The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck

On May 28, 1914, the RMS Empress of Ireland began her 192nd trip across the Atlantic from Quebec City, Canada, enroute to Liverpool, England, carrying 1,056 passengers and a crew of 423. In the early hours of May 29, fog descended on the St. Lawrence River, and the ocean liner was rammed by the Storstad, a Norwegian coal ship. In the fourteen minutes it took for the Empress of Ireland to sink, there was time to launch only four of the forty lifeboats, and rather than women and children first, it was everyone for themselves.

Over a thousand people died that night, claiming the lives of more passengers than either the Titanic or the Lusitania, and the tragedy stands as the worst peacetime maritime disaster in Canadian history.

Investigative journalist and author Eve Lazarus draws on a trove of historical documents, including small-town newspaper reports, the Wreck Commissioner’s Inquiry, and first-hand accounts passed down through personal letters and family lore, to tell the story of the wreck and its aftermath through the eyes of the Canadian survivors. Through these records, as well as interviews with experts and descendants of the passengers, Lazarus recounts the story from both a Canadian and a Norwegian perspective and investigates why many of the stories regurgitated in newspapers and books for over a hundred years are wrong. The result is an absorbing and stirring narrative that uncovers stories of heroism and sacrifice, human endurance, and modern-day shipwreck hunters.