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Oceans of Fate: Peace and Peril Aboard the Steamship Empress of Asia
Paperback
General World HistoryNaval History
Publisher Price: $22.99
ISBN13: 9781459752511
Publisher: Dundurn Press
Published: Feb 18 2025
Pages: 456
Weight: 1.65
Height: 1.20 Width: 6.00 Depth: 8.90
Language: English
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.
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