Deadlier Than Titanic… So Why Does NOBODY Know About This??? | Empress of Ireland

Just before two in the morning on the twenty-ninth of May, 1914, two ships that had already seen each other's lights lost sight of one another in a fog bank on the St. Lawrence. Fourteen minutes after the Norwegian collier Storstad struck her, the Canadian Pacific liner Empress of Ireland was gone, and 1,012 people with her — more paying passengers than were lost on the Titanic. This is the story of how it happened: two crews who had planned an ordinary pass, a fog that erased the river, a contested turn no one outside could see, and a ship undone below the waterline by manual watertight doors and rows of open portholes. Two national inquiries weighed the same night and reached opposite verdicts. Underneath the argument lie the causes that are not in dispute — and the safety-at-sea changes that followed. Last Known Position tells the stories of ships and the people who sailed them — what happened, why it happened, and what changed because of it. Calm, careful, and researched from the official record. ⏱️ CHAPTERS 0:00 Cold open 1:34 The ship 3:56 The voyage 6:09 The event 10:10 The why 13:40 What changed 15:13 Coda 📖 ABOUT THIS EPISODE The RMS Empress of Ireland was a Canadian Pacific Railway liner built at Fairfield, Govan, in 1906, working the Liverpool–Quebec North Atlantic run. On 29 May 1914, outbound under Captain Henry Kendall and having just dropped her pilot at Pointe-au-Père (Father Point), she collided in fog with the Norwegian collier SS Storstad, under first officer Alfred Toftenes with Captain Thomas Andersen below. Among the dead were about one hundred and sixty-seven Salvation Army members and the Canadian Staff Band, actor Laurence Irving and his wife Mabel Hackney, and explorer Henry Seton-Karr; seven-year-old Grace Hanagan survived. Lord Mersey's Canadian commission blamed the Storstad; the Norwegian side maintained the Empress had turned. This maritime disaster documentary reconstructs the collision, the fourteen-minute sinking, and the inquiry — a shipwreck explained from the official record. 🗺️ See where every wreck lies on our Master Map: @ter-map/ 🔔 SUBSCRIBE: @LastKnownPositionDocumentary 📚 SOURCES Researched from the official inquiry record and public sources ("RMS Empress of Ireland", "SS Storstad", "Pointe-au-Père, Quebec", "Canadian Pacific Railway"). Original narration — not a reading of any source. Every episode is fact-checked line by line before narration; no recycled scripts, no invented details. 🎵 MUSIC Original ambient score.