RMS Empress of Ireland — Rammed in Fog, Gone in Fourteen Minutes, 1,012 Dead

In the early hours of 29 May 1914, the Canadian Pacific ocean liner RMS Empress of Ireland was rammed amidships in dense fog on the St Lawrence River by the Norwegian collier Storstad and sank in about fourteen minutes; 1,012 of the 1,477 people aboard died. The death toll exceeded that of the Titanic two years earlier among passengers, and the disaster remains the worst in Canadian maritime history. It happened a few miles off Pointe-au-Père, near Rimouski, Quebec, as the Empress was outbound from Quebec City for Liverpool, having dropped her pilot and gathered speed in clear weather minutes before the fog closed in.

The Empress was a 14,191-ton liner built in 1906, carrying about 1,477 passengers and crew under Captain Henry George Kendall, who had taken command only days earlier. The Storstad, loaded with coal, approached from the opposite direction. Both ships saw each other’s lights before a fog bank rolled between them; each then lost sight of the other and made decisions blind. When the Storstad emerged from the fog she struck the Empress on the starboard side, driving a wedge-shaped hole low in the hull near the engine and boiler rooms. Water poured in through the breach and through open lower-deck portholes; the liner listed hard to starboard, rolled onto her side, and went down before most of those in the lower cabins could escape.

The disaster was investigated by a Canadian Wreck Commissioner’s inquiry that opened in Quebec on 16 June 1914 under Lord Mersey — the same jurist who had presided over the British Titanic inquiry. After hearing 61 witnesses, including both captains, the commission found that the question reduced to a single issue: which ship had altered course in the fog. It concluded it could come to “no other conclusion” than that the Storstad had changed her heading, and laid the blame on her chief officer, Alfred Toftenes, for wrongly and negligently altering course in fog and for failing to call his captain when the fog set in.

The verdict was contested. A separate Norwegian inquiry reached the opposite conclusion, blaming the Empress of Ireland. The two findings were never reconciled. No criminal charges followed in Canada; the dispute was largely settled in civil litigation, in which Canadian Pacific prevailed against the Storstad’s owners and the owners’ counterclaim failed. The collision, like the loss of the Empress itself, became a textbook case of how two vessels, each acting on incomplete information in fog, can converge into catastrophe.

PS General Slocum — A Church Outing Burned on the East River, ~1,021 Dead

On the morning of 15 June 1904, the excursion paddle steamer PS General Slocum caught fire on New York City’s East River while carrying a chartered church outing, and burned so fast that an estimated 1,021 of the roughly 1,342 people aboard died. The dead were overwhelmingly the women and children of St Mark’s Evangelical Lutheran Church, a German-immigrant congregation from Manhattan’s Little Germany, bound for a picnic on Long Island. It was the deadliest day in New York City’s history until the September 2001 attacks, and the worst loss of life on American inland waters.

The Slocum was a wooden-hulled sidewheel steamer built in 1891, about 264 feet long, operated by the Knickerbocker Steamship Company. She had been chartered for the day. A fire broke out forward, in a lamp room or storage compartment packed with combustible material, and spread through the dry wooden vessel within minutes. The captain, William Van Schaick, kept the ship moving upriver into a headwind that fanned the flames rather than running her immediately aground, and steered for North Brother Island some distance ahead. By the time she beached, the fire had consumed much of the vessel.

What turned a fire into a mass-casualty disaster was the state of the ship’s life-saving equipment and the unpreparedness of her crew. The cork life preservers were more than a decade old and had rotted; many disintegrated or, weighted and waterlogged, dragged people under rather than holding them up. The six lifeboats were inaccessible — reportedly wired and painted in place — and could not be launched. The fire hose was cheap and rotten and burst when pressure was applied. The crew had never been drilled and abandoned the firefighting effort. Over all of this sat the federal Steamboat-Inspection Service, whose inspector had recently certified the decayed equipment as sound.

The disaster was investigated by a US Commission of Investigation appointed by President Theodore Roosevelt, which reported in October 1904. It found a chain of organisational and oversight failures: defective and decayed equipment, an untrained crew, the master’s failure to beach the ship promptly, and the inspection service’s failure to do its job. Eight people were indicted; only Captain Van Schaick was convicted, sentenced in 1906 to ten years for failing to maintain the fire drills and equipment the law required. The disaster drove a tightening of federal steamboat-safety regulation.