Current Affairs

Just after midnight on May 29, 1914, the Empress of Ireland sank in the St. Lawrence River, with a loss of 836 passengers, four more than had died on the Titanic two years earlier. Almost everyone has heard of the Titanic, but how many have heard of the Empress of Ireland? Eve Lazarus hadn’t before she began her research, which she embarked on only because of a request from someone fascinated by the story of Gordon Davidson, a survivor who supposedly swam six and a half kilometres to shore from the sinking ship.

Impossible, said the experts. And although Davidson’s swim became legendary, Lazarus discovered that the reality was less dramatic. The graduate student from Union, Ontario, actually swam to a lifeboat and thus was eventually able to continue his journey to England to complete his doctorate in history — even if his notes went down with the ship. Davidson’s life is perhaps the most interesting in Lazarus’s Beneath Dark Waters and perhaps one of the saddest. After he earned his degree, Davidson went off to fight in the First World War, where he was seriously wounded. He ended up in Vancouver, teaching at the University of British Columbia, but he struggled with what we would now call post-traumatic stress disorder and died by suicide in 1922.

Others had happier stories. Arthur Delamont, for example, was one of the many Salvation Army band members travelling to London. He, too, ended up in Vancouver, where he founded a well-known boys’ band whose members over the years included the bandleader Dal Richards, the architect Bing Thom, and the entrepreneur Jimmy Pattison.

Lazarus devotes the last third of her book to accounts of the survivors (perhaps that is the legacy her subtitle refers to), but the best part is the story of the accident itself, which remains mysterious to this day. The Empress of Ireland left Quebec City late on the afternoon of May 28. It was clear sailing through the evening and night, but then fog rolled in and the ship collided with a Norwegian vessel, the Storstad. The Canadian Pacific ocean liner sank quickly, and Lazarus is very good at recounting the panic, the quick thinking (one passenger escaped through a porthole, and others clung to wreckage in the icy waters), the overall confusion, and the sombre makeshift morgue in Rimouski.

Who was at fault? The two captains pointed fingers at each other. Local officials blamed the Storstad, which was exonerated by a Norwegian investigation. Lazarus tries to be even-handed, but the bow of the Storstad ended up in the starboard side of the Empress, so it is hard to accept the Norwegian view that the passenger ship hit the collier; it must have been the other way around. But it’s possible that the Empress changed course in a way that caused the collision, as many online sleuths suggest. Or maybe we should blame the notorious Hawley Crippen. The captain of the Empress, Henry Kendall, had played a role in the murderous homeopath’s capture years earlier, and one tale is that Crippen cursed him in revenge. Kendall did seem unlucky; besides the 1914 disaster, he was on the scene for the Halifax explosion in December 1917. Or maybe it was the cat. Since the launch of the Empress of Ireland in 1906, Emmy had been on every voyage — or so the story goes — but before the final one, she jumped ship. A bad omen, some thought.

John Boileau doesn’t tell us too much about causes and culpability in his book on the Titanic. Rather, The Lucky and the Lost focuses on the children, with fascinating accounts of those who lived and those who didn’t.

Consider the Navratil brothers, abducted by their father in a custody dispute with his ex-wife, Marcelle. The Slovakian tailor living in Nice, France, changed his name and took the boys with him to England, boarding the ship in Southampton in April 1912. They survived the wreck, but he did not, and for a while they were known as the “Titanic orphans,” until their Italian mother saw a photograph in the newspaper and reunited with them in New York (the White Star Line covered her ticket aboard the Oceanic).

Loraine Allison and her mother could have escaped onto a lifeboat but instead went looking for Loraine’s brother, Trevor. Unbeknownst to them, Trevor was already safely on another lifeboat with the nanny. Sadly, both Loraine and her mother died. But an imposter came forward years later, claiming to be Loraine Allison; she became known as the Anastasia of the Titanic, in an allusion to the women purporting to be the murdered youngest daughter of Czar Nicholas II.

Loraine was the only child in first class to die. If you were young in first or second class, you had a good chance of survival, largely because of the traditional “women and children first” rule, which was strictly enforced on the Titanic, so much so that some men were kept out of lifeboats at gunpoint. Still, half the children died (mostly in third class), which upsets Boileau. If the rule had been followed more strictly, he argues, all of the kids could have lived.

Not actually part of maritime law, the old rule wasn’t followed at all on the Empress of Ireland; it was everyone for themselves, perhaps because there was so little time to flee (just fourteen minutes, compared with more than two hours on the Titanic). Only three of the 139 children escaped the Empress of Ireland, or about 2 percent.

On the St. Lawrence, those who reached safety were mostly the crew. Did they neglect the passengers? Lazarus suggests they just knew the ship better. Nearly two-thirds of them made it to shore, while only a quarter of the Titanic crew set foot on land again.

Boileau looks for patterns in all the information he has gathered on the children: Did the survivors tend to die young? Did they marry and have children of their own? Did they embrace publicity? But the answers vary, and there seem to be no patterns. There seem to be no patterns either for the survivors of the Empress of Ireland: one died by suicide, while another became a respected bandleader. All of them endured catastrophe. However compelling these two tragedies are, it is not clear in either book how they shaped the people who came through them.