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.
Tabela de Conteúdo
Foreword by James P. Delgado
Preface
Part One: Ocean Bound
- 1 Heater Boys and Holder- Ons
- 2 Dancing Like a Hurricane
- 3 Stripped for War
- 4 Guns and Shuttlecocks
- 5 Atlantic and Pacific
Part Two: Between Wars
- 6 Boys to Sea
- 7 Salt of the Sea
- 8 Rising Twenties
- 9 Collapsing Thirties
- 10 Sea upon Sky
- 11 Ship to Shore
- 12 Smugglers and Stowaways
Part Three: The Second World War
- 13 The “Accidental” Bombing
- 14 Ark of War
- 15 Last in Line, First in Trouble
- 16 Voyage of Doom
- 17 Escape from Singapore
- 18 Homeward
- Epilogue: Signing Off
Acknowledgements
Appendix 1: Empress of Asia Casualty Lists, 1914–42
Appendix 2: Timeline
Notes
Selected Bibliography
Image Credits
Index
About the Author
Sobre o autor
Dan Black is the former editor of Legion Magazine, and author or co-author of three previous books, including Harry Livingstone’s Forgotten Men: Canadians and the Chinese Labour Corps in the First World War. He lives near Ottawa.
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