How I Solved the Century-Old Mystery of a Miraculous Shipwreck Survivor
July 08, 2025 at 12:12AMMost people know about the sinking of the Titanic, which claimed the lives of 832 passengers when it went down off the coast of Canada in 1912 on its maiden voyage. But why, though, have so few people heard about the Empress of Ireland, which sank just two years later and had an even higher passenger death toll? In this excerpt from her book, Beneath Dark Waters: The Legacy of the Empress of Ireland Shipwreck, Eve Lazurus recounts the tragedy and tries to verify the surprising story of Gordon Charles Davidson, a passenger who is said to have survived by swimming nearly four miles to shore.
More than 200,000 litres of water a second poured into the Empress, causing catastrophic flooding in the engine rooms and lower decks. The furnaces flooded. The power went out.
The ship was thrown into darkness before most of the sleeping passengers could even grasp what was happening. Those who had managed to leave their cabins were left groping around in the pitch dark, trying to find a way out, clawing their way up the tilting stairs. Because they had boarded the ship mere hours earlier, they were unfamiliar with the ship’s layout. In just thirty seconds, the Empress had taken on almost half her own weight in water. After a minute and a half, the boiler rooms were flooded with the equivalent of nine Olympic swimming pools of water.
from Longreads https://longreads.com/2025/07/07/how-i-solved-the-century-old-mystery-of-a-miraculous-shipwreck-survivor/
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