Customer Rating: 
Summary: A Great Voyage Into Unkown Waters
Comment: Every so often I have been lucky enough to find books that answered questions I have had about historical events. PAVLOSK tells about what happened to a Russian imperial palace during and after the Revolution and World War II. BERLIN: THEN AND NOW has photos of Berlin of the places in the city that were made famous in the last century. Now, Derek Grout in EMPRESS OF IRELAND: THE STORY OF AN EDWARDIAN LINER does not just talk about the 1914 sinking of the EMPRESS on the St. Lawrence River with a loss of over a thousand lives. Rather, the author writes about the life of the ship and the world it lived in.This is clearly a 4.75 star book. The author tells us about every feature of the life of a working ship from its birth to death. Owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway (CPR), a company that was not one of the "high flyers" on the Atlantic, the ship did not sail the glamor route to New York but the secondary route direct to Canada (which could have been reached faster by a fast ship to New York and then a train to Canada). Japanese and British royalty, future Nobel laureates, holders of the VC and other stars graced its passenger lists but not in the number (nor lumination power) of the ships sailing to New York. CPR ships were built to help build Canada and to provide the sea portion of CPR's Europe to the Far East service. It was the scores of small and medium liners on various routes that linked the people of the world together until the 1960's.
Grout covers what the world was like at the turn of the 20th Century when the ship was conceived. He talks about the development of Canada and the role the CPR in that development. The construction of the ship and why some decisions about its construction (reciprocating vs. turbine eingines) is covered. But most important, the author covers every function that kept this mid-sized Edwardian liner working from the coal it used and how it coaled to handling the mail (for the coveted RMS)to how the ship was provisioned and 4,000 meals were prepared every day. Nothing escaped his notice from pilot fees and crew wages to how clean the ship was kept, even during rough weather!
Why not a 5.0 grade? There were some things I think the book needed but were, surprisingly, missing:
(1) Despite a remarkable array of photos, there were not enough picture of the ship, interior and exterior. Since the EMPRESS OF IRELALND was a virtual twin to her sister EMPRESS OF BRITAIN, if pictures of public rooms and cabins of the former were not available, the latter should have been used. (Were these pictures lost when CPR's headquarters in London was destroyed in World War II?)
(2) Food was important on the ship as on any Atlantic liner but thwere were few menus reproduced.
(3) Grout points out that the EMPRESS, unlike TITANIC, had a life beyond the disaster that sank her and it was that life that was what he was out to cover in his book. Also, other books have been written on the sinking. However, for continuity's sake if nothing else, a somewhoat more detailed description of the disaster on May 29, 1914 should have been included.
(4) I wish there had been more about the interaction between passengers and the crew, particularly with their stewards.
These observations notwithstanding, EMPRESS OF IRELAND is a wonderful book and a MUST for everyone interested in ocean liners and in the history of Canada.
