I t’s the morning of August 22, 2019, and I’m in a Zodiac bouncing along the waters of the St. Lawrence River. It can hold six divers and all their gear, but this morning, there are only six of us—no gear. Far from being divers, we are curiosity seekers from New York, Vancouver, London, and Montreal, all obsessed with the sinking of the Empress of Ireland, which claimed 1,014 lives in 1914.
Until a few years ago, I had never heard of the Empress and its disastrous end. And that’s staggering, because the loss of passenger life (836) outnumbered that of the Titanic (832).
The Empress, owned by the all-powerful Canadian Pacific Railway, carried more than 117,000 people between Liverpool, England, and Saint John, New Brunswick, and later Halifax or Quebec City, depending on the season, in ninety-six round trips between 1906 and 1914. A million or so Canadians from coast to coast can trace their roots back to an ancestor who came to Canada on this ship.
Every schoolchild knows the story of the Titanic, the luxury ocean liner that hit an iceberg and sank in 1912. So why did the Empress tragedy, which claimed even more passenger lives a little over two years later, fail to embed itself in our collective national consciousness?
Likely it’s because, while the Titanic was filled with big names from the New York social register, the Empress was a comfortable workhorse filled with ordinary Canadians. Most of those who drowned were in the third-class hold, and a large number of them were immigrants and labourers. It wasn’t the maiden voyage, people didn’t want to think that these ships were vulnerable, and in most people’s minds, the Empress liners were synonymous with safety, reliability, and comfort.
On May 28, 1914, the Empress began her 192nd trip across the Atlantic, from Quebec City en route to Liverpool, 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. There was time to launch only four of the forty lifeboats, and rather than women and children first, it was everyone for themselves in the fourteen minutes it took for the Empress to sink.
In just thirty seconds, the Empress took on almost half her own weight in water.
A century later, on this late-August day in 2019, I’m sitting next to Hugh Verrier, a New York lawyer who heads up one of the world’s largest law firms and who is responsible for our trip out to the wreck. Verrier is originally from Montreal, and since the 1920s, his family has owned a summer property near Rimouski, close to where the Empress sank. He swims in the St. Lawrence River most summers and has always known about the tragedy, but in recent years, he has developed a fascination for the story of survivor Gordon Charles Davidson.
Davidson was a PhD candidate from Union, Ontario, who lived in Vancouver when he wasn’t studying at UC Berkeley in San Francisco and was travelling on the Empress for a study trip. He had reportedly survived the sinking of the Empress by swimming six and a half kilometres to shore. When Verrier looked into it, experts told him this wasn’t possible—not at that time of year and not for that distance. But he wanted to make sure. He wanted to verify the information that had been repeated in newspaper articles and regurgitated in books and even at Davidson’s own memorial service almost a century before. Whatever happened, Verrier wanted to set the record straight.
In November 2017, Verrier hired me to research Davidson. In an email to me, he attached Davidson’s 1922 obituary, an article about his miraculous swim to shore, and a photo of him receiving medical treatment at the Château Frontenac following the shipwreck.
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