History
The Empress of Britain was built by Fairfield Shipbuilding in Govan near Glasgow, Scotland. She was launched on 11 November 1905.
The 14,189-ton vessel had a length of 458.8 feet, and her beam was 65.7 feet. The ship had two funnels, two masts, twin propellers and an average speed of 18-knots. The ocean liner provided accommodation for 310 first-class passengers and for 470 second-class passengers. There was also room for 730 third-class passengers.
The SS Empress of Britain left Liverpool on 5 May 1906 on her maiden voyage to Quebec. Thereafter, she was scheduled to sail regularly back and forth on the trans-Atlantic route. In the early days of wireless telegraphy, the call sign established for the "Empress of Britain was "MPB."
On her second voyage, the Empress of Britain made the west-bound trip from Mouville to Rimouski in five days, 21 hours, 17 minutes -- a new record, which was a credit to her Captain, James Anderson Murray, and to her shipbuilders. Both the Empress of Britain and her sister ship, the ill-fated RMS Empress of Ireland were the fastest ships making the trans-Atlantic run at the time. In 1914, the Empress of Ireland sank in the St. Lawrence River with great loss of life.
Much of what would have been construed as ordinary, even unremarkable during this period was an inextricable part of the ship's history. In the conventional course of trans-Pacific traffic, the ship was sometimes held in quarantine if a communicative disease was discovered amongst the passengers. Similarly, it would have been expected, for example, that the ship would notify authorities in Halifax that one passenger had died from pneumonia en route to Canada from Europe.
Less than two weeks after disaster struck the RMS Titanic in the North Atlantic, the Empress of Britain also struck an iceberg on 26 April 1912; but the reported damage was only slight.
On 27 July 1912, the Empress of Britain rammed and sank the British collier SS Helvetia in fog off Cape Magdelene in the estuary of the St Lawrence River, the same river where her sister met a similar fate.
Read more about this topic: RMS Empress Of Britain (1906)
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