waters were brought to Rimouski, but many later died of pneumonia.
Comparisons to the Titanic were inevitable, but there is no winner in a game of disaster.
The Titanic lost 832 passengers and 635 crew; the Empress lost 840 passengers and 172 crew, 134 children. The Titanic took 2 hours, 40 minutes to sink. The Empress of Ireland went down in just 14 minutes. Coming so soon after the Titanic, the Empress underscored the difficulty of building a ship guaranteed to sink slowly enough to completely abandon it.
While as great of a tragedy as the Titanic, the sinking of the Empress of Ireland never garnered the press or international attention the Titanic received. The Empress of Ireland was not a particularly famous or fashionable ship. Soon after the Empress sank, the world’s attention was drawn to the early beginnings of World War I in Europe.
What had happened? For certain, fog had proved to be a treacherous conspirator. Captain Kendall blamed the Norwegian captain for the disaster. “You have sunk my ship!” were the first words he uttered when he was pulled on board the Storstad. Had the two ships simply kept their courses and speeds, they would have passed each other without colliding.
The Canadian government wanted answers and commissioned an Inquiry which met on on 16 June 1914 in Quebec City. Lord Mersey, who had presided over the Titanic Inquiry in 1912 (and would preside over the Lusitania Inquiry in 1915), lead the Empress Inquiry.
Captain Kendall testified he was going to pass the Norwegian ship cleanly starboard to starboard with no risk of collision. As the fog rolled in, the captain stopped the engines and blew the ships whistle’s three short blasts, indicating that the engines were now at full speed astern. The fog worsened and the Storstad’s masthead lights reappeared when the ship was only a hundred feet away coming at them broadside.
Storstad Captain Thomas Anderson was awakened by Chief Officer Toftenes, when he slowed the ship down. Toftenes thought they were going to pass port to port. He ordered a turn to starboard, away from what he thought was the other ship’s course. In reality, he was turning into the Empress’s side. Captain Anderson testified he ordered full speed astern moments before the two ships collided.
The Commission found that the Storstad had changed course during the fog and was at fault.
There were three factors that led to the rapid sinking of the Empress of Ireland: 1) the location of the impact, midship, 2) failure to close the watertight doors, and 3) the open portholes. The Norwegians then held their own inquiry and found the Empress of Ireland at fault. They said the standard protocol of passing port to port was not followed.
Just weeks after the disaster, Canadian Pacific hired a salvage company to retrieve the first-class mail, the purser’s safe and $150,000 in silver bullion ($2 million today). From June through August, numerous dives were made to retrieve its valuables and some of the bodies. Unfortunately, only a small number of bodies were retrieved. Most were trapped beyond the divers’ reach inside the wreck.
Following the investigation into the accident, Captain Kendall was cleared of all charges in the disaster. He went on to serve aboard other ships and had a long life at sea. He passed away in 1965 at the age of 91. His obituary in The London Times made no mention of the his role in the sinking of the Empress of Ireland.
The Empress would lie in its watery grave for another 50 years before it was rediscovered by modern scuba divers in 1964, lying in 130 feet of water. But because the St. Lawrence is around 40F/4C even in summer, and has strong tidal currents that limit visibility, this is a dive for experts only. Nevertheless, the Empress has been visited hundreds of times since, including one by Dr. Robert Ballard, discoverer of the Titanic wreck.
Some divers have treated the wreck with respect while others have ravaged its remains. The insides of the Empress of Ireland are half-hidden by the silt steadily deposited by the St. Lawrence River over the years. Because the ship rests at so sharply on an angle, the starboard side is buried.
In the ship’s dining salon, chairs and tables appear to float in the silt like driftwood. The remains of light fixtures dangle from the steeply angled ceiling. In the adjoining pantry, most of the first-class china has been taken by divers, as is the ship’s bell, one of its propellers, and the main bridge telegraph.
Sadly, some divers have even taken the bones of the more than 1,000 people who drowned inside. Divers continued to explore the wreck until 1998, when it was classified as a historic site by the Quebec government, protecting it from any further plundering.
A monument stands over a mass grave on a coastal road near Pointe-au-Père in Rimouski, inscribed with the names of those lost in the disaster. Ships passing by will see a white buoy which permanently marks the location of the wreck. Ironically, the lessons from the Empress of Ireland would have to be relearned 40 years later during the sinking of the Andrea Doria in 1956 following a another collision, when once again fog proved more than a match, for even modern radar.