Customer Reviews

Dark Descent: Diving and the Deadly Allure of the Empress of Ireland

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Dark Descent: Diving and the Deadly Allure of the Empress of Ireland is a book for everyone! I am definitely not a member of the diving community, though if I were I would love the book as a guide to equipment and techniques. I am, in fact, alternately revolted and fascinated by extreme sports and the people who practice them, a combination of feelings that compels me to seek understanding in books like Dark Descent. This page-turner of a book goes a long way towards providing enlightenment and does it in a most interesting way. Deep wreck divers are tourists! McMurray's abbreviated yet complete rendering of the Canadian ocean liner Empress of Ireland's history and the tragedy of her 1914 sinking on a routine voyage from Quebec City to Liverpool reads like a Michelin guide to an exciting
historical site. Immediately one feels that reading about it isn't enough. One is compelled to visit. The bulk of the book is a history of tourism, a very difficult kind of tourism, to one of these sites. In tightly written, chronological chapters, McMurray describes all the expeditions to the Empress, as they illuminate the technical progress of diving and, more importantly to this reader, the motivations of the divers and the rivalries and sportsmanlike competition between them. Though the retrieval of artifacts provides a financial incentive
for early explorers of the wreck, diving continues after the government of Canada declares the wreck off limits to salvage. Why? All tourism involves a certain amount of discomfort and risk, and it is really these that make the tourist feel as if he or she has a special connection to the past, somehow more real than the experience of reading a book or watching a program on the History Channel. In such moments of actively reaching for connection, we feel most alive. That is why we travel, why we climb mountains. The chapters of this book describe this feeling of being fully alive, fully connected to the past, as it is experienced in a unique way by each of a series of explorers over the last ninety years. As the author says so well, in describing one of his own dives on the Empress, "I told myself I was really here. It was touching a powerful story, bearing witness to a profound and heart-wrenching tragedy." For a reader not yet ready to make that ultimate trip to the bottom of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, this book provides the next best thing to actually touching this story. Dark Descent is a great read!

I first learned about the "Empress of Ireland" disaster through Clive Cussler's book "Night Probe!" I eventually found out more about the vessel and her untimely end.

The history is well-documented here by McMurray. Outbound in the St. Lawrence River, the Empress is badly holed by a fully-loaded collier and sinks within 15 minutes, killing more than a thousand.

This disaster was generally overshadowed by the outbreak of World War I and the ship was largely forgotten. But once she was found, she became a magnet for the curious and those with ulterior motives.

Much like what happened to the Titanic, the Empress has been stripped of much of her gear, her inner treasures, and sadly some of her bodies. A section of the "boneyard" has reportedly been plundered by some rather morbid and sick-minded individuals.

McMurray goes into great detail on the many expeditions and dives, the work by some to protect the wreck and what has been found, as well as those who've lost their lives diving on her.

While the Empress may be in the St. Lawrence, it's a dive for only the best, as this book carefully explains.

This is probably the most comprehensive history of the Empress of Ireland and updates all that has happened since she went down in May 1914. It is at times dense and a slow read, but you can't take away its entertaining, yet sobering qualities.

The sinking of the Empress of Ireland after a collision in the St. Lawrence Seaway is one of the most tragic shipwreck stories of all time. The author does a fine job of chronicling the numerous expeditions to this wreck, the dangers of diving it ( not for beginners) and the actual story of the 1914 tragedy. Mr. McMurray himself has dived this wreck and his first hand knowlege is evident in this well researched and equally well written book. This is a must have for the historian and the diver.The Wreck Hunters: Dive to the Wreck of the USS Bass

It is really hard to find a good and well written book on diving. This is a great book. I couldn't set it down. Felt like it was there and in the moment. Made me want to postpone diving the Doria to dive the Empress. Exelent Book. If you like this book then you should check out Fatal Depth, and Deep Descent. Both also great books.

Make no mistake, this is as complete a work on the ship "Empress of Ireland" as one might wish to find. The story of the tragedy itself is told in fascinating detail and the individual accounts of personal loss, survival and even the death of a professional salvage diver in the days following the demise of this once great ship reveal a level of research which is both thorough and complete.

It all happened in 1914, only two years after the loss of the Titanic but also only a few months before Europe would be plunged into a conflict which would become known as the Great War, or the War to end all Wars. How curious, therefore, that the story of the Titanic lives on - and on, and that that of the Empress of Ireland seems to have become lost alongside the wreck itself.

Anyone wanting to know anything at all about the Empress of Ireland need hardly look further than this book - which is, indeed a job well done. My only criticism is reserved for the standard of reproduced photographs - some of which are no bigger than postage stamps and many of which are not clear.

First class reference material for historians, anyone with an interest and, especially, those contemplating diving the wreck itself. Read the book first, you might just change your mind.

NM

I enjoyed the first book, Deep Descent and found it a good reference book for my technical diving students. This book was equally as good. It combines the history of the wreck as well as the history of the diving that has taken place on the wreck. It also includes some excellent information on the diving fatalities that have occured on this wreck. If you want to learn from the mistakes of others this book will help.

While the book reads quickly, it is no page-turner. Unlike Shadow Divers or The Last Dive, the descriptions of the dives were not gripping. I did find the local politics of controlling the dive site to be interesting, but only a diver would.

The reason the book is not a page-turner is that there is no spine to the story. True, there is a central theme to the book, namely, the Empress of Ireland, but that is a ship, not a person. Stories about objects simply can't evoke much emotion from readers unless the object is anthropromorphized (think Pinocchio). Hollywood has made a number of movies about cars, guns, hotel rooms, and other things that pass from one person to another and what happens to those people while in possession of the thing, and those movies all suffer from the same problem: they are episodic in nature. There is nothing inherently bad about being episodic, but a book of short stories usually can't sustain your interest in the same way as a novel can.

So Dark Descent is good reportage of a series of incidents involving the Empress of Ireland, but I think it of interest mainly to divers. I wouldn't recommend it to a friend unless the friend was a diver or an armchair technical diver.

Beautifully written! McMurray shares with us his passion for the Empress and all of her history. He shares with us her majestic beauty above the sea, as well as beneath the sea. I never knew of the Empress of Ireland until reading this book, and I will visit her site one day. McMurray not only writes about the Empress and the divers that love her, but he makes the reader want to be included in that world, too. Thank you Mr. McMurray for writing such a touching story.

A good book, a great book, actually. Although I'm more impressed with The Last Attempt, The true Story of Freediving Champion Audrey Mestre and the Mystery of her death" by Carlos Serra.

That book gave me goose bumps, especially on the way the whole story develops and the twist in the end. Expect something like The Sixth Sense with Bruce Willis, because the final point about Audrey's death is in your face throughout the narrative but hard to see until it's told by the author. Amazing book The Last Attempt!