The pair made such an impression that Allan Line won a valuable Canadian Government mail contract before the ships were even launched.

When the performance of the two ships was evaluated, Laurentic was found to produce 20 percent more power than her sister for the same coal consumption.

This led IMM to specify a similar three-screw combination of two triple-expansion engines and one low-pressure turbine for the Olympic-class ocean liners that Harland & Wolff launched in 1910 and 1911.

[12] The White Star and Dominion Lines provided two ships each to run a weekly joint service between Liverpool and Canada.

On a westbound crossing to New York on 22 January 1910 a storm hit Laurentic that broke portholes on her upper deck, flooded her bridge and officers' quarters and disabled her engine order telegraphs.

[11] In July 1910 Metropolitan Police DCI Walter Dew used Laurentic's speed to reach Rimouski, Quebec ahead of murder suspect Hawley Harvey Crippen and his lover Ethel Le Neve, who were travelling aboard the Canadian Pacific liner Montrose.

Laurentic's Master, John Mathias, reported by wireless on 21 April "that he had kept a careful lookout while passing over the Grand Banks, and had seen neither bodies nor wreckage".

[4] On 3 October she left Gaspé Bay as one of a convoy of 32 ships bringing more than 30,000 members of the Canadian Expeditionary Force to Europe.

In September the Royal Navy had captured several German merchant ships that had sought refuge in the Wouri estuary.

[20] From September 1915 to January 1916 Laurentic patrolled the Bay of Bengal, visiting Port Blair, the Hooghly River, the coast of Balasore and Rangoon.

[20] On 5 February Laurentic stopped the Japanese merchant ship Tenyo Maru off the Philippines and sent a boarding party aboard.

[20] Laurentic left Cape Town on 25 July 1916, reached Halifax, Nova Scotia on 15 August and discharged her cargo of bullion.

By 30 October she was back in Halifax, where she unloaded the specie and spent four weeks in port before leaving on 27 November for Liverpool.

On the morning of 25 January she called at Buncrana in Lough Swilly to disembark four ratings with symptoms of yellow fever.

Laurentic was due to rendezvous with a destroyer escort off Fanad Head, but her commander, Captain Reginald Norton, chose to proceed without it.

[23] Despite the difficult conditions Laurentic's crew launched lifeboats and tried to row ashore, guided by Fanad Head Lighthouse.

The officers and men lived up to the best traditions of the navy...The deaths were all due to exposure, owing to the coldness of the night.

Damant and his team used guncotton to blow open a watertight door called the "entry port" mid-way down the ship's side, and an iron gate in the companionway leading to the baggage room.

The weight, and the awkward angle of the wreck, made it hard to move each box to the entry port to be hoisted to the surface.

Damant abandoned this access route and directed his crew to use explosives to remove the mainmast and make a vertical shaft down through the wreck to where he expected the gold now to be.

[37] The work was dangerous, and further complicated by Royal Navy minesweepers in the area occasionally detonating German mines that they found.

[38] In the winter of 1919–20 parts of the ship's superstructure either side of the work site collapsed, filling the hole that the divers had made in 1917 and 1919.

[40] In 1920 Damant and his crew tried centrifugal pumps and dredging grabs, but the space was too constricted and the periods in which they could be used were too short for them to be effective.

[42][39] In the winter of 1921–22 the currents washed away some of the débris, and in the spring of 1922 the first diver to descend found gold bars protruding from the sand within the wreck.

[44] They wore standard diving dress but chose to work bare-handed, using improvised scoops to dig and thrusting their hands into the loosened silt and recognising gold bars by touch by their fingertips.

Damant then prescribed the laborious but safer method of removing about 2,000 sq ft (190 m2) of steel plates to expose the seabed beneath.

[45] In June 1924 Damant was made a CBE,[46] and that December members of the diving crew including P/Os Balson, Dent and Light were awarded the Medal of the Order of the British Empire.

In 1924 Damant presented the bell from her bow to All Saints' parish church, Portsalon, County Donegal, the port from which Racer and her salvage crew operated.

[53] Being in the territorial waters of the Republic of Ireland and more than a century old, the wreck is automatically protected by the National Monuments (Amendment) Act, 1987, section 3, sub-section (4).

[54] Divers must obtain a licence from the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media before diving on the wreck.