http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RMS_Empress_of_Ireland
RMS Empress of Ireland was an ocean liner built in 1905 [1] by Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering at Govan on the Clyde in Scotland for Canadian Pacific Steamships (CP).[2] This Empress was distinguished by the Royal Mail Ship (RMS) prefix in front of her name because the British government and Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) had decades earlier reached agreement on a mail subsidy contract between Britain and Hong Kong via Canada.
While steaming on the Saint Lawrence River in fog, the Empress was struck amidships by the Norwegian collier (coal freighter) SS Storstad; and the fatally damaged vessel sank very quickly in the early morning of 29 May 1914. This accident claimed 1,024 lives[3], making it the deadliest maritime disaster in Canadian history.[4]
Artifacts from the wreckage and the history of the vessel, its passengers and crew are on display in the Empress of Ireland Pavilion at the Site historique maritime de la Pointe-au-Père in Rimouski, Quebec.
The Empress of Ireland was built by Fairfield Shipbuilding & Engineering Co. at Govan near Glasgow in Scotland.[5] The 14,191-ton vessel was a fixed price contract of £375,000 and was to be delivered to C.P.R eighteen months from the date the contract was signed. The keel was laid for hull number 443 at Fairfields berth number 4 next to her sister ship, the Empress of Britain which was also under construction on 10 April 1905. The new Empress had a length of 570 feet (174 m), and her beam was 66 feet (20.1 m). The plumb-bowed ship had twin funnels, two masts, twin propellers and an average speed of 18 knots (33 km/h). Providing accommodation for 310 first-class passengers and for 470 second-class passengers, there was also room for up to 750 third-class passengers. This meant that she had an overall capacity of 1,580. The Empress was launched on 26 January 1906, and she set out on her maiden voyage from Liverpool, she proved herself as both reliable and fast.[4] There was one incident in 1909 where the Empress struck a sunken vessel or an unknown submerged rock at the northern end of the St Lawrence.[6]
The vessel, along with her sister ship Empress of Britain, had been commissioned by Canadian Pacific for the northern trans-Atlantic route between Quebec and England. The transcontinental CPR and its fleet of ocean liners were part of the company's self-proclaimed World's Greatest Transportation System.
The Empress of Ireland departed Quebec City for Liverpool at 16:30 local time on 28 May 1914 with 1,477 passengers and crew. Henry George Kendall had just been promoted to captain of the Empress at the beginning of the month; and it was his first trip down the Saint Lawrence River in command of the vessel.
Early the next morning on 29 May 1914, the ship was proceeding down the channel near Pointe-au-Père, Quebec (eastern district of the town of Rimouski) in heavy fog. At 02:00 local time, the Norwegian collier Storstad crashed into the side of the Empress of Ireland. The Storstad did not sink, but Empress of Ireland, with severe damage to her starboard side, listed rapidly, taking on water. Most of the passengers and crew in the lower decks drowned quickly when water poured into the ship from the open portholes, some of which were only a few feet above the water line. However, many passengers and crew in the upper deck cabins, awakened by the collision, made it out onto the boat deck and into some of the lifeboats which were being loaded immediately. Within a few minutes after the collision, the Empress of Ireland had listed so far on its starboard side that it became impossible to launch any more lifeboats than the four that had already been launched. Ten or eleven minutes after the collision, the ship lurched violently on its starboard side in which as many as 700 passengers and crew crawled out of the portholes and decks onto its side. For a minute or two, the Empress of Ireland lay on its side, while it seemed to the passengers and crew that the ship had run aground. But a few minutes later, about 14 minutes after the collision, the ship's stern rose briefly out of the water, and its hull sank out of sight, throwing the hundreds of people still on its port side into the near-freezing water. Exactly 1,024 people died.[3] Of that number, 840 were passengers, eight more than the Titanic.
There were only 465 survivors, four of whom were children (the other 134 children were lost) and 42 of whom were women (the other 279 women were lost). One of the survivors was Captain Henry George Kendall, who was on the bridge at the time and quickly ordered the lifeboats to be launched. When the Empress was thrown on its side, Kendall was thrown from the bridge into the water, and was taken down with the ship as it began to go under. Swimming to the surface, Kendall clung to a wooden grating long enough for a nearby lifeboat, with crew members aboard, rowed over and pulled him in. Immediately, Kendall took command of the lifeboat as well as rescue operations, as he had the lifeboat crew pull as many people from the water into the boat. When the boat was full, Kendall ordered the crewmen to row to the lights of the mysterious vessel that had rammed them to drop off the survivors. After an hour or two of making a few trips back and forth from the nearby Storstad to the wreckage to look for survivors, Kendall gave up when there was no more hope of finding survivors as most had succumbed to drowning or hypothermia.