I’m excited to be travelling to Quebec City this week to have a conversation about my book Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck at the Imagination Writers’ Festival. One of the best things about writing this book has been meeting people like Guy D’Astous who have long reaching connections to the ship.
Rediscovering the Empress of Ireland:
Meet Guy D’Astous of Montreal. Guy is a collector of the CPR liner’s artifacts and ephemera and has made 35 dives to explore the Empress at the bottom of the St. Lawrence River.
Guy has been obsessed with all things to do with the Empress of Ireland since he made his first dive in 1989. He showed me the tile he found on that first dive. “The tile from the kitchen is the very first artifact that I brought back from the wreck. I started with this and told myself that it would be nice to have a plate or a porthole.”
35 Dives:
Guy made a total of 35 dives to the Empress over the next decade, amassing a collection that includes cups and plates, champagne bottles, spoons, a model of the Empress, a passenger’s top hat, a shoe, a gold walking stick, portholes, paintings, and thousands of documents, including photos, brochures, books, postcards and letters.
He says that his most treasured possession from those dives is the memory. “The artifacts are very interesting, but it’s not as touching as seeing the Empress with your own eyes for the first time. You hear about it, you see pictures, you hear the stories, but when you touch it with your hands and you see it with your own eyes, it’s an amazing feeling.”
His favourite artifact is the ship’s phone, which he bought from Philippe Beaudry in the early 2000s. “Having an artifact that comes from the bridge is quite rare,” he says. “The last order that Captain Henry Kendall gave to the engine room was through that phone.”
Amazingly, the phone still works.
Many of the artifacts brought up by divers between 1964, when the ship was rediscovered and 1999 when it was declared a national historical site, are now on display at the Empress of Ireland Museum at Pointe-au-Père, Quebec. The private museum is close to where the ship went down and designed in the shape of the ship.
If you’re wondering why I’m writing about a shipwreck on the other end of the country, that’s because it’s also a huge Western Canadian story. Seventy-five passengers alone were from BC. Only 10 returned.
With thanks to Guy D’Astous for allowing me to include so much of his impressive collection in Beneath Dark Waters. And a thank you to Pierre Champagne, president of the Société d’histoire du Bas-Canada.
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