Hundreds of people were tucked in for the night on a long ocean journey to Europe.
The engine of the ship hummed dully throughout the decks.
No one worried about the ship sinking like the Titanic did two years earlier because this vessel had more than enough lifeboats, and all of the newest safety features.
Worry free and content passengers put their heads on pillows and drifted to sleep in cabins that night.
Then…
In the middle of the cold night, a massive jolt ripped through the ship.
Bags fell off shelves and people fell out of beds.
After the shudder, the dull hum of the engines was gone.
Passengers got dressed and went to the deck to see what happened.
Those who felt the crisp spring air that night were the lucky ones.
For hundreds, it was already too late.
Within ten minutes of being woken up from their peaceful slumber, some passengers were struggling in the dark as water filled their cabins.
Many died never knowing what had happened.
I’m Craig Baird, this is Canadian History Ehx and today I share the story of Canada’s Titanic… this is the Empress of Ireland disaster.
When the War of 1812 ended, a new era began for Canada.
The Great Migration.
The first wave took place from 1815 to 1850 and saw 800,000 immigrants from the British Isles taking long journeys across the Atlantic Ocean.
They left behind their homeland, where work was hard to come by and cities were overcrowded, to find a better life in what would become Canada.
The next great wave of immigration came in 1885 after the completion of the transcontinental railway. Immigrants could now settle the Canadian West and arrived in the tens of thousands over two decades.
The Canadian Pacific Railway encouraged immigration because it meant money for the railroad.
New arrivals paid the CPR to transport them and their worldly possessions to their final destination on the prairies. When they arrived, they bought land that the CPR usually owned.
It was a thriving business model for the railroad.
Eventually the company realized it could make more money by owning the very ships that brought immigrants to Canada.
In the early-1880s, while still building its great transcontinental railroad across Canada, the CPR negotiated with the United Kingdom government to establish an ocean-going service from Asia to the Canadian Pacific Coast.
Two decades later in 1903, Canadian Pacific Steamships company started operating in the Atlantic Ocean with three ships, the Lake Erie, Lake Manitoba and Lake Champlain, the CPR transported 23,400 passengers in 1904 in 33 westbound crossings from Europe.
The company wanted to build on that success.
Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering out of Glasgow was contracted to build two ships, initially named the Empress of Germany and the Empress of Austria.
Both names were later changed under a new policy that required any Canadian Pacific ship to be named after a colony or dependency of the British Empire.
The Empress of Britain was the first to be launched, hitting the water on Nov. 11, 1905, and taking her maiden voyage on May 5, 1906. She would ply the waters of the North Atlantic for the next quarter century until she was taken out of service and scrapped in 1930.
The Empress of Ireland was built next as a sister ship, and had her keel laid down on April 10, 1905. Measuring 170 metres long with four decks, she was built to hold over 1,500 passengers and be one of the best immigrant ships of the era.
These ships helped usher in the third wave of immigration which took place just prior to the First World War, from 1911 to 1914.
Theys were mostly from Eastern and Southern Europe and their numbers dwarfed previous waves, with hundreds of thousands of new immigrants stepping onto Canadian shores each year.
Great ships, capable of carrying hundreds of people, ferried new arrivals from Europe across the Atlantic and into Canadian waters.
The Empress of Ireland was one of those ships.
The Empress of Ireland, like many ships of the time, was built with three classes.
First class held 310 passengers and gave open access to the boat deck and two promenades. There was a music room with built-in sofas and a grand piano. The first-class dining room could hold 224 people, with a secondary children’s dining room located next to it.
Second class held 460 passengers that had access to an open deck and also featured a dining room, social hall, and smoking room.
Third class was not as bad as you might envision.
While passengers didn’t have as much space, or the fanciest rooms, there was still plenty for the 764 passengers to enjoy. They had an open deck with wooden benches, a smoke room, ladies’ room with piano and a children’s sandbox.
The Empress of Ireland launched on Jan. 27, 1906 and took her maiden voyage six months later on June 29 from Liverpool carrying 1,257 passengers.
She arrived in Quebec City on July 6. After six days in the city, she turned around and began her first east-bound journey back to Liverpool.
She would do this for the next seven years.
During that time, she completed 95 round trips and transported 119,262 people to Canada, and 67,838 to the United Kingdom.
She likely would have continued doing this for years to come, had it not been that fateful night on May 29, 1914.
Following the tragedy of the Titanic in 1912, Canadian Pacific Steamships upgraded all their ships with lifesaving equipment.
No one wanted a repeat of what happened to that great ship.
The Empress of Ireland originally featured wooden lifeboats, but these were upgraded to steel lifeboats. Another 26 wooden collapsible lifeboats were also added. This meant there were lifeboats for 1,686 people, more than enough to ensure every single person on the ship could get away in the case of a disaster.
The vessel had been built with 10 watertight bulkheads that were divided into 11 compartments that could be sealed with 24 watertight doors. This was expected to keep the ship afloat even if two compartments were ripped open.
Unlike the Titanic, her watertight doors had to be closed manually, rather than by a switch on the bridge and that did not change.
She was also equipped with a wireless telegraph in 1913 so operators could call for help if something happened in the North Atlantic.
No one anticipated that a disaster would befall the ship within sight of shore.
On May 28, 1914, the Empress prepared to depart from Quebec City for another run to Liverpool.
On board was a crew of 420 and 1,057 passengers. She was running at only two-thirds capacity, and first class was quite empty with only 87 passengers as most 717 others were booked in third class which was nearly to capacity.
Among the passengers were some very high-profile individuals. Laurence Irving, son of Victorian stage actor Sir Henry Irving, was heading home after two years in North America on a stage tour.
Sir Henry Seton-Karr, a former Member of the British House of Commons was also going home after finishing a hunting trip in British Columbia.
There was also Lt. Col. Charles Tylee, a member of the Canadian Army, on his way to Europe with his wife Martha.
In second class, most passengers were members of the Salvation Army, who were going to a Congress in London.
The ship was under the command of Henry George Kendall, a man who began his sailing career at the age of 14.
When he was 26 in 1900, he survived a shipwreck off the coast of Newfoundland. That experience pushed him to meet with inventor Guglielmo Marconi to develop a ship-to-shore radio that could be used to send distress signals in the case of a disaster.
In 1908, he received his first command, and in 1910 was appointed captain of the Canadian Pacific’s SS Montrose. He was widely respected for his abilities and for having a cool head under pressure.
Also on board were the wife and young daughter of William Clarke. They were going to visit Liverpool, while William remained at home.
For two weeks, his daughter told him she had a bad feeling about the trip and that she was afraid to go.
He brushed her concerns aside and told her the ship was more than safe.
He would regret those words for the rest of his life.
With her passengers aboard, the ship was ready to begin her journey.
But then…a passenger suddenly jumped ship.
She was a yellow tabby, the ship’s cat, who fled down the gangway just as the ship was ready to leave. A steward ran and grabbed the cat and brought her back on board.
Once again, she fled and was eventually left behind in Quebec City.
Perhaps that cat had a premonition… of the horrors that were to come.
The Empress began its journey along the St. Lawrence River at 4:27 p.m. on May 28, 1914 with many passengers enjoying the crisp afternoon spring air from the ship’s decks.,
She chugged along the river against the current as everyone settled for the long journey ahead.
Day turned to night, and by midnight, passengers were asleep in their cabins, as the crew stood watch on the bridge.
Everything was routine.
At about 1 a.m., the crew on the Empress sighted the SS Storstad. Another ship coming towards them in the opposite direction.
The St. Lawrence River was the busiest waterway in Canada, so it was not unusual to see another ship.
The Storstad was a Norwegian ship first launched on Oct. 4, 1910. The day she was launched, she struck another ship, SS Dardania, leaving her stern damaged.
Repaired, she left on her maiden voyage on Jan. 31, 1911 as a cargo ship doing supply runs from North America to Europe.
On March 20, 1914, she left Philadelphia for Venice, Italy to unload 9,700 tons of coal.
With that accomplished, she turned around and departed Italy on April 10 for North Sydney, Nova Scotia.
For the rest of the summer, she was to run coal from North Sydney to Montreal under the command of Captain Thomas Anderson, who was known to be a strict captain.
Heading toward Montreal with 10,400 tons of coal, her crew sighted the Empress of Ireland in the distance.
There was more than enough room for the ships to pass each other, starboard to starboard, without any difficulty.
Captain Kendall on the Empress ordered his ship to alter her course slightly to give her extra room.
And as the ships moved along the river in opposite directions, Mother Nature played her hand.
A dense fog rolled in, lowering visibility down to only a few metres in front of each ship. This was not unusual for this time of year, and Kendall knew what he needed to do.
He ordered Full Astern, and signaled three short blasts to tell the Storstad that she was reversing her engines and slowing down.
On the Storstad, First Officer Alfred Toftenes signaled one long blast of the ship’s horn in reply.
The crew on the Empress believed the blast came from the starboard side.
Toftenes chose not to wake Captain Anderson, out of fear he would be reprimanded for waking the captain for something trivial.
Unable to see anything in front of him, Kendall ordered the engines to a full stop. He signaled two blasts of the horn to tell the Storstad that his ship had stopped.
The air was still as the crews of each ship listened for the other to make sure they would pass each other in the dense fog.
On the Storstad, the crew thought they saw the green lights of the Empress and believed she would hold her course and pass the Storstad on the starboard side.
After a few tense seconds, the Storstad crew suddenly saw what they thought were the lights of the Empress again and believed she was changing her course.
First Officer Toftenes now believed the Empress was going to pass them on the port side.
To get extra room, he ordered the Storstad to make a small change towards port and then cut the engines and allow the vessel to drift.
On the Empress of Ireland, the crew waited to see the Norwegian ship but saw nothing through the fog.
The only sound was the lapping of waves against the Empress’ hull.
And then…
Like a monster emerging from the darkness, the 131-metre long Storstad suddenly appeared roaring out of the fog towards the Empress.
The crew scrambled to get their ship out of the way, but it was already too late.
The Storstad had appeared only 30 metres away.
That is less than half the size of a CFL football field.
At 1:56 a.m. on May 29, the Storstad crashed into the starboard side of the Empress.
The entire ship shook as she heaved in the water from the force of the collision.
People on every deck fell out of their beds. The lights flickered and a great grinding noise echoed throughout the vessel.
The Storstad collided at a 40-degree angle into the Empress.
The design of the front of the Storstad created a battering ram effect that tore a five-metre gash into the side of the Empress.
The collision could not have happened at a worse spot.
The Empress, like most ships, was weakest in the middle and it struggled to hold itself together with the huge hole in its hull.
Captain Kendall immediately sprang into action and grabbed a megaphone.
He called the Storstad and told that ship’s crew to go full ahead against the Empress. Kendall wanted to use the Storstad as a plug to prevent the Empress from sinking quickly. This maneuver would allow passengers to get off the damaged ship.
The Storstad complied, but the current was too strong, and it began to tear the interlocked ships apart.
Sparks flew as steel rubbed on steel and the two ships grinded against each other as the current pulled the Storstad away and the St. Lawrence River flooded into the stricken Empress of Ireland.
Kendall said later,
“When he struck me, I had stopped my engines. I shouted to him to keep full speed ahead, to fill the hole he had made and then he backed away!”
There was no way of slowing down the rushing water and the tragedy that was about to come.
Throughout the Empress, passengers were sitting in their rooms, trying to figure out what happened.
Some poured into hallways to talk to fellow passengers who were just oblivious as to what that monstrous noise was.
On the bridge of the Empress, the crew tried desperately to keep the ship with the Storstad, which was fast moving away in the current.
Within seconds, the two ships were metres apart.
The Storstad was still afloat. All its damage was in the front of the ship and there was little danger of it sinking.
It was a completely different story for the Empress.
The five-metre gash in the starboard side of the ship was now open to the water.
A thunderous 60,000 gallons of water per second began rushing into the ship. That is nearly as much water as goes over the American side of Niagara Falls every second.
There was nothing that could be done. The ship was going to sink, and it was going to do it fast.
Captain Kendall sent out a message on the wireless,
“Empress of Ireland stopped by dense fog, struck amidship in a vital spot by collier Storstad.”
At Father Point’s Marconi Station, the telegraph operator picked up the message and then immediately lost contact with the ship.
He didn’t know it in his quiet telegraph station on dry land, but the telegraph room on the Empress was already filling with water as the operators fled for their lives.
The Empress was sinking so quickly that there was no time to close the watertight doors to prevent the flooding of other compartments.
The same passengers who were wondering what had happened only minutes earlier were hit by a wall of water rushing towards them.
Hundreds of passengers in second and third class were trapped below deck with no hope of survival.
Only five minutes after the collision, the Empress began to list towards the starboard side. As the ship tilted, the lifeboats on the port side became useless as they could not be lowered down to water level.
Due to the angle of the ship, any lifeboats released from the port side would crash into the side of the ship or tumble into the water.
On the starboard side, the ship was listing so quickly that only five lifeboats were launched with only a few people in them.
As the ship continued to tip towards the starboard side, water poured into any open porthole increasing the speed with which the ship was taking on water and sucking many who made it out back into the ship.
It was complete chaos on the sinking Empress.
Ten minutes after the collision, the vessel lurched heavily onto its starboard side.
It was at such an angle that people climbed out portholes on the port side and stood on the side of the ship.
Two minutes later, the stern of the ship rose high out of the water and the ship began to sink in earnest.
Hundreds of people standing on the port side were thrown into the cold water.
Most died from hypothermia, rather than drowning.
Captain Kendall was one of those thrown from the Empress.
He was forced to swim to the surface where he clung to a wooden grate floating in the water.
He was quickly rescued by a nearby lifeboat.
He took command and began searching for survivors and rescued them on the boat. He transported them to shore and then ventured out to rescue more people.
A stoker in the engine room was having a terrible sense of déjà vu.
William Clark, no relation to the man who watched his wife and daughter get on the ship earlier, had survived the sinking of the Titanic where he worked as a fireman
Now he was on another ship that was about to experience a similar fate.
He wrote later,
“No one had any time to wait on the Empress of Ireland. We knew what we had to do. No more, no less. The empress sprawled like a pig in the mud. The Titanic simply sank like a fat baby going to sleep.”
He had fallen into the water and was rescued by a nearby lifeboat.
Laurence Irving, who was on his way home after performing on stages across North America, became separated from his wife as the ship began to sink. His wife could not swim so he put the only life jacket he had around her. Both jumped into the water, but neither survived the night.
The Nelson family from Provost, Alberta were on their way to Ireland to visit family. They had only been in Canada for seven years. The entire family was killed that night.
One man identified only as W. Davis, out of Montreal, woke up when the collision happened and saw water pour into the stateroom where he was sleeping with his wife. He took his wife up to the deck, but the ship was listing so badly that they had to crawl on their hands and knees up the increasingly sloping deck.
When the ship suddenly surged to the starboard side, his wife was swept away from his grasp.
As the Empress sank, both Davis and his wife were sucked under the water. They were able to swim back to the surface and held onto a piece of wood floating in the water.
Both survived.
Two brothers, Chris and Ted Bartschie from Botha, Alberta, were on their way home to Switzerland for a visit. Both men woke up in the collision and went to get lifejackets on deck. As the ship sank, they said goodbye to each other and jumped into the water but were sucked under water.
Ted survived, but Chris did not.
He had cut his hand before the trip and was unable to hang onto anything to stay afloat.
A rancher out of British Columbia, J.W. Longley held onto the deck as best as he could when the ship sank beneath the waters he came back up after a few seconds and grabbed the side of a lifeboat and was rescued.
William Measuers, a Salvation Army bandsman, did the same thing. He crept along the rail of the promenade deck until the ship went under the water. Then he swam to the surface, grabbed a lifeboat, and was rescued.
On board the ship were 11 stewardesses. A Mrs. Hollis would be the only one to survive.
She said,
“I cannot swim, but I managed to keep afloat for a few moments until a fireman pulled me out of the water.”
14 minutes after the collision, the ship was gone.
The sounds of people yelling and thrashing in the water filled the air.
Only seven of 40 lifeboats were launched.
Nearby, the Storstad’s crew was doing everything it could to help survivors.
The crew launched their lifeboats to rescue people out of the cold waters.
The telegraph operator on the ship also kept sending distress signals to the mainland and across the St. Lawrence River Valley several nearby ships made the journey to the crash site.
Despite best efforts, the loss of life was staggering.
Of the 420 crew on the Empress, 172 died.
Passenger casualties were much worse.
Over 840 died on the ship, including 134 children.
Of the 310 women on board, only 41 lived.
Of the men, 172 out of 437 survived.
Second class was especially hard hit.
Of the 253 passengers in that class, 205 died.
Of the 170 members of the Salvation Army, only 40 lived to tell the tale of the Empress.
In first class, 51 people died out of 87.
Among the dead was Ella Hart-Bennett, the wife of British government official William Hart-Bennett and Gabriel J. Marks, the first mayor of Suva, Fiji, along with his wife.
Lt. Charles Bowes-Lyon, the first cousin of Queen Elizabeth, The Queen Mother, survived, only to die five months later in the First World War.
The youngest survivor was Grace Hanagan. She would also become the last living survivor of the disaster when she passed away in 1995.
Her parents were part of the Salvation Army in second class. She said she woke up 10 minutes before the ship went under and jumped over the side. Grace was one of only four children to survive. She was rescued by a lifeboat, but her parents died.
For years afterwards, she was scared to take a bath.
She said,
“I remember holding onto a plank or some wood and there was a woman on it with me. We saw a lifeboat a little ways off and we called to the people in the boat.”
In the 1990s she shared her experience in a documentary.
One girl, Florence Barbour, survived thanks to the heroics o Robert Crellen.
Known as Uncle Robert, he was friends with her parents, and he was on the deck with the family when the ship began to tip to its side.
After he was thrown into the water, he grabbed Florence who was already in the water and put her on his back.
He swam with her on his back for an hour until they were rescued by a lifeboat. Crellen took over the lifeboat and rescued another 25 people.
When he and Florence arrived in Quebec City, he said,
“She kept asking me when her mamma and sister would be with her. I could not bring myself to tell her they had died in the icy waters.”
James Grant, the doctor aboard the Empress spent the night tending to the injured survivors while wearing a wet pajama top and borrowed pants.
He never talked about the disaster for the rest of his life.
As for William Clarke, the man whose daughter didn’t want to get on the ship, he soon learned that his wife and daughter were dead.
He said,
“I would sooner have gone down on that boat with my wife and child than have heard this terrible news.”
Dolly Brooks was as unfortunate as Clarke’s daughter. She had been travelling in second class with her parents. As the ship rocked and rolled her mother held her hand until they hit the water.
Dolly’s parents survived, but she did not. When her body was found, holding a tiny wallet firmly in her hand. It has since been placed in a museum.
The first rescue ship on the scene was the CGS Eureka, followed by Lady Evelyn.
As morning broke, a message from one of the ships in the search area stated,
“No sign of Ireland. Lifeboats visible in the distance circling around the CGS Eureka. The government steamer Lady Evelyn is also on the scene now.”
Lady Evelyn was able to rescue 200 people from the water, while the Storstad had saved 133.
Eventually, the rescue effort turned to body recovery as anyone still in the water by morning had died of hypothermia.
The Storstad limped into port with a smashed bow along with rescued passengers aboard. Once she arrived in Montreal, she was immediately detained, and the crew questioned.
The loss of life was staggering, and it remains the worst peacetime maritime disaster in Canadian history.
Then Prime Minister Robert Borden said of the disaster,
“In its awful suddenness and in the dreadful toll of human life taken the disaster is one which brings a shock as we, in this country, have never felt before.”
Captain Kendall of the Empress, filled with grief, was reported to have stayed in a hotel, and not said more than two words to anyone in the days after the disaster.
You might be wondering, how was this crash such a disaster?
The terrible loss of life on the Empress was caused by three main factors.
The first, I already covered and had to do with the site of the impact. The Storstad hit the Empress in the middle, arguably the weakest point, creating a large hole through which water poured in.
The second factor was the failure to get the watertight doors closed in time to prevent further flooding across the starboard side of the ship.
The third factor were the longitudinal bulkheads which prevented water from reaching the port side. This caused all the water to remain on the starboard side and created the list on the ship that eventually tipped it on its side.
This led to a fourth contributing factor, which were the open portholes on the starboard side that allowed water to pour into the upper decks of the ship.
As with any disaster, the first question after was, who was to blame?
A few days after the ship sank, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle, author of Sherlock Holmes, was in Montreal.
A reporter asked him to say who was to blame for the disaster and what caused it.
Doyle, who was often asked to solve mysteries due to the famous character he created, said he didn’t know.
On June 16, 1914, a Commission of Inquiry was held with Lord Mersey, a British jurist, presiding over matters.
Over the course of two weeks, 61 witnesses were called to testify, including 24 crew and officers.
Among them was Captain Kendall.
There were also 12 crew from the Storstad, including that ship’s captain, Captain Anderson.
Five passengers from the Empress testified, as did two divers, two wireless operators, two naval architects and several others.
In the testimonies, two different stories began to emerge from the two ships.
The crew of the Empress reported that they were proceeding full speed when they saw the Storstad.
Captain Kendall stated he ordered the Empress to move so the ships would pass starboard to starboard.
When fog rolled in, he then ordered the ship to stop and blew three short blasts from the horn.
After several minutes, Kendall testified, he saw the Storstad 30 metres away and coming at full speed.
Kendall told the commission he then ordered full speed ahead to try to get out of the way, but the Storstad hit the Empress before they could clear it.
Kendall put all the blame on the Storstad.
He had felt this way since he was rescued by the Storstad crew, and he immediately ran at Captain Anderson and yelled “You have sunk my ship!”.
When the Storstad crew testified, they said that the Empress changed course and the crew assumed she was going to pass port to port.
After exchanging whistle blasts, the Storstad slowed down and Captain Anderson, who was asleep at the time, was finally called to the bridge.
When Anderson got to the bridge and saw the Empress, he ordered full speed astern to try and miss the ship.
The conflicting evidence led Lord Mersey to say,
“The stories are irreconcilable, and we have to determine which is the more probably. The times, distances and bearings vary so very much, even in the evidence from witnesses from the same ship.”
At the end of the inquiry, with the testimonies and evidence, the commission stated that it came down to one simple issue.
Which ships changed course in the fog?
The commission put the blame on the Storstad in their opinion. First Officer Alfred Toftenes on the Storstad was called out specifically for altering course in the fog and failing to wake Captain Anderson when the fog arrived.
Captain Anderson was not happy about the conclusion and called Lord Mersey a fool for the decision.
The sinking led to changes in ship design. The use of an inverted prow, which was common at the time, acted like a battering ram when hitting another ship.
Investigators said the Storstad hit the Empress like a chisel into tin.
So naval designers stopped using the inverted prow in ship designs and began employing a raked bow with the top of the prow forward. This minimized the damage below the waterline in a collision.
The use of longitudinal bulkheads also ended because trapped water caused a ship to list heavily in the water if it was hit on one side.
The Empress was gone, and blame was levied.
Now it was time for everyone to go on with their lives as best as they could.
On June 16, 1914, Canadian Pacific hired a salvage company to dive down to the ship and blast a hole in the side of the First-Class area so that items could be retrieved.
The ship sank in water that was so shallow its funnels were visible from the water’s surface.
Divers rescued bodies and other valuables from the ship.
Unfortunately, limited visibility and the strong current of the St. Lawrence caused problems.
One of the divers, Edward Cossaboom, was killed when he slipped from the hull of the ship and fell 20 metres to the riverbed. His air hose ruptured as he fell. He was found unconscious and was brought to the surface. All attempts to revive him failed.
However, divers were able to collect 318 bags of mail and 251 bars of silver worth $3 million in 2024 funds.
In subsequent litigation, CPR sued the owners of the Storstad for $2 million, which was the value of the silver bullion left on the Empress. The owners of the Storstad countersued for $50,000. The CPR won their case, and became owners of the Storstad, which they sold for $175,000.
The CPR bought the Virginian from the Allan Line to fill the void in service and on June 12, it left Liverpool on its first voyage, taking over from the Empress’s duties.
Captain Henry Kendall of the Empress went to Belgium after the commission released its report. Soon after, the Germans invaded, and he worked with the British government at their consulate helping to get 600 refugees out of the country.
Using the SS Montrose, the refugees were loaded on the SS Montreal and towed out of port for England.
Kendall then joined HMS Calgarian and served in the First World War until 1918.
For his service he was mentioned in dispatches several times.
He survived a second ship sinking in March 1918 when the Calgarian was torpedoed by the German submarine U-19.
He wrote in a letter afterwards,
“Well, you noticed that the Calgarian was blown up . . . They put no less than four torpedoes into her so you can imagine the explosion and people being blown sky high . . . Well, I was eventually saved with 150 others by another vessel. Now comes the fun! Half an hour after she was blown up, so down went Henry George again. However, I managed to get to a drifting lifeboat and came to the conclusion it was good enough for me so eventually landed in Ireland.”
After the war, he worked for Canadian Pacific as the Marine Superintendent, and then moved to London in 1924.
He died in a nursing home in London in 1965 at the age of 91.
According to the nurses at his bedside, his last moments were in delirium reliving the fateful sinking of the Empress all over again.
Meanwhile the Chief Officer of the Storstad, Alfred Toftenes, who took most of the blame, disappeared for a few years after the disaster. He only popped up again in 1918 when he passed away in New York City.
Robert Crellin, aka Uncle Robert, who saved the life of Florence Barbour, went back to work as a miner in British Columbia. He died in Trail, B.C. in 1944.
Florence Barbour went back to England where she lived out the rest of her days.
In 1964, a half century after the disaster, she returned to Canada and met with Uncle Robert’s son. He gave her his father’s watch, the one he had on the night of the disaster.
Florence returned to England after the visit, where she passed away in 1972.
As for the Storstad, the other ship in this tale, following its sale it went into service during the First World War.
On March 8, 1917, she was sunk by the German submarine U-62 off the coast of Fastnet Rock near Ireland where three crew members died.
The captain was the same man in charge when the Storstad hit the Empress, Captain Thomas Anderson. [2]
He survived the sinking.
There is a good chance that this episode is the first time you are hearing about the Empress of Ireland disaster.
Why was it forgotten in time?
It came down to two things.
The Titanic
And
The First World War
The Titanic sank only two years earlier, and greatly overshadowed the Empress of Ireland’s demise.
Then, a few months later Austrian Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated, and the First World War erupted.
Only the Salvation Army seemed to write anything about the tragedy over the next few decades. Despite the site being relatively accessible in the St. Lawrence River, no divers went to the site until 1964.
Four years later one of the 20-tonne propellers was removed from the ship.
It was not until 1982 that Herbert Wood wrote Till We Meet Again, which helped bring the story of the Empress back into the public consciousness.
Three other books were written soon after.
In 1998, Jim Cameron’s Titanic was released in theaters and became the biggest movie in history and the story of the Empress found new life.
That year, the Quebec government finally declared the site a Provincial Historic Site.
This was far too late to protect artifacts that had been taken from the site illegally by divers from the United States over the years.
Robert Ballard, the man who found the Titanic, visited the wreck site, and said it was clear that many artifacts and even human remains were stolen by treasure hunters.
While the Empress continues to sit 40 metres under the waters of the St. Lawrence River, a relatively easy dive distance, the cold water, limited visibility, and strong currents of the St. Lawrence makes it especially dangerous. To date, nine people have lost their lives diving to the ship.
In 2005, The Last Voyage of the Empress, a TV movie, was released and investigated the sinking with re-enactments and underwater investigation.
In April 2012, 500 artifacts were removed from the Empress and acquired by the Museum of Civilization.
Canada Post has also created two stamps to commemorate the sinking, and the Royal Canadian Mint released a coin to honour the victims of the disaster in 2014.
Information for this article comes from Canadian Encyclopedia, Canada’s History, Wikipedia, Across Border and Valley, Botha, Liverpool Museums, Early Furrows, Irish Central, Ottawa Citizen, Calgary Herald, Montreal Gazette, National Post, Saskatoon Daily Star, Daily News Advertiser, Vancouver Province,
