HN Reader

If you liked this story, you might like the game Return of the Obra Dinn, which is kinda just this but for ~60 different people on a fictional ship.

> Every schoolchild knows the story of the Titanic, the luxury ocean liner that hit an iceberg and sank in 1912. So why did the Empress tragedy, which claimed even more passenger lives a little over two years later, fail to embed itself in our collective national consciousness?

Because the Titanic was the biggest ship ever, it sunk on its maiden voyage, although it was said to be unsinkable. It's probably one of few stories from our time which will be remembered in a thousand years.

Its amazing how much and how little things have changed when it comes to media. Good reminder to always be skeptical about sensationalism.

The headline as I read the article was "How I Solved the Century-Old Mystery of a Miraculous Shipwreck Survivor", but it doesn't actually detail _how_ the mystery was solved. They talked to a couple different people, found an old newspaper clipping, but the crucial

> Davidson was picked up by a lifeboat and taken to the Storstad, which survived the collision.

The actual meat of the article, doesn't have any clear source. I guess it might've come from the mentioned piece in "St. Thomas Journal", but it's not exactly clear.

Cool story, but not exactly the "How I solved a mystery" that you'd expect from the headline.

Tldr: 'Davidson stripped off his nightshirt and swam away from the ship. The suction took him down, and when he came up, he swam into a frenzied crowd. “They tramped me under three times before I got through them. I swam on a little farther, but the water was fearfully cold, and I was out of practice swimming,” he said.

Davidson was picked up by a lifeboat and taken to the _Storstad_, which survived the collision.'

The article was apparently edited to increase prolixity.

Oceanliner Designs has a great recreation of this accident: https://youtu.be/-9ZLZ8hiA5Y?si=ElcaIqEQhTHsElkM

...and of the last 10 minutes of this accident: https://youtu.be/N5CxSRsiUys?si=wS42xVXUb5Awb95U

Hi I’m from [outlet] news can we cite your piece about how he successfully fashioned an aeroplane out of scrap deck chairs and flew to safety?

> On May 28, 1914, the Empress began her 192nd trip across the Atlantic, from Quebec City en route to Liverpool, carrying 1,056 passengers and a crew of 423.

I have to say I'm surprised by the size of the crew, both from the economic perspective and from the fact that it's steam and not sails. I guess I'll need to read more on how these ships were run.

> After a minute and a half, the boiler rooms were flooded with the equivalent of nine Olympic swimming pools of water.

Oh for crying out loud

Claiming the disaster was worse than the Titanic seems pretty thin just because more passenger lives were lost?

Total Lives lost:

Titanic: 1,500 Empress of Ireland: 1,012

He was picked up by a lifeboat. There is no mystery; he had made clear himself multiple times that this is how he was rescued.

He says near the beginning that only 832 people died on Titanic, which is plainly untrue and made me stop reading because I felt I could no longer trust anything the author was saying without fact checking it. I mean that's a really basic thing to get wrong.