RMS Empress of Ireland Shipwreck

 scuba diving facility / area, shipwreck, disaster site

RMS Empress of Ireland was an ocean liner operated by Canadian Pacific Steamship Company in the transatlantic lanes, linking the railroad's nationwide network via Quebec City with Great Britain via Liverpool. Assigned to this regular routing, the Empress of Ireland had safely completed 95 Atlantic crossings and had departed on her 96th crossing from Quebec City at 16:30 local time on May 28, 1914 fully laden with 1,477 passengers and crew.

Steaming up the St. Lawrence River during the evening of the 28th and into the early morning of the 29th the Empress, under the command of Henry George Kendall on his first trip down the Saint Lawrence River as Captain, neared the pilot station at Rimouski shortly before 0200hrs. Approaching the same location from the opposite direction was the Norwegian collier SS Storstad, which like the Empress had been steaming under fair skies and clear conditions as she made her way for Quebec City. Lookouts aboard both ships sighted the lights of the other as the ships shortly before a thick bank of fog rolled in from the North and reduced visibility to less than a mile, prompting both ships to slow their speed and use dead reckoning navigation. Having last confirmed each other to be lined up for a Port-to-Port passage, navigators and lookouts aboard both ships could do little but assume that both ships would continue on their paths, however shortly before 0200hrs the Empress began a turn to Port in an apparent attempt to re-enter the deep channel and leave the Storstad on her Starboard side. Coming into view through the fog on a dead-ahead course as she began her turn to Port, the Empress likely appeared to be bearing down on the Storstad for a head-on collision prompting Storstad's Captain to order an emergency turn to Starboard. With the two ships now turning into each other’s path, the sudden appearance of the Storstad’s mast and directional lights out of the fog left little time for the crew aboard the Empress to react, save for an order from Captain Kendall for an emergency turn back to Starboard in the hopes of lessening the severity of the collision.

Two minutes before the hour the reinforced reverse-slanting prow of the Storstad, designed to break harbor ice in her Northern homewaters, sliced into the Starboard hull of the Empress of Ireland at one of her midship longitudinal bulkheads, causing massive damage to the ship below the waterline. Immediately taking a list to Starboard following the collision, the Empress began to rapidly flood as water poured into the ship through the collision hole as well as hundreds of open portholes in passenger staterooms, quickly sealing the fate of most crew and passengers sleeping in the lower decks at the time of the collision. Those who did manage to escape their cabins to the lifeboat deck found the ships list so great that only her Starboard side her lifeboats could be launched, of which only four were able to be loaded before the rapidly increasing list prevented the use of the rest. Surviving passengers and crew were soon mustering on the Port side of the Empress which became almost fully exposed only ten minutes after the collision as the ship rolled onto beam ends. Remaining on her side and appearing to have struck bottom, passengers and crew engaged in a frantic attempt to pull survivors through the ships portholes to the relative safety of the outer hull. After only four minutes of lying on her Starboard side, progressive flooding of the Empress’ lower decks began to win out over her remaining buoyancy and the ship quickly began to sink bow-first, throwing hundreds of people from her port side into the near-freezing water as she sank at this location at approximately 0215hrs.

Rescue efforts carried out by the four lifeboats launched before the ship went down were woefully inadequate when faced with the sheer number of people in the water, and after an hour for frantic efforts to find survivors only 465 of the estimated 700 people to have entered the water were found alive, the rest succumbing to drowning and hypothermia. In what remains the worst shipwreck in Canadian history, the loss of RMS Empress of Ireland resulted in the deaths of 1,012 people, more than the loss of RMS Titanic two years prior. Largely overshadowed and forgotten by the declaration of War two months later, the sinking of the Empress of Ireland was eventually blamed on the crew of the Storstad in subsequent inquiries and hearings, though the issue of fault for the collision remains contentious today.

Largely forgotten after initial salvage efforts carried out by Canadian Pacific to recover the ships mail and pursers safe, the wreck of RMS Empress of Ireland remained on her Starboard side in 130ft of water and slowly faded from the public eye until its 1969 “rediscovery” by a group of Canadian divers. Since that time an extensive amount of legal and illegal salvage has taken place on the wreck, prompting a belated 1998 declaration by the Canadian government that the wreck was restricted to destructive penetration and salvage practices. Formally declared a National Historic Site of Canada in 2009, the wreck of RMS Empress of Ireland is now a fully protected wreck and gravesite and has become a popular dive site for experienced SCUBA divers. A collection of salvaged items from the ship are displayed at the nearby Empress of Ireland Pavilion at the Site historique maritime de la Pointe-au-Père in Rimouski, Quebec.

www.maritimequest.com/liners/empress_of_ireland.htm