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 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 a “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 one ship — and the lives of her passengers and crew — intersected during a tumultuous period of world history, culminating in her destruction off Singapore at the height of the Second World War.

DAN BLACK has written and edited hundreds of articles on Canada's military, past and present. He is the former editor of Legion Magazine and the co-author of Old Enough to Fight: Canada's Boy Soldiers in the First World War and Too Young to Die: Canada's Boy Soldiers, Sailors and Airmen in the Second World War, with John Boileau. Dan lives outside of Ottawa.

Dan Black's profile page

James P. Delgado, President of the Institute of Nautical Archaeology, is a marine archaeologist who has investigated shipwrecks around the world. With Clive Cussler, he hosted "The Sea Hunters," a National Geographic International TV series that played for five seasons to millions of viewers in 172 countries. Delgado is the author or editor of thirty books, including the international best-sellers Lost Warships: An Archaeological Tour of War at Sea and Across the Top of the World: The Quest for the Northwest Passage. When not travelling the world for INA in quest of lost ships, he lives on the Waterfront in Steveston, British Columbia - a village founded by Japanese fishermen.

James P. Delgado's profile page