HALIFAX—A leading marine archaeologist says Canada needs a consistent national strategy to protect the country’s underwater wrecks, amid concerns that sunken ships are being looted and undermanaged.
“In Canada, shipwrecks are kind of the poor cousin to on-land archaeological sites,” said Rob Rondeau, who has studied both the wrecks of the Titanic and Empress of Ireland. The ships sank just two years apart, carrying several hundred souls apiece to watery graves.
The Empress of Ireland collided with a Norwegian coal ship on the Saint Lawrence River on May 29, 1914, whistles blaring through the dense fog. Two-thirds the size of the Titanic, the freighter disappeared beneath the surface in just 14 minutes. Of 1,477 people aboard, 1,092 perished.
While the disaster of the Titanic looms as large as its name in our national consciousness, the Empress of Ireland—despite a similarly tragic casualty—has for the most part slipped into the annals of history. Rondeau says this reflects differing efforts, or lack thereof, employed to preserve the sunken ships and commemorate the disasters at a national level.
“The United States, they’ve been much more proactive with the Titanic, they’ve really sort of embraced it as their own, even though it was an international ship,” Rondeau said April 12 before a presentation at the Canadian Museum of Immigration.
More than 3,700 metres below the surface, the Titanic lies in international waters and thus falls within the scope of the UNESCO Convention on the Protection of the Underwater Cultural Heritage. In addition, the U.S. has national legislation protecting all archaeological sites from sea to shining sea.
