Empress of Ireland
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The RMS Empress of Ireland was a passenger ship built in Glasgow in 1906 on the Canadian Pacific Railway . From June 1906 onwards it operated in regular service in the North Atlantic between Québec ( Canada ) and Liverpool ( England ). On May 29, 1914, she sank after a ship collision in the St. Lawrence River . 1,012 people were killed. The sinking of the Empress of Ireland is the civil shipping disaster with the third largest loss of life before the outbreak of the First World War (after the Titanic and the General Slocum ), as well as the worst maritime disaster in Canadian history to date.
Emergence
The contract to build the Empress of Ireland and her sister ship Empress of Britain was placed in 1903 by Baron Thomas G. Shaughnessy, President of the Canadian Pacific. The Empress of Ireland was built on April 10, 1904 on slipway no. 4 as construction no. 443 of Fairfield Shipbuilding & Engineering Co. in Govan ( Glasgow ) laid down. The Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR) paid particular attention to modern design and the presence of different styles in the interior design of the passenger accommodation. The ship had eight decks, two funnels and the quadruple expansion engines customary at the time for propulsion .
The launch took place on Saturday, January 27, 1906, in the presence of various high-ranking representatives and dignitaries of the shipyard and the shipping company as well as hundreds of onlookers. The wife of the managing director of the Fairfield Shipyard, Alexander Gracie, named the ship Empress of Ireland .
The maiden voyage took place on June 29, 1906 under Captain Frank Carey (route Liverpool - Moville, Ireland - Québec ).
The last crossing
Departure from Québec
On Thursday, May 28, 1914, the Empress of Ireland cast off in Québec for its 96th Atlantic crossing. At 4:27 p.m. the lines were loosened while the on-board orchestra played God Be with You 'Till We Meet Again . The ship was under the command of Captain Henry George Kendall, who had replaced the previous Captain James Anderson Murray on May 1. In addition to 420 crew members, 1057 passengers were on board . The third class was fully booked with 717 people, while the second class with 253 passengers was just half full. The first class was only a third occupied with 87 people, which was very unusual for the Empress of Ireland . Among the first class travelers were some prominent names from politics, culture, and society, among others. A .:
- Laurence Irving (Canadian actor and playwright, Sir Henry Irving's son)
- Mabel Hackney Irving (actress, Laurence Irving's wife)
- Sir Henry Seton Karr (Scottish nobleman and big game hunter)
- Ella Hart-Bennett ( writer , wife of the British Colonial Secretary for the Bahamas , William Hart-Bennett )
- Major Henry H. Lyman (Canadian entomologist ) with wife
- Gabriel J. Marks (Mayor of Suva , capital of Fiji ) with his wife
- Wallace L. Palmer (editor of the London newspaper Financial News ) with his wife
- Ethel Grundy Paton (daughter of the Vice President of the Quebec Central Railway )
- Lieutenant Charles Lindsay Claude Bowes-Lyon (first cousin of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon, later Queen Mom )
Among the passengers in the second class was Johann August Reinhold Bach, a descendant of Johann Sebastian Bach , with his daughter and a contingent of 167 members of the Canadian Salvation Army on their way to the third International Congress of The Salvation Army on June 13th in London. After a short stop in Rimouski to take over the post, the ship ran into the open mouth of the St. Lawrence River , which is around 30 nautical miles wide at this point .
Downfall
On the night of May 28th to 29th, there was a thick fog in the St. Lawrence River. At 1:38 a.m., the two officers on watch on the bridge of the Empress of Ireland at Pointe-au-Père (Father Point) northeast of Rimouski spotted the lights of another ship on starboard ahead, but this quickly disappeared in the fog . It was the Norwegian coal freighter Storstad (6,028 GRT ) under Captain Thomas Andersen. The crew of the Storstad had the Empress of Ireland previously seen already a few minutes, but without knowing to what ship it was. At 1:41 a.m., Captain Kendall ordered a change of course to avoid the fast approaching ship. However, the thick fog prevented such maneuvers and so Kendall had his ship stopped at 1:45 a.m. In addition, he gave appropriate signals with the fog horn to draw the other ship's attention to himself. It was then assumed that the Storstad would pass on port side, but then suddenly she emerged from the fog on starboard side only a ship's length away.
Captain Kendall ordered full speed ahead at the last second to prevent the impending collision, but it was too late: at 1.55 a.m. the Storstad rammed the Empress of Ireland amidships between the chimneys and tore a hole 13 m high and 5 m wide the hull, through which up to 300 tons of water per second immediately flowed in.
The ship was listed very quickly and the boiler rooms overflowed, causing the power to fail six minutes after the collision. The captain gave the order to make a distress call by radio and to leave the ship. The ship had a sufficient number of lifeboats and life jackets for all passengers - this was a lesson from the Titanic disaster - but the ship sank so quickly that only nine boats could be manned in the short time. At the time of the collision, most of the passengers on the Empress of Ireland were asleep in their cabins, and most of them found it impossible to get on deck with the ship's enormous lean. When the power went out, panic broke out and the boat deck was overcrowded in minutes. The stairs were no longer passable after a few minutes. The ship lay on the starboard side, the funnels broke off and hit the water. According to eyewitness reports, countless people were walking around on the horizontal port side of the sinking ship.
After only fourteen minutes was Empress of Ireland in position 48 ° 36 ' N , 68 ° 25' W declined. Of the 1,477 people on board, 1,012 were killed: 599 men, 279 women and 134 children. 465 people survived (419 men, 42 women and four children). Some were killed directly in the collision, others were unable to escape from the sinking ship in time or subsequently drowned in the cold water.
The Storstad was badly damaged, but still fully buoyant. When the crew heard the screams of the people in the water, the lifeboats were immediately launched to pick up survivors. Two ships from Rimouski, which had received the emergency call from the Empress of Ireland , also came to the rescue, but the first did not arrive until 3.15 a.m., more than an hour after the liner sank. Hundreds of bodies were recovered during the night and the days that followed.
Aftermath
Weeks after the ship's sinking, corpses, some of which were horrific, were washed ashore on both sides of the St. Lawrence River. In the early summer of 1914, a rescue team was sent down into the wreck to retrieve more victims. By the end of June almost 90 dead - mostly women in nightgowns - had been recovered, of which only 20 could be identified. The paymaster's safe was also recovered.
Afterwards, a court blamed the Storstad for the fact that its first officer, Alfred Toftenes, had changed course without informing the captain. But the captain of the Empress of Ireland was also criticized for stopping his ship in the fog and thus limiting its maneuverability. If the Empress of Ireland had continued to sail normally, the accident would probably not have happened. A later Norwegian investigation, however, absolved the crew of the Storstad of any guilt.
Although the fate of the Empress of Ireland dominated the media for a short time, it was quickly forgotten due to the outbreak of the First World War, despite its severity.
On April 20, 2009, the wreck of the Empress of Ireland was added to the list of National Historic Sites of Canada .
Others
According to stories, the ship's mascot, the cat Emmy, ran away right before departure and was never seen again.
When the Empress of Ireland sank , more passengers (840) were killed than on the Titanic (832) and the Lusitania (791). More than 1500 people were killed on the Titanic, but almost 700 of them were crew members.
The last survivor of the Empress of Ireland , Canadian Grace Hanagan Martyn, died on May 15, 1995 in St. Catharines , Ontario, the day before her 88th birthday. She had lost her parents in the accident.
One of the most famous stories about the Empress of Ireland is the fate of the American passenger Fannie Mounsey. The mother of nine from Chicago traveled second grade with a friend to England to visit relatives; she died in the sinking. In the spring of 1915, her family heard of a mentally confused woman in an English sanatorium who was afraid of water, kept mumbling the name "Mounsey" and looked like Fannie Mounsey. They hoped that their beloved wife and mother had survived the disaster and only lost their memories, because Mrs. Mounsey's body had never been found. Her husband William E. Mounsey, daughter Sarah Lund and her husband Charles took the Lusitania to Liverpool on May 1, 1915 to bring their relatives home. But this time too, a tragedy thwarted the company's plans: The Lusitania was sunk on May 7, 1915, William Mounsey and Charles Lund died. 28-year-old Sarah ended the trip alone and found that the woman was not her mother, but a certain Kate Fitzgerald. She had now lost her mother, father and husband in two of the greatest shipping disasters of the 20th century.
The writer Clive Cussler used the sinking of the Empress of Ireland as a real basis for a fictional plot in his novel Um A Hair Width (original title: Night Probe ), which deals with a secret treaty that would make the United States and Canada the “United States of Canada “Should join forces. The prologue describes the sinking of the Empress of Ireland and the fate of the man who carries a copy of the waterproof sealed contract with him and goes down with the ship. In the main plot, set in 1989, the hero Dirk Pitt is supposed to rescue the contract from the wreck to prevent the document from falling into the wrong hands.
Among the passengers on the Empress of Ireland were some relatives of well-known personalities: First-class passenger Catherine Cay was a sister of George Ronald Hamilton Cheapes, who was with the eldest daughter of the British shipowner J. Bruce Ismay , the director of the White Star Line , was married. The 29-year-old Charles Lindsay Claude Bowes-Lyon, a cousin of Elizabeth Bowes-Lyon , who later became Queen Mum, also traveled in first class . He survived the sinking, but died five months later in the war.
literature
- Robert D. Ballard / Ken Marschall : Lost Liners - From the Titanic to Andrea Doria - the glory and the sinking of the great luxury liners . Wilhelm Heyne Verlag GmbH & Co. , Munich 1997, ISBN 3-453-12905-9 (English, original title: Lost Liners: From the Titanic to the Andrea Doria. The ocean floor reveals its greatest lost ships. Translated by Helmut Gerstberger).
- Kevin F. McMurray, Dark Descent: Diving and the Deadly Allure of the Empress of Ireland . International Marine, 2004, ISBN 0-07-141634-X (English).
Web links
- The sinking of the Empress of Ireland / MPL
- Maritime Museum in Pointe-au-Père / Rimouski , dedicated to the sinking of the Empress of Ireland (French / English)
Individual evidence
- ^ Wreck of RMS Empress of Ireland National Historic Site of Canada. In: Canadian Register of Historic Places. Accessed August 22, 2018 (English).