Write the Ship

Days before the fall of Singapore in February 1942, a former Canadian Pacific ocean liner was targeted by successive waves of Japanese dive-bombers while sailing toward the harbour of Britain’s supposedly impregnable bastion of empire in Asia. Then, on the morning of February 5, three of the incendiary bombs turned the vessel into a floating inferno, and the crew and passengers abandoned ship. Over the following decades, the wreck slowly disappeared beneath the waves. Salvage work was slow. Only in 1998 was one of the 2.4-metre-tall iron anchors retrieved. It has been on display in the National Museum of Singapore for the past decade.

The Empress of Asia was completed for the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1913. Built in Glasgow, Scotland, as a luxury passenger liner, it broke trans-Pacific speed records, carried vast numbers of immigrants and refugees to North America, served as a troopship during both world wars, transported thousands of Chinese workers...