Empress of Ireland: Fourteen Minutes in the Fog

In the spring of 1914, the Canadian Pacific liner RMS Empress of Ireland had completed 95 round trips between Liverpool and Quebec City. She was 570 feet long, 14,191 gross tons, twin-screw, capable of 18 knots, and she carried more than enough lifeboats for everyone on board. After Titanic two years before, every Atlantic operator had been forced to count seats. On the evening of May 28, she pulled out of Quebec City for her 96th crossing with 420 crew and 1,057 passengers. About 5 a.m. the next morning she would be at the bottom of the St. Lawrence and 1,012 of those 1,477 people would be dead.

The captain on this voyage was Henry George Kendall. He had been promoted to command of the Empress at the start of the month. This was his first downstream run as her master. He was already famous in the British Empire — four years earlier, as captain of the SS Montrose, he had recognised Dr. Crippen and his disguised mistress as fugitives, sent the world's first wireless message used to catch a murderer, and personally testified at the trial. Kendall was 39 years old. He had spent his career obsessing over speed and over Canadian Pacific's advertised Atlantic schedules.

At 1:30 in the morning of 29 May, the Empress was off Pointe-au-Père on the south shore of the lower St. Lawrence. She had just dropped her river pilot. Course was N76E. Visibility was excellent. Kendall sighted the masthead lights of an oncoming vessel — the Norwegian collier SS Storstad, 6,028 tons, downbound with coal — about 6 nautical miles ahead. Then a low bank of fog rolled across the water and swallowed both ships within minutes.

Each captain later swore the other had changed course. The Storstad's chief officer Toftenes claimed the Empress's lights had altered to the right. Kendall, on the bridge of the Empress, had ordered his engines stopped and then full astern, then sounded three short blasts to signal he was reversing. He believed the Storstad would pass safely down his port side. What he could not see was that Toftenes — who had failed to call his own captain Thomas Andersen when the fog rolled in — had ported his helm. The Storstad's reinforced ice-breaking bow, designed to crush sea ice, drove into the Empress at right angles below the waterline, opening a 25-foot gash between the boiler rooms.

The Empress was a watertight-compartment ship of the post-Titanic generation. She had longitudinal bulkheads and watertight doors. None of it mattered. The doors were not closed in time. Worse, dozens of portholes on the lower decks had been left open for ventilation in the warm river air — a common practice in sheltered waters that the new SOLAS convention of 1914 specifically forbade. The ship listed instantly to starboard. Water poured in through every open porthole below B-deck. Within four minutes she was on her side and most passengers berthed below the boat deck were drowning in their bunks. The lights and power failed five or six minutes after the collision. The longitudinal bulkheads, designed to limit flooding, instead trapped the water on one side and made the list catastrophic. At about 2:09, the bow rose, and the Empress went under stern-first. From collision to gone: 14 minutes. Titanic had taken 2 hours and 40 minutes.

Of 310 women aboard, 41 lived. Of 138 children, 3. Of 610 male passengers, 173. The crew, who were on watch and on deck, fared best — 248 of 420 survived. Among the 167 Salvation Army officers and bandsmen of the Canadian Staff Band, travelling to a London congress, 159 died, including the bandmaster, his wife, and most of the brass section. The English actor and playwright Laurence Irving — son of Sir Henry Irving — drowned with his wife and stage partner Mabel Hackney. Henry Seton-Karr, an explorer and former Member of Parliament, died after giving up his lifebelt to a young woman. Lieutenant Charles Lindsay Claude Bowes-Lyon, first cousin to the future Queen Mother, survived the wreck and was killed near Ypres five months later. Grace Hanagan, age 7, was one of three child survivors; her parents, Salvation Army members both, drowned. She lived until 15 May 1995 and was the last survivor of the wreck.

The Storstad lowered her own lifeboats and pulled 200 people out of the water. The pilot boat Eureka arrived from Pointe-au-Père at 3:10 with another 150. The St. Lawrence in late May ran at about 4 degrees Celsius — anyone in the water more than 30 minutes was dead. By dawn the rescue was over.

Lord Mersey, who had chaired the Titanic inquiry in 1912 and would chair the Lusitania inquiry in 1915, came to Quebec to run the Wreck Commissioner's hearings in June. After eleven days and 61 witnesses, he ruled the Storstad solely at fault for changing course in fog and for Toftenes' failure to wake his captain. The Empress's open portholes and uncloseable watertight doors were called contributing factors but not causes. Captain Andersen, ruined, called Mersey a fool in the press. Canadian Pacific won a $2 million silver-bullion judgment against Storstad's owners; the collier was seized and sold for $175,000.

Ten weeks later, Britain declared war on Germany. A year after that, the Lusitania went down with 1,198. The Empress of Ireland — Canada's worst peacetime maritime disaster, the worst Canadian shipwreck in history, and a casualty list 172 names larger than Titanic's passenger toll — vanished from the front pages and stayed there.