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Meeting The Empress

by Richard Coleman

176 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); historical fiction; catalogue #05-2289; ISBN 1-4120-7394-4; US$16.59, C$19.08, EUR13.63, £9.54

Fed up with his parents drinking and fighting, a young teen runs away from home and finds employment, friendship, love and adventure aboard the doomed ocean liner Empress of Ireland.

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About the Book

About the Author

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About the Book

It is May of 1914. Charles Heath, age 14, has had enough of drunken fights at home between his parents, and school holds little interest for him. When one day he is forced to punch out a rival in class to protect his love interest, Janet, he decides to quit school and find a job. With the police hot on his trail, his adventure begins as he finds himself on a train bound for Quebec City, where he is to commence employment as a cabin boy on the Empress of Ireland. On the train he meets another love interest, Helen, and a rival for her affections, Ian. All three wind up aboard ship.

Once aboard the Empress, Charles' adventures continue; enter Gina, a promiscuous sixteen-year-old girl who has her eye on him, as well as every other good looking male aboard ship.

Charles meets a number of passengers and crew (all historically accurate) including the captain, Henry Kendall and the ship*s doctor, James Grant. While aboard, Charles cracks a tooth and has to have it extracted, introducing the reader to dentistry of 1914. He also has an altercation with the ship*s cat, Bulkhead, resulting in a nasty bite requiring stitches. Charles hooks up with Stan, a seasoned cabin boy who introduces him to the finer points of life on the Empress, including tobacco and alcohol.

Circumstance places all four characters on deck in the early morning hours of May 29, 1914. In a dense fog bank the Empress of Ireland collides with the Norwegian coal ship Storstad. While the Storstad remains afloat, the Empress sinks in fourteen minutes, taking with her 1012 people. 500 passengers and crew find themselves pitched into the St. Lawrence in the middle of the night, Charles, Helen, Gina and Stan among them.

With the friends now separated, the story continues aboard the Storstad, whose crew picked up many of the survivors, and then later in Quebec City, where Charles must enter the morgue where all bodies have been taken for identification, in his efforts to find his friends.

The book concludes with the discovery that Gina has perished, Stan has lost an arm, but Charles is re-united with Helen, who was rescued by another lifeboat. All the surviving characters return to Toronto to start over again, and are considerably wiser for their experiences.

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About the Author

Richard Coleman has been an elementary school teacher for twenty-eight years. He has a passion for twentieth-century Canadian history, and has managed to pass on this passion to many of his students. He currently resides in Richmond Hill, Ontario and is married with five children and five grandchildren.

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Excerpts

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Catalogue Information

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