RMS Empress of Ireland

The RMS Empress of Ireland is a transatlantic ocean liner built for the Canadian Pacific Railway's steamship division, entering service in 1906 on the route between Liverpool and Quebec, and is remembered chiefly for sinking in the Saint Lawrence River in May 1914 after colliding in heavy fog with a Norwegian collier, the Storstad. The Empress of Ireland sank in only about fourteen minutes, and the disaster killed more than a thousand people, a death toll among passengers and crew higher than that of the Titanic two years earlier, though it received far less lasting public attention, coming as it did shortly before the outbreak of the First World War overshadowed the story. The wreck lies in relatively shallow water and has since become a popular, if hazardous, destination for technical scuba divers.