Oceania Cruises’ Marina has commemorated the 100th anniversary of the sinking of the Canadian Pacific liner Empress of Ireland in the River St Lawrence in Canada 100 years ago.
Five to one at night on 29 May, church bells in Rimouski and Sainte-Luce-sur-Mer rang out in the still of the darkness to commemorate the loss of Empress of Ireland a hundred years earlier.
“Descendants of family members involved in the tragedy gathered in Rimouski for a series of commemorative events. One group of individuals who had assembled at Pointe-au-Père Marine Historic Site happened to notice that a cruise ship was passing by offshore in precisely the same location and at precisely the same time that the Empress of Ireland had been lost,’ Oceania said in a statement.
Marina had departed the Port of Québec on the evening of 28 May, just as the Empress of Ireland had done a century earlier.
Empress of Ireland was a 14,191 gross register ton liner that had been completed in 1906. On 29 May 1914, the 6,000dwt Norwegian collier Storstad collided in thick fog with the liner that went down with the loss of 1,024 lives. A court of inquiry laid the blame for the disaster on the Norwegian ship.
Despite the heavy loss of life involved, the sinking of Empress of Ireland is relatively little known as it occurred only a month before the assassination of Archduke Francies Fredinand and Archduchess Sophia, heirs to the thrones of Austra-Hungary, on 28 June in Sarajevo. The subsequent events led to the outbreak of the First World War in early August.
