THE FORGOTTEN “TITANIC”! The RMS Empress of Ireland sinking resulted in the deaths of more passengers than the RMS Titanic disaster.

The RMS Empress of Ireland sinking resulted in the deaths of more passengers than the RMS Titanic disaster.

Why has the RMS Empress of Ireland tragedy been forgotten? The sinking of the RMS Empress Of Ireland hit Canada hard and was the worst maritime disaster in Canadian history. Occurring just two years after the RMS Titanic disaster, and a year before the loss of the RMS Lusitania, it is essentially forgotten.

Why?

The Empress disaster does not have the drama of the Titanic’s iceberg collision, nor is it the subject of countless films and books-or excessive hype. It carried ordinary people, unlike the Titanic’s millionaires and aristocrats. The Empress was not a leviathan, nor did it ply the popular route from New York to Southampton, England. There were enough lifeboats for all on board and it was not a maiden voyage. Nor did the Empress foundering have the political repercussions of the torpedoing of the Lusitania.

The Last Voyage of the Empress – Part 1 of 5 from David Greener on Vimeo.
First part of the excellent Last Voyage of the Empress series presented by the CBC.

Three months after the Empress sank, the First World War broke out. The tragedy was quickly overtaken by death in Europe on an unfathomable scale. The loss from the Empress paled in companion with the wholesale slaughter wrought by modern warfare. The Empress simply passed into “forgotten” history.

It took just 14 minutes for the St. Lawrence River to swallow the Canadian Pacific’s RMS Empress of Ireland in the pre-dawn of May 29, 1914. The disaster claimed 1,012 lives. More passengers, but less crew, perished in this tragedy than in the infamous Titanic sinking of 1912, and the catastrophe ranks as Canada’s worst maritime disaster.

The Empress’s sinking is one of a triumvirate of ocean liner disasters between 1912 and 1915 that took over 3,700 souls. The other two ships were the Titanic and Lusitania, and the stories of their losses are well known. What follows is the largely forgotten history of the sinking of the Empress of Ireland.

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Canadian Pacific’s EMPRESS OF JAPAN- 193os postcards…

In 1930 the Canadian Pacific’s trans-pacific service reached its zenith with the introduction of the magnificent S/S Empress of Japan. She was a very handsome ship and had magnificent interiors that now are associated with the Empress liners of Canadian Pacific. This mighty ship was delivered to Canadian Pacific in Liverpool and sailed on her maiden voyage from Liverpool to Quebec on the 14th July 1930. From Quebec she sailed to Southampton. On the 12th July 1930 she sailed from Southampton bound for Hong Kong via the Suez Canal to begin her trans pacific services. On the 7th August 1930 she set off on her first trans-pacific crossing from Hong Kong to Vancouver via Yokohama and Honolulu. Some of the notable guests on board included HM The King of Siam. During her maiden trans-pacific voyage, she set a new speed record for the route from Yokohama to Vancouver. Over the next nine years the Empress of Japan made 58 round trips from Vancouver to Yokohama and Shanghai (via Honolulu) during which time the American and Japanese competition could never match her speed. During this heyday she was the undisputed champion of the trans-pacific service. She was the flagship of the trans-pacific service, like the famous RMS Empress of Britain was for their transatlantic service. Sadly this came to an end when the Second World War started in September 1939. At the time the Empress of Japan was in Shanghai. Due to suspicions about Japanese intentions Canadian Pacific ordered her to sail straight back to Victoria in British Colombia via Honolulu. There like many other ocean liners she was converted for use as a troopship during the Second World War and gave sterling service. In October 1942 after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour, Winston Churchill (the British Prime Minister) personally ordered that the Empress of Japan should be renamed as Empress of Scotland. She carried this name for the rest of her Canadian Pacific career. (Courtesy: The Ocean Liner Virtual Museum – UK)

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