Oceans of Fate: Peace and Peril Aboard the Steamship Empress of Asia
Oceans of Fate: Peace and Peril Aboard the Steamship Empress of Asia by Dan Black
English | February 18, 2025 | ISBN: 1459752511, 9781459752535 | True EPUB | 456 pages | 48.1 MB
English | February 18, 2025 | ISBN: 1459752511, 9781459752535 | True EPUB | 456 pages | 48.1 MB
The remarkable story of how one ship ― doomed by war ― intersected lives and crossed into history.
Completed in 1913 for Canadian Pacific, the Empress of Asia plied the oceans for nearly 30 years. Built for long-haul ocean travel during peace-time, she saw wartime service as an armed merchant cruiser and troopship before Japanese dive-bombers destroyed her in 1942.
Through the Roaring Twenties and the Great Depression, she brought continents and people together, delivering mail and multimillion-dollar consignments of silk. As a luxurious passenger liner, she was a “Greyhound of the Pacific,” braving epic storms and smashing transpacific speed records. From stokehold to bridge, steerage to first-class staterooms, she steamed with a kaleidoscope of lives, including courageous and recalcitrant crew, immigrants and refugees seeking a better life or relief from disaster, drug smugglers, weapons dealers, and the idle and not-so-idle rich.
This is the dramatic story of how that one ship and the lives of those on board intersected during a tumultuous period of world history, culminating in her sinking off Singapore in the Second World War.