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Winnipeg Free Press
17-05-2025
- General
- Winnipeg Free Press
Peril in the St. Lawrence
When it comes to maritime disasters, the 'big' events spring to mind. In 1912, the RMS Titanic gets eviscerated by an iceberg. Three years later, a wartime torpedo impales the RMS Lusitania. Both ships take hundreds of passengers and crew to watery graves in the North Atlantic and Irish Sea, respectively. In the ensuing decades, each ship is immortalized on screen and stage, in books and song. (Thank you, Celine Dion.) But in Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck, Vancouver-based investigative journalist and podcaster Eve Lazarus does a deep dive into a national maritime tragedy that rivals Titanic and Lusitania for 'big event' status. CANADIAN PRESS FILES The RMS Empress of Ireland, owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway, sank in May 1914 in the St. Lawrence River. On May 29, 1914, the RMS Empress of Ireland, owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), was t-boned in dense fog by the SS Storstad, a Norwegian coal ship. Fourteen minutes after impact, the 170-metre long Empress plunged to the bottom of the St. Lawrence River. Only four of its 40 lifeboats were lowered; more than 1,000 passengers and crew drowned. This would have been the liner's 192nd Atlantic crossing. Today, the Empress of Ireland rests 45 metres (130 feet) below the river's surface, and 8.3 kilometres (5 miles) offshore, near Rimouski, Que. Officially discovered in 1964, the wreck has long been an exploratory site for seasoned divers. In 2009, it received National Historic Site status; a modest museum and river buoy mark the worst peacetime maritime disaster in Canadian history. So how come so few of us know so little about this story? In her 11th book, Lazarus, a self-professed lover of non-traditional history, explores why such a huge calamity has garnered so little attention, compared to its 'big event' cousins. One reason, she writes, is because the Empress was a basic workhorse, whose main job was moving immigrants and mail between Canada and Europe. The Empress was well-travelled, shipboard luxuries were few and steerage-housed migrants were many. Winnipeg Jets Game Days On Winnipeg Jets game days, hockey writers Mike McIntyre and Ken Wiebe send news, notes and quotes from the morning skate, as well as injury updates and lineup decisions. Arrives a few hours prior to puck drop. The liner's manifest supports this premise: there are no Astors or Guggenheims to be found on the Empress like there was on the Titanic. Rather, the Empress' largest contingent among the 840 passengers was 170 Canadian Salvation Army personnel and their families, en route to a Liverpool conference. Also diverting public attention away from the sinking and its post-disaster inquiries was the assassination of the Austria's Duke Ferdinand, which ignited the First World War in July 1914. It all adds up, she says. To label Beneath Dark Waters 'well-researched' is almost a misnomer. The tone of Lazarus' newsy prose may not hook a reader like others in the shipwreck genre (think Erik Larson's Dead Wake or David Grann's The Wager). But Lazarus has gone one better, accessing private journals, photos and public reports, plus countless personal interviews with survivors' families and site visits, to leave no informational stone unturned. It's all packaged and delivered in her succinct writing style and approachable layout. REBECCA BLISSETT PHOTO Eve Lazarus The result? A solid read for lovers of maritime mishaps. Lazarus makes her case as to why the Empress of Ireland story resonates in 2025 and the imprint — the legacy — it has left on our national psyche. 'The Empress sank in just 14 minutes, so not nearly enough time to make a motion picture about it,' she writes. 'Mostly though, it was a Canadian story, and as Canadians, we like to bury the lede.' GC Cabana-Coldwell is a Winnipeg-based freelance writer who loves maritime disasters and tries to never buy a lede. Beneath Dark Waters
CBC
04-05-2025
- General
- CBC
Vancouver writer uncovers truths of survivors of Empress of Ireland shipwreck
When fog blanketed the St. Lawrence River on May 29, 1914, a ship carrying hundreds of passengers and crew was rammed by a passing coal ship. The passenger vessel, known as the Empress of Ireland, sank in just 14 minutes, killing most of the people onboard. The story of the shipwreck and those who survived it are featured in a new book by Vancouver author, journalist and historian Eve Lazarus, one she spent years researching to find out the truth about what happened. It all started when she was hired by a lawyer who owns a summer home near Rimouski, Que., where the Empress went down. Having swum in the St. Lawrence most summers, he came across the story of a survivor of the wreck, a UBC history professor by the name of Gordon Davidson and one of 75 B.C. passengers, who had allegedly survived by swimming 6.5 kilometres to shore. "He talked to diving instructors and ice polar swimmers and biologists, anyone he could find that could verify that that was possible," Lazarus told CBC's North by Northwest host Margaret Gallagher. "Everyone said no, no, it just wasn't possible, not in that cold temperature at that time of year. So he hired me to see if I could find the origin story." The ship, which was travelling from Quebec City to Liverpool, England, had 40 lifeboats on board, but only four were deployed when the ship sank so quickly. About one in five passengers survived, but a higher proportion of the 400-some crew made it out. Lazarus said the crew was criticized for not prioritizing the safety of passengers, but her research tells her there was nothing selfish about how things worked out. "Fifty per cent of the crew would have been on duty that night in the middle of the night, and a lot of them worked in the engine rooms where it was really dangerous and really hot. They had escape routes to the top deck … so a lot of them were able to get to the top deck very quickly and help with lifeboats and get that going." Because this happened in the middle of the night, a lot of passengers stopped to dress before fleeing the ship, which would be their fatal flaw. Lazarus went out on the river in a Zodiac in 2019 and sat atop the site of the wreck. "You could see it on radar, and knowing there are still 800-and-something remains of people, it really is an underwater graveyard still down there," she said. "It was very difficult for me to come to terms with that. It was very powerful." Lazarus said a lot of the reporting that came out of the sinking of the Empress of Ireland occurred just a few hours after it happened. Reporters descended on Rimouski, she said, and started interviewing people who were dealing with traumatic injuries, were recovering from the cold or who had lost their entire families. They were in shock. Reporters, in those days, would have been using shorthand to write stories and phoning them into their respective newsrooms, Lazarus pointed out, creating another opportunity for error. "It's not surprising that a lot of it was wrong." Davidson did not swim ashore following the Empress of Ireland's demise, Lazarus learned. Instead, he was rescued in a boat. She believes the lore around his harrowing swim started with a story in Vancouver's The Province newspaper, where a reporter speculated that, because Davidson was a good swimmer, he must have swum. "It was still an incredible survival story, but I couldn't understand how that story could get so wrong," Lazarus said. "[The story] became real, and that was the story that went to all these newspapers and books."
Toronto Star
28-04-2025
- General
- Toronto Star
Death. Fear. Frigid water. Here's how a few who experienced Canada's worst peacetime sea disaster managed to survive
It cost more passengers' lives than the Titanic or the Lusitania. Yet the disastrous sinking of the Empress of Ireland in the St. Lawrence River has been largely forgotten, by Canadians and everyone else. In this excerpt from the new book 'Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck,' author Eve Lazarus takes readers back to May 29, 1914, when the passenger steamship, bound for Liverpool from Quebec City, was struck by the coal ship Storstad. Travellers and crew were thrown into the frigid sea to fight for survival; in a matter of hours more than a thousand people aboard the Empress would be dead. Two months later, the First World War broke out, and dwelling on even a tragedy this massive was no longer an option for Canadians.
