It took just 14 minutes for the St. Lawrence River to swallow the Canadian Pacific's RMS Empress of Ireland in the pre-dawn of May 29, 1914. The disaster claimed 1,012 lives. More passengers, but less crew, perished in this tragedy than in the infamous Titanic sinking of 1912, and the catastrophe ranks as Canada's worst maritime disaster.
The Empress's sinking is one of a triumvirate of ocean liner disasters between 1912 and 1915 that took over 3,700 souls. The other two ships were the Titanic and Lusitania, and the stories of their losses are well known. What follows is the largely forgotten history of the sinking of the Empress of Ireland.
The Empress of Ireland
The Empress of Ireland, pride of the Canadian Pacific white empress fleet, was designed by Francis Elgar and built at the Fairfield Shipbuilding and Engineering Co. yards in Govan, Scotland (near Glasgow), and launched on the Clyde on January 27, 1906.
The liner was built to increase trade on the lucrative sea lanes between England and Canada, offering six-day voyages across the Atlantic. It sailed between Liverpool and Quebec City when the St. Lawrence was open for navigation, or from Saint John, New Brunswick in the winter months.
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