I Solved the Century-Old Mystery of a Miraculous Shipwreck Survivor

Summary

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 Norw...