Oceans of Fate: Peace and Peril Aboard the Steamship Empress of Asia

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 thirty years. Built for peacetime deep-sea travel, she saw wartime service as an armed merchant cruiser and troopship before Japanese dive bombers destroyed her off Singapore in 1942.

Through the Roaring Twenties and Great Depression, she brought continents and people together, delivering mail and multi-million-dollar consignments of silk. As a luxurious passenger liner, she was the “Greyhound of the Pacific,” encountering enormous 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 and weapons dealers, and the idle and not-so idle rich.

This is the dramatic story of how that one ship — and the lives of her passengers and crew — intersected during a tumultuous period of world history, culminating in her destruction off Singapore and the fate of her crew.