28-04-2025
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.
