I t’s the morning of August 22, 2019, and I’m in a Zodiac bouncing alongside the waters of the St. Lawrence River. It could possibly maintain six divers and all their gear, however this morning, there are solely six of us—no gear. Removed from being divers, we’re curiosity seekers from New York, Vancouver, London, and Montreal, all obsessive about the sinking of the Empress of Eire, which claimed 1,014 lives in 1914.
Till a couple of years in the past, I had by no means heard of the Empress and its disastrous finish. And that’s staggering, as a result of the lack of passenger life (836) outnumbered that of the Titanic (832).
The Empress, owned by the omnipotent Canadian Pacific Railway, carried greater than 117,000 individuals between Liverpool, England, and Saint John, New Brunswick, and later Halifax or Quebec Metropolis, relying on the season, in ninety-six spherical journeys between 1906 and 1914. 1,000,000 or so Canadians from coast to coast can hint their roots again to an ancestor who got here to Canada on this ship.
Each schoolchild is aware of the story of the Titanic, the posh ocean liner that hit an iceberg and sank in 1912. So why did the Empress tragedy, which claimed much more passenger lives a bit of over two years later, fail to embed itself in our collective nationwide consciousness?
Probably it’s as a result of, whereas the Titanic was stuffed with massive names from the New York social register, the Empress was a cushty workhorse stuffed with bizarre Canadians. Most of those that drowned have been within the third-class maintain, and a lot of them have been immigrants and labourers. It wasn’t the maiden voyage, individuals didn’t need to assume that these ships have been weak, and in most individuals’s minds, the Empress liners have been synonymous with security, reliability, and luxury.
On Might 28, 1914, the Empress started her 192nd journey throughout the Atlantic, from Quebec Metropolis en path to Liverpool, carrying 1,056 passengers and a crew of 423. Within the early hours of Might 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 solely 4 of the forty lifeboats, and moderately than girls and kids first, it was everybody for themselves within the fourteen minutes it took for the Empress to sink.
In simply thirty seconds, the Empress took on nearly half her personal weight in water.
A century later, on this late-August day in 2019, I’m sitting subsequent to Hugh Verrier, a New York lawyer who heads up one of many world’s largest regulation corporations and who’s answerable for our journey out to the wreck. Verrier is initially from Montreal, and for the reason that Nineteen Twenties, his household has owned a summer time property close to Rimouski, near the place the Empress sank. He swims within the St. Lawrence River most summers and has at all times recognized in regards to the tragedy, however lately, 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 learning at UC Berkeley in San Francisco and was travelling on the Empress for a research journey. He had reportedly survived the sinking of the Empress by swimming six and a half kilometres to shore. When Verrier regarded into it, specialists instructed him this wasn’t doable—not at the moment of yr and never for that distance. However he needed to verify. He needed to confirm the data that had been repeated in newspaper articles and regurgitated in books and even at Davidson’s personal memorial service nearly a century earlier than. No matter occurred, Verrier needed to set the file straight.
In November 2017, Verrier employed me to analysis Davidson. In an e-mail to me, he connected Davidson’s 1922 obituary, an article about his miraculous swim to shore, and a photograph of him receiving medical therapy on the Château Frontenac following the shipwreck.
“I’ve not discovered any file of him talking or writing about swimming to shore,” Verrier wrote. “He didn’t have any kids. So, this isn’t going to be simple to seek out out about.” He wasn’t flawed.
O n the morning of Might 28, 1914, the port at Quebec Metropolis was buzzing with exercise. Almost 3,000 immigrants, vacationers, and returning Canadians would disembark from seven totally different ocean liners that day, and staff have been unloading the cargo from two colliers that carried coal from Cape Breton to Montreal. The Dominion Coal Firm operated fourteen colliers, together with the Norwegian-registered Storstad.
The RMS Empress of Eire towered above the wharf. She was 14,191 tons of Edwardian magnificence. She had been in Quebec Metropolis for 5 days, and this subsequent sail could be her 192nd journey throughout the Atlantic. She was beneath the command of the newly promoted Captain Henry George Kendall, the youngest captain of the big Atlantic liners. It might be his third crossing as commander of the Empress. On Might 1, he had taken the ship from Halifax—the Canadian winter terminal—to Liverpool and returned by way of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and up the now thawed St. Lawrence River to Quebec Metropolis. The journey out had been uneventful, and the Empress had arrived safely at port with 1,100 passengers aboard.
Now, by 1:30 a.m. on Might 29, the Empress was previous essentially the most harmful a part of the St. Lawrence River and going about seventeen knots (thirty-one kilometres per hour). John Carroll, the lookout, rang the crow’s nest brass bell as soon as to inform the bridge of a vessel on the starboard aspect. Kendall took the steps to the compass platform for a greater view. He may see the distant lights of an incoming ship—the Storstad—and estimated that it was about ten kilometres away. The climate was clear and nice, and Kendall noticed no purpose for concern.
A short while later, a thick financial institution of fog rolled in from the south shore, slowly creeping throughout the water in a northwest route and blanketing the Empress and the Storstad. Each ships have been now hidden from one another. Moments later, Kendall was standing on the navigation bridge, staring in horror because the Storstad ’s bow emerged from the fog and headed straight towards them. The collier rammed the passenger ship lifeless centre, slicing by the Empress.
The Storstad was on its method to Montreal, carrying greater than 10,000 tons of coal. She had a strengthened hull that would slice by winter ice, and at that second, she was headed to Father Level to gather a pilot who would navigate the ship up the St. Lawrence. Her sharp prow ripped by the Empress ’s metal plates and cabins, tearing a 32.5-square-metre gap within the ship’s starboard aspect, effectively under the waterline.
Greater than 200,000 litres of water a second poured into the Empress, inflicting catastrophic flooding within the engine rooms and decrease decks. The furnaces flooded. The facility went out.
The ship was thrown into darkness earlier than many of the sleeping passengers may even grasp what was occurring. Those that had managed to go away their cabins have been left groping round within the pitch darkish, looking for a method out, clawing their method up the tilting stairs. As a result of that they had boarded the ship mere hours earlier, they have been unfamiliar with the ship’s format. In simply thirty seconds, the Empress had taken on nearly half her personal weight in water. After a minute and a half, the boiler rooms have been flooded with the equal of 9 Olympic swimming swimming pools of water.
G ordon Charles Davidson was a handsome, critical younger man of twenty-nine. He had darkish hair, dark-brown eyes, and an athletic construct and stood simply shy of six ft. Later he would develop a moustache, however for this journey throughout the Atlantic, he was clear shaven and wore his hair parted barely to the left in an try to clean down an unruly cowlick that had dogged him since childhood.
Davidson had spent his childhood on the household farm in Union within the Elgin County of Ontario. After ending highschool, he moved to Vancouver to check.
When Verrier employed me to analysis Davidson and the story of his miraculous swim, the very first thing I did was put collectively a household tree. Davidson had not had kids, however his older brother, James, had three, and that appeared like a very good place to begin.
I tracked James’s granddaughter right down to her residence in Madrid, Spain. Not solely is she the keeper of the Davidson household historical past, she had Davidson’s precise survival account within the type of a century-old torn-up newspaper clipping. The issue was that the identify of the newspaper that it was printed in was principally torn out and solely recognized as “—as Journal.” The headline was “Native Boy Tells a Graphic Story of Battle with Dying When Empress Went Down.”
With the assistance of my pal Tom Carter, a Vancouver artist and historian, we have been capable of monitor the article to the St. Thomas Journal, a newspaper that had merged with the St. Thomas Every day Instances in 1918 to turn into the St. Thomas Instances-Journal, which nonetheless publishes. Sadly, none of its early points had been digitized. Gina Dewaele on the Elgin County Archives discovered Davidson’s letter printed in full within the St. Thomas Journal of June 2, 1914.
When Davidson reached Quebec Metropolis, he noticed that early newspaper stories had listed him among the many lacking. He instantly despatched a telegram to his father in Union, letting him know that he was protected. His father contacted James, in Vancouver. James then gave an interview to a reporter, and someway the story of Davidson’s survival acquired blown out of proportion. The story, which appeared within the Vancouver Province on June 1, 1914, ran with the headline “He Swam Ashore as Empress Sank.”
Simply 4 weeks after it had claimed front-page headlines, the tragedy abruptly disappeared from newspapers.
“If the report that he swam ashore is appropriate, he carried out a extremely great feat,” wrote the reporter. “From the meagre particulars of Mr. Davidson’s escape acquired by his brother right here, his experiences could also be pictured. The boat sinking with its a whole bunch of passengers pitched into the water all struggling for all times; the frantic try to seize the boats or to safe a chunk of wreckage on which to drift to security, might be imagined.”
The story goes on to say that, after seeing the lifeboats have been stuffed to capability, Davidson saved swimming till he was too far out for rescue and as an alternative determined to swim to shore. It ends with the reporter noting that Davidson was a robust swimmer and had managed to discover a lifebelt.
I n actuality, Davidson woke to the sound of speeding water on that night time on the Empress. At first, he thought it was the crew flushing out the decks, however the noise was too loud. He turned on the electrical gentle and was horrified to see water flowing into his cabin.
“Even then, I hardly realized what was flawed, however [Arthur] Stillman [with whom Davidson was sharing a room] referred to as that we have been sinking and rushed out, and I adopted in my nightshirt. By that point, the water was half filling the cabin,” Davidson’s account within the St. Thomas Every day Instances reads. “As I stepped into the passageway, a stream of water from the open porthole struck me between the shoulders and knocked me down. The water was spouting in there in a foot-wide stream that was 15 ft lengthy. I scrambled on my arms and knees until I acquired past it. Then I climbed up two flights of stairs until I acquired to the saloon deck, the place I braced myself in opposition to a door. The bow dipped beneath first, and he or she had listed thus far that it was like a degree flooring after I ran down her aspect and dived off the keel.”
Davidson stripped off his nightshirt and swam away from the ship. The suction took him down, and when he got here up, he swam right into a frenzied crowd. “They tramped me beneath 3 times earlier than I acquired by them. I swam on a bit of farther, however the water was fearfully chilly, and I used to be off form swimming,” he mentioned.
Davidson was picked up by a lifeboat and brought to the Storstad, which survived the collision.
None of what appeared within the Vancouver Province truly occurred. It was all one reporter’s wild hypothesis. And regardless that Davidson tried to appropriate the data himself, that one reporter’s model from two days after the shipwreck is what was repeated and embellished in newspaper articles, in books, and even in his personal obituary eight years later.
Simply 4 weeks after the tragedy had claimed front-page headlines around the globe, the Empress of Eire abruptly disappeared from newspapers. On June 28, 1914, Austrian archduke Franz Ferdinand and his spouse, Sophia, have been shot lifeless in Bosnia. By the next month, a lot of the world was at warfare. And lots of of these younger males who had narrowly escaped dying on the Empress, together with Davidson, would quickly face an excellent greater risk: 4 years of unprecedented carnage, slaughter, and destruction.
Tailored and excerpted, with permission, from Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck by Eve Lazarus, revealed by Arsenal Pulp Press, 2025.
Eve Lazarus is a reporter, creator, and the host and producer of the true crime podcast Chilly Case Canada. She lives in North Vancouver.
