OCEAN LINER/CANADIAN PACIFIC: Captain Kendall’s personal photograph of the lost Empress of Ireland with his manuscript description of the disaster — which is totally at odds with official Inquiry findings.
Famous as “The Man Who Caught Crippen” (the infamous London cellar murderer), Captain H. G. Kendall moved from that triumph — in the S.S. Montrose — to the soul-destroying tragedy of the Empress of Ireland just over four years later. This is his personal portrait of the the lost Empress , about which he never spoke publicly — and mention of which he notoriously omitted from his memoirs, Adventures on the High Seas . The photograph, with his personal subscript, hung on a wall beside the stairs in his Merseyside home — and was there when he died in a nursing home in 1965, aged 91. Nurses said he had repeatedly mentioned the Empress and on his deathbed was writhing in horror at apparent shipwreck. A unique opportunity to acquire a stunning image of one of the three greatest shipwrecks of the Golden Age — with the Empress trailing only Titanic and Lusitania in fascination — one that moreover personally belonged to her world-famous Captain. There is simply nothing even near equivalent with Captain E. J. Smith or W. T. Turner, with this item made even more important by Kendall’s handwritten contradictions of Lord Mersey’s findings. The subscript reads:
“ Empress of Ireland ”
Sunk by the collier “ Storstad ”, carrying 12,500 tons of coal and steaming 12 knots. The Empress sank in six minutes, the gash made allowed the water to run in at the rate of 282 tons per second. The number of lives lost was 1,026. The collision occurred on May 29th at 1.54am 1914 off Father Pt, Gulf of St Laurence [sic]. I was then her Commander. H G Kendall
The importance of this artefact cannot be overestimated. Kendall said 282 tons of water ingress per second, to the Inquiry’s 265 (p. 601 of the report). The Captain writes that the Empress sank in only six minutes, whereas the Inquiry found ‘About 15’ (p. 593). Wireless operator Leslie at Father Point believed it was ‘about ten minutes’.
Kendall also differed on the exact time of the collision: the Inquiry estimated it at one minute later than he (1.55 to 1.54), while Leslie put it nine minutes earlier. The speed of the Storstad is cited as twelve knots by Kendall, who was confronted with her in the fog, yet Lord Mersey estimated 10 kts. The Captain of the Empress puts the number of lives lost at 1,026, fourteen more than the 1,012 found by Lord Mersey.
Photograph shows the Empress in the very St Lawrence seaway where she foundered just before World War One. This image has never been published anywhere before.
An extraordinarily significant document in Canadian and British maritime history. 23cms x 28cms.