Twenty Minutes to the Bottom of the River

On the night of 28 May 1914, the RMS Empress of Ireland steamed out of Quebec City bound for Liverpool, carrying 1,477 passengers and crew on her 96th Atlantic crossing. The weather was good, the St. Lawrence River was calm, and nothing about the night suggested disaster.

By 2:10 a.m. on 29 May, the Empress of Ireland was on the bottom of the river.

At 1:50 a.m., the Norwegian coal freighter SS Storstad loomed out of a sudden bank of thick fog and struck the Empress broadside on her starboard side, tearing open a huge wound in her hull. Hundreds of tons of river water poured in at a rate the pumps and the crew could never hope to fight.

It was a warm late-May night, so portholes on the lower decks had been left open for air, turning them into hundreds of ready-made floodgates once the river reached them. The post-Titanic watertight doors had to be closed by hand, but the list came so fast there was no time to reach them.

Ten minutes after the collision, the Empress rolled hard onto her starboard side. Lifeboats on the high port side now hung uselessly far above the water, while passengers jolted awake to find their cabin walls becoming floors, then ceilings, in darkness and ice-cold river water.

Fourteen minutes after impact, she was gone. Of the 1,477 people on board, 1,012 died — 840 of them passengers, a higher passenger death toll than the Titanic.

Among them were 171 members of the Salvation Army travelling to London for an international congress, many of whom surrendered their life jackets to other passengers as the ship died under them. Only eight of those 171 survived.

For a brief moment, the Empress of Ireland was front-page news across the world, held up as another warning about fog, collisions and the illusion of safety at sea. Then, thirty days later, on 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand was assassinated in Sarajevo, and by August Europe was at war. Newspapers that had been running diagrams of the wreck turned instead to mobilisation, alliances and casualty lists, and the Empress of Ireland’s dead were swallowed by a much larger catastrophe.

Today, the wreck lies in about 40 metres of water near Rimouski, Quebec, protected as a National Historic Site of Canada and visited by experienced divers. At the Site Historique Maritime de la Pointe-au-Père, artefacts recovered from the wreck are displayed, while the Salvation Army still remembers those it lost every year.

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