A Forgotten Disaster
Clockwise from top: The Empress of Ireland plies the waters of the St. Lawrence in the early 1900s; the government steamer Lady Grey (foreground) sits in a dry dock at Levis, Que., in 1915; the damaged bow of the Storstad.
Fourteen minutes. That was all the time it took the elegant Empress of Ireland, pride of the Canadian Pacific’s North Atlantic passenger fleet, to go from sailing serenely down the calm waters of the St. Lawrence River to lying on the river bottom, taking more than 1,000 souls with her in Canada’s worst marine disaster. Yet the story of her sinking, which rivals the Titanic a...