Canada’s Mayflower: BC author uncovers the hidden history of the Empress of Ireland

Eve Lazarus of North Vancouver has made a career out of highlighting the hidden histories that are all around us in books like Vancouver Exposed and Cold Case BC. Her latest title – Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck – follows that tradition and is perhaps her most ambitious work to date.

The May 1914 sinking of the Empress of Ireland in the mouth of the St. Lawrence River is still the worst peacetime maritime disaster in Canadian history. Of the 1,477 people on board, 1,012 died. That is more passenger deaths than the Titanic or the Lusitania, yet it is far less well known. It may have been the victim of bad timing. Not even a month after the Empress sank, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria-Hungary was assassinated, bringing about World War I.

Another reason, as Lazarus puts it, may be that “it’s a Canadian story, and as Canadians, we like to bury the lede.”

It’s the unsung aspect of the story that drew in Lazarus.

“While the Titanic was filled with big names from the New York social register, the Empress of Ireland was a comfortable workhorse filled with ordinary Canadians,” she writes.

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The Empress was struck dead centre by the Storstad, a much smaller Norwegian coal ship, under heavy fog in the St. Lawrence.

“It was just catastrophic. Water suddenly came in, and the lights went out. Suddenly, the ship started to list. And from the time the Storstad hit the Empress to the time that it sank was 14 minutes,” she said.

Most tragic is the fact that the ship sank so quickly that only four of its 40 lifeboats could be launched.

Lazarus first came upon the Empress of Ireland story when she was asked to research one of its survivors, Gordon Charles Davidson, a PhD candidate from Ontario who lived in Vancouver and lectured History at UBC.

“It was always written that Gordon had survived by swimming the four miles (or six and a half kilometres) to shore, and it’s been written about in books and magazines and even in Gordon’s own obituary and memorial service in the ’20s,” she said.

Hugh Verrier is a former New York lawyer with a summer home in Rimouski, Que., not far from the shipwreck. He hired Lazarus to essentially fact-check this well-worn tale.

“So, I built this family tree and ended up finding [Gordon’s] brother’s granddaughter in Spain, and she had the origin story, and it turned out that Gordon didn’t swim to shore, but it was fascinating,” she said.

“That got me wondering how many other stories were wrong, and why were they wrong? How was this myth carried on for a century? And so, I went down the rabbit hole and decided to look at more of the survivors, more of the stories.”

Lazarus says she was inspired to write the book after taking a boat ride with Verrier above the Empress shipwreck five years ago.

“And it was quite a powerful experience, just knowing that you’re hovering over this underwater graveyard, there are still over 800 people who were trapped inside, and they couldn’t get them out,” she said.

“And at that moment, I decided I wanted to write a book by writing about the Canadian survivors and following their lives and impact.”

Lazarus found the B.C. connections didn’t end there.

“It didn’t surprise me that most of the passengers came from Toronto, but the city with the next most passengers was Vancouver,” she said.

“39 people were booked out of Vancouver that night. Five came back, and just about every town in B.C. had passengers that were lost on the Empress that night, and yet it’s just disappeared into history.”

Lazarus notes that while the Empress doesn’t have the fame or renown of more high-profile sinkings like the Titanic or the Lusitania, in some ways it is just as important. She calls it Canada’s Mayflower, after the ship that transported pilgrims from England to North America in 1620.

“The Empress brought 120,000 people, mostly out to Canada, mostly immigrants, between 1906 and 1914. So, they’ve kind of extrapolated that and said, ‘Okay, well, that would be about a million people today.’ And if that’s true, that’s one in 40 of us. That’s staggering to me.”

She hopes the book will help restore the Empress of Ireland to its rightful place in history.

“I think any 12-year-old kid can tell you about the Titanic, but ask them about the Empress of Ireland, which is such an incredible Canadian story, and no one knows about it.”

Beneath Dark Waters is a fascinating, meticulously researched book filled with stories about the survivors and those who didn’t make it. Its greatest strength is in how it casts new light on a forgotten tragedy.

Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck is published by Arsenal Pulp Press