Our Halifax Connection
We spent the last few days of our trip in Halifax which is where my sister started her vacation in the Maritimes about 7 weeks ago. In spite of the somewhat gloomy day, there were some sites here we felt compelled to see because our family has a strong connection to Halifax.
Our maternal grandparents arrived in Canada from England in 1914 when our grandfather was transferred from the British Navy to the Canadian Navy. Our mother was born in December, 1916, and they made their home there until she was 6 years old when he was transferred to Victoria.
One of the most significant and tragic events in the history of Halifax is the explosion which occurred here on December 6th, 1917, 5 days before our mother's first birthday. I remember Grandma telling me when I was little how the explosion blew out the windows in their home and shards of glass fell onto Mom's crib which was near the chimney. Luckily, the our family all survived. Before I go into where we went today, I thought it would be good to go over the details of that event. The following description was put together from several websites including the Canadian Encyclopedia and the Vimy Foundation.
On the morning of that fateful day, two ships collided in the city's harbour. One, the Mont Blanc, was a French munitions ship loaded with explosives bound for the battlefields of WWI which was entering . The other was a Norwegian-registered relief ship, the SS Imo, delivering food to war-ravished Belgium. What followed was one of the largest human-made explosions prior to the detonation of the first atomic bombs in 1945. The north end of Halifax, particularly the neighbourhood of Richmond, was wiped out by the blast and subsequent tsunami. Nearly 2,000 people died, another 9,000 were maimed or blinded, and more than 25,000 were left without adequate shelter.
The Imo was departing that foggy morning south through the Narrows, the harbour's tightest section, moving on the eastern, Dartmouth side of the channel instead of the Halifax side to the west, where outgoing vessels normally travelled. The Imo's path required incoming ships to pass to its right or starboard side, rather than to its left or port side, which was customary. The Imo had an experienced, local harbour pilot on board, William Hayes, who knew the harbour's navigation rules. However, earlier encounters that morning with two inbound vessels - both of which Imo had passed starboard-to-starboard - resulted in the unusual position that the Imo occupied, too far to the east and on the wrong side of the Narrows. Francis Mackey, Mont-Blanc's pilot, was guiding the ship inbound on the Dartmouth-side of the Narrows, when he encountered the Imo heading straight towards him. Mackey would later maintain that the Imo was moving at an unsafe speed and also that incoming ships had the right-of-way over outgoing vessels. Regardless of the accuracy of those claims, what is certain is that the Imo was sailing too far to the east in what should have been Mont-Blanc's path.
The two ships collided at the entrance to the Narrows and the Imo’s bow tore a hole in the Mont Blanc. Few of those on shore knew of the Mont Blanc’s explosive cargo; it carried 5.85 million pounds of explosives, including picric acid, TNT, gun cotton, and benzol. When the loose grains of picric acid were set alight by the crushing force of the Imo’s bow, dense fumes from the barrels of benzol on deck caught fire and led the flames directly back to the barrels. In those few seconds, the fate of the ship, and Halifax, were sealed. Expecting an explosion at any moment, the Mont Blanc’s crew abandoned ship, and rowed frantically for shore, and for over twenty minutes the ship was adrift in the Narrows. It eventually came to rest against Pier 6 in the industrial neighbourhood of Richmond, The spectacle attracted the attention of people on shore, including children on their way to school, and drew many residents to their windows and others towards the ship itself. Few understood the danger, except for a handful of harbour and naval officials and the ships' two pilots. At 9:04:35 a.m. the Mont Blanc exploded in a massive fireball. The blast flattened buildings instantaneously and sent shards of glass through the air, slicing through whatever stood in their path and causing terrible injuries. The ship’s entire hull was hurled in the air, tumbling within the fireball, with most of it simply vapourizing. Fragments of the ship tore into the buildings and people in the Halifax Harbour and dockyards. The explosion also caused a large tsunami in the harbour, the resulting twenty-foot wave smashed into buildings, swept people out to sea and decimated the Mi’Kmaq community in Tufts Cove. More than 2.5 square km of Richmond were totally levelled, either by the blast, the tsunami, or the structure fires caused when buildings collapsed inward on lanterns, stoves and furnaces. Homes, offices, churches, factories, vessels (including the Mont-Blanc), the railway station and freight yards and hundreds of people in the immediate area were obliterated. Farther from the epicentre, Citadal Hill deflected shock waves away from the south and west ends of Halifax, where shattered windows and displaced doors were the predominant damage. On the waterfront though, the railway yards were destroyed, as were a series of large piers that once jutted into the harbour. Even larger stone or concrete buildings, such as the Richmond Printing Company, were reduced to rubble. Bewildered survivors, including those injured or in shock, wandered or crawled amid the wreckage, trying to make sense of what had happened. About 1,600 people died instantly, including hundreds of children. Roughly 400 more died from their injuries in the days that followed. The explosion and its flying debris decapitated some, took the limbs from others, and left many with burns, fractures and open wounds. There is one account of a girl who was running down a road to her home and the explosion blew her 1/2 km away - amazingly, she survived but only to return to her home to find it gone. Morgue records from 1918 show 1,631 known dead or missing, about a third of them under the age of 15. By 2004, the number of dead had been revised at 1,946. More than 1,500 buildings were destroyed and 12,000 damaged. Twenty-five thousand people were made homeless or lacked proper shelter after the explosion, a problem made worse by the winter blizzard that struck Halifax the next day. John Barnstead, the Registrar of Vital Statistics, was able to identify victims' bodies using clothing and personal items which was a method he had developed after the sinking of the Titanic. His system helped identify victims and is still in use today.
While I had visited the Naval Museum here with our mother in the early 90s as she wanted to see the ships her father had been on and my sister had visited several cemeteries here, there were three places we wanted to see: the Halifax Explosion Memorial Bell Tower, the Mont Blanc Anchor Site, and the Canadian Immigration Museum.
Our first stop was the Memorial Bell Tower which can be found in Fort Needham Park.
Our final stop of the day was the Canadian Immigration Museum which was excellent. It details the various stages of immigration during Canada's history from the 1600s to the present day. There were testimonials from people who had come to Canada as immigrants by choice and from refugees fleeing conditions in their countries of origin. It also gave a good historical account of how Canada's immigration laws have changed and evolved over the last couple of hundred years. Given that both sets of our grandparents (maternal and paternal) had been immigrants to Canada in the early 1900s, it seemed a fitting way to spend the last afternoon of our vacation.
Comments
Post a Comment