Nova Scotia (38 page)

   
The same returning ships also brought along prisoners of war,
who were relegated to the cold stone cellblocks of the Citadel or
the prison on Melville Island, where now stands the genteel Armdale
Yacht Club. One of the more famous guests of the Citadel prison
during these years was Russian revolutionary Leon Trotsky, who
predictably had little positive to say afterwards about his prison
days in Halifax or Amherst. n

   
There were persistent rumours of German spies walking the
streets of Halifax and news of German subs within a stone’s throw
of the coast. Nova Scotian German families who had lived here for
generations were often snubbed or viewed with suspicion. In my own
coastal community of Lawrencetown, if a local resident with a
German last name was seen standing on the headland gazing off to
sea, he might openly be accused of spying or signalling those
elusive German U-boats.

   
Submarines were a constant threat to shipping, and in 1917 a
monumental effort was made to reduce the losses by sending ships
across the Atlantic from Canada in protected convoys. Halifax was
the perfect staging area for corralling a large number of ships in
Bedford Basin. The ships then proceeded under escort across the
open Atlantic. Between August and November of that year, over fifty
convoys with more than 500 ships steamted out of Halifax for
Europe. From a commodity point of view, it was a spectacular feat,
with something like seventeen million tons of cargo moving in and
out of Halifax.

The Hourglass Harbour

When the U.S. declared war on
Germany in 1917, the U.S. Navy became a frequent visitor to the
harbour. An American sea-plane base was also established in Eastern
Passage.

   
The Halifax-Dartmouth ferry service, the lifeline between the
people on each side of the harbour, was working well over capacity,
jam-packed with civilians, soldiers and military vehicles. Ships
often blocked the ferry lanes and there were at least two
collisions between ferries and large ships. Well before the big
boom of the Halifax Explosion, boats and ships were bumping into
each other in the impossibly heavy traffic.

   
There is a long list of bumps and scrapes, near misses, close
calls and downright smash-ups in the harbour during World War I,
but nothing rivals the collision that set off the Halifax Explosion
of December 6, 1917.

   
The harbour has been described as an hourglass in shape. The
main part of the harbour on the ocean side is ten kilometres long
and two kilometres wide. The Narrows is about one kilometre in
length and a mere 450 metres across. This opens up into Bedford
Basin, six kilometres long and four kilometres wide. The Basin is
where the convoys could safely assemble, well-*protected from
anything beyond the harbour mouth. Any incoming vessels would have
to stop for clearance between Lighthouse Bank and McNab’s Island.
If everything went by the book, ships would pass in or out of the
Narrows in a safe and orderly fashion. But as it turned out, the
Narrows was not nearly wide enough to allow for human
error.

A Grave Miscalculation

The
Mont Blanc
was a ship destined for Bordeaux,
France, loaded to the gunwales with explosive cargo that included
guncotton, 200 tons of TNT, 2,300 tons of wet and dry picric acid,
and 35 tons of benzol in thin steel barrels loaded at the last
minute lest any cargo space go unused. The
Mont Blanc
was
not a new ship but she was considered serviceable in wartime when
everything afloat was being put into the war effort. Owned by a
French transport company, she was captained by Aimé Le Medec, with
a crew of less than forty. Loaded with her tonnage of deadly cargo
in New York, she was too slow to join the convoy going to Europe
from there, so she headed north to Halifax, arriving on December
5.

   
A local pilot with twenty-four years’
experience, Francis Mackey, came on board to usher her into the
harbour. He didn’t understand much French but had a good record of
never having been involved in an accident. After being checked out
by the naval authorities, the
Mont Blanc
was given
permission to move through the Narrows to the Basin.
t

   
Leaving the Basin that morning and headed for
New York was the
Imo
. The
Imo
was a Belgian relief ship of Norwegian registry and had
once been a passenger ship for the White Star Line. Now she was
referred to as a “tramp steamer,” but she was in good enough
condition to be called into service for the war. Her captain was
Haakon Fron and the local pilot was William Hayes. She should have
left the previous day but there had been delays with the loading of
coal.

   
The chain of events leading to the disaster
began when an American tramp steamer entered the Narrows on the
wrong side. Behind this ship was the
Stella Maris
, a
36.5-metre-long tug towing two barges. The
Imo
was on its
way out to sea. The
Stella
Maris
turned to avoid the
oncoming
Imo
and found herself heading for the
Dartmouth shore and directly into the path of the incoming
Mont Blanc
. There are conflicting reports as to who did what
when both ships realized that a collision was imminent, but
whatever the case, the
Imo
ended up ramming
into the bow of the
Mont
Blanc
. Archibald MacMechan,
who had the honour of writing up the official reports on the
ensuing city-wide disaster, suggests that the pilot of the
Imo
gave a critical order to change direction – in English –
but it wasn’t understood by the French crewmen. MacMechan reports
that “the
Imo
came with great violence against the
starboard bow of the
Mont
Blanc
and crushed the plating
to a depth of ten feet.” Sparks from the collision set off a fire
almost immediately. “Dense clouds of smoke rose into the still
morning air, shot througah with flashes of fierce red flame . .
.”

   
The crew of the
Mont Blanc
might have
been the only ones to realize just how dangerous the situation was.
They abandoned ship and rowed their lifeboats like madmen toward
Dartmouth as their vessel began to drift toward Halifax’s
blue-collar Richmond neighbourhood on the other shore. People along
the waterfront in Halifax and Dartmouth could see the fire and knew
there was trouble. Crowds gathered to watch.

   
Firefighters were ready to respond and sprung
into action, while the noble captain of the
Stella Maris
left her barges and put a line onto the
Mont Blanc
to tow her away. HMS
Highflyer
, anchored
nearby, sent a whaler and seven men to help. Also handy was
HMCS
Niobe
, a sort of floating dormitory described by
MacMechan as resembling “Noah’s Ark.” Men were dispatched in a
tender to help in any way they could.

   
At this point, good intentions were not enough
to avoid the inevitable gargantuan blast just seconds before 9:05
a.m. that would go down in the books as the single largest man-made
explosion in the history of the earth until the dropping of the
Hiroshima atom bomb. Novelist Hugh MacLennan was living in Halifax
at the time and documented the horrific event in his novel
Barometer Rising
. He writes of the earthquake, “air-concussion”
an*d giant wave produced by the blast he describes as creating a
“sound beyond hearing.” The water opened up and the rock beneath
the harbour transferred the shock onto the city, where the ground
“rocked and reverberated, pavements split and houses swayed as the
earth trembled.” Up above ground, “the forced wall of air struck
against Fort Needham and Richmond Bluff and shaved them
clean.”

   
According to Archibald MacMechan, the walloping
blast vaporized the
Mont
Blanc
in a “spray of metallic
fragments.” Metal shards rained down around the harbour and in the
city along with a black oily precipitation. The ship’s cannon was
launched through the air and crashed down more or less intact three
kilometres away on the Dartmouth side near Albro Lake, while her
anchor went the other direction, landing even further away on the
far side of the Halifax Peninsula beyond the Northwest Arm.
The
Stella Maris
and her poor crew were catapulted
into the air and crashed down near Pier 6. All who had been aboard
were killed.

   
The
Highflyer
and
Niobe
suffered serious damage but immediately sent crews ashore
to help fight fires and treat victims of the debacle. At the sugar
refinery wharf, longshoremen were unloading a ship named the
Picton
when the shock wave slammed into them, killing most,
shredding their clothing and blackening their bodies with the
oil-laden rain. Ships all around the harbour sustained damage.
The
Imo
was shoved aground near Tuft’s Cove in
Dartmouth. Amazingly, there were survivors aboard, including the
helmsman and the ship’s dog, who refused to leave and howled long
after the disaster.

In the Path of the Shock
Wave

A hundred kilometres away in Truro
people heard the blast. Plates were rattled in Charlottetown,
P.E.I., and houses shook in Sydney, 3B20 kilometres away. A
mushroom cloud, not dissimilar to a nuclear blast, vaulted three
kilometres up into the sky. Some say the blast momentarily swept
clean to the bottom of the harbour, making the harbour floor
visible. Rocks were ripped from the bottom and shot up into the
sky, only to fall back to earth in what seemed like a deadly meteor
shower. The explosion set in motion a wall of water measuring at
least four and a half metres high. It crashed up onto the shores of
Halifax and swept up the hill of the North End of the city. On its
way, it tore up piers and pilings, smashing tugs and small boats,
depositing them on the lower streets. As the water drained back
toward the harbour, it carried hundreds of unwary victims to a
watery grave.

   
Citadel Hill acted as a barrier to buffer the effect of the
explosion and somewhat protected the well-to-do families living in
the South End of Halifax. But the working-class North End, the
Richmond area in particular, had no such protection. Very few
houses were left standing. Entire families were killed, some
trapped in collapsing houses, others caught in the raging fires
that ensued as stoves burning coal or oil tumbled over. All around
the city, people were blinded or otherwise injured by flying glass
as windows shattered.

   
The North End railway yards were in the direct path of the
shock wave. Railroad engines were picked up like toys and tossed.
Rails were ripped up and the steel bent into odd and fantastic
shapes. The railway station had a glass roof which collapsed onto
passengers waiting below.

   
The collateral damage of the event would take weeks, months
and in some cases years to repair. Electric and phone lines were
down. Gas was cut off from the North End to prevent further fires
and explosions. A huge voluðme of natural gas was lost when the
enormous holding tank near the South End of town had massive metal
plates sheared off. Miraculously, the vapour did not ignite, but
rose upward into the atmosphere, sparing most of the South End from
a fate similar to that of the North. The sugar refinery near the
Narrows, however, was decimated, collapsing on its employees or
trapping them in the fire, as “syrup-soaked timbers” were
torched.

“Dartmouth in Ruins”

Miracles of survival abound in the midst of this horror.
Two ferries were making the crossing at the time of the blast and,
while some passengers were injured by flying glass, no one was
killed. Dorothy Chisholm was on the ferry, making her way from
Dartmouth to work at the Royal Bank in Halifax that morning. She
remembers first seeing the fire on the
Mont Blanc
and
then feeling the blast, but the ferry apparently kept right on its
way to Halifax. She reported for work but was told to go home, and
on the way back, observed fires throughout the North End. Joan
Payzant, in
Like a Weaver’s
Shuttle
, logs an account of
great understatement by one ferry worker, Charles Pearce, who
entered the following into his diary:

Dec. 6: Weather Fine

Mr.
W. Pearce, Machinist on
Chebucto
until the
Great Explosion, then went home to fasten up windows and
doors.

Frank Green – Extra help on
Chebucto
until 9 a.m.
went home badly hurt by the explosion.

Ferry steamers kept running all
night. Ferry Boats and property badly damaged.

City of Dartmouth in ruins.
Everybody boarding up windows and doors.