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 destined for labour service on the Western Front, and was used for opium smuggling over the course of almost thirty years. Its most significant cargo during the 1920s was raw silk, shipped primarily from Yokohama to Vancouver. Here it was loaded onto CPR trains bound for Halifax or New York City. The largest shipment was valued at $12 million and filled twenty railway cars, which were airtight, heavily guarded, and given priority as they crossed the continent. The following decade, a newspaper ad for Canadian Pacific Ocean Tours held out the promise of “strange, exotic places — queer outlandish customs . . . Babel of conflicting tongues . . . meet them all on your World Tour.” It’s doubtful that the ship’s hairdresser, a young woman from Vancouver who spent a day ashore in Shanghai, expected the beheading of a Chinese man to count among the customs she would witness when she set sail. “She told me he looked at her with sad eyes just as the executioner’s blade fell,” her son recalled to Dan Black as he researched Oceans of Fate.

One compelling approach to telling a boat’s story is that of Katherine Anne Porter in her best-selling Ship of Fools, which was based on a journal she kept during a voyage she made in 1931 from Mexico to Germany. Yet that 1962 publication was a novel, her characters fictional, the drama imaginary, and it covered just a single journey. Reality is not so malleable. In its lifetime, the Empress of Asia carried literally thousands of people across the oceans during hundreds of sailings. Anyone who’s travelled on a cruise ship or liner will know how uneventful the experience can be in reality. More often than not, the enemy is not the vagrant iceberg, the on‑board fire, or the towering rogue wave. It’s boredom. It’s all very well to get one’s nose into a really good book, enjoy the pool, eat wonderful food, and take lots of naps. Gazing at an empty horizon soon palls. As for that unforgettable chat at the captain’s table about microsurgery with the fascinating cardiologist: try to retell the tale when you get home and watch eyes glaze over. The challenge when writing about a ship is not just to find personal stories but to weave them into a compelling narrative that keeps the reader turning the pages. Oceans of Fate has over 400 of them.

Black has done a meticulous job of unearthing diaries, journals, and personal letters and photographs of both crews and passengers, as well as plowing through dozens of newspapers, essays, and journal articles. The book’s appendices include casualty lists and a detailed timeline. If it’s facts and names you’re after, you’ll find them here aplenty. The result is a highly informative chronicle. Each character is given his or her backstory, though some familiar names, such as Frank Lloyd Wright, who sailed on the Empress of Asia five times while building Tokyo’s Imperial Hotel, could have done with more. Some events and places are arguably shortchanged, including the William Head Quarantine Station on Vancouver Island, where thousands of Chinese labourers were medically examined before embarking for the killing fields of Flanders and the Somme. (Admittedly, Black had more to say about that in Harry Livingstone’s Forgotten Men, his important book from 2019.)

 Ironically, it’s with the death of the Empress of Asia that Oceans of Fate really comes to life. When it was commissioned, Canadian Pacific made a choice with results its officials could not have imagined. Lured by the promise of plentiful cheap coal from mines in Nanaimo, the company decided not to power the boilers with oil, the fuel being used on other liners. Sticking to outdated technology meant that more than half the ship’s company was composed of stokers to keep it at speed. As long as these were mostly hard-working Chinese men, this was fine. But when it was turned into a Second World War troopship, these experienced hands were replaced by ill-trained and semi-mutinous crews.

The final voyage of the Empress of Asia was in a convoy transporting over 2,000 British soldiers from Bombay to reinforce the defences of Singapore. Fourth Officer Walter Oliver, whose unpublished memoir Black has used to good effect, argued that the ship should first have been converted to oil. “She is too old, too slow and when cleaning fires throws enough smoke that may be seen for miles,” he wrote. “She is a menace to herself and any convoy she joins. In her present state, she might make a good hospital or depot ship, but useless otherwise.” Oliver was right. Constantly lagging behind the other ships, the Empress of Asia became an obvious target for the Japanese planes that finally sealed its fate.

Remarkably, most of the crew and troops escaped the flames and ended up on shore. Here their fortunes differed widely. The city had not yet surrendered to the Japanese, and by one route or another many made it back to safe Allied territory over the next few days. Others were not as lucky. Over 150 eventually became prisoners of war, some in the notorious Changi Jail and others on the deadly Burma Railway. On board, class divisions had always been obvious among the passengers. But the crew also was strictly segregated, with separate sleeping quarters and eating areas for officers and for men, as well as for the troops being transported. The disparities played their part during the escape. It comes as little surprise to learn that not long after the Empress of Asia was abandoned, its Vancouver-based captain and two of his chief officers were comfortably settled, if only briefly, in the splendours of Raffles Hotel.