The Great Halifax Explosion Read online

  While Highflyer and her crew were being cheered by crowds on both sides of Halifax Harbour from the moment she was sighted, Mont-Blanc slipped out of Gravesend Bay as quietly as she could, under cover of darkness, to make her perilous trek up the East Coast. If all went well, Mont-Blanc’s captain and crew would be received in Halifax in complete silence, leave Halifax as anonymously as they had arrived, and repeat that reception in Bordeaux three weeks later.

  Their plans went awry from the start. A few hours out of Brooklyn, a wicked snowstorm off the Maine coast brought heavy winds and high waves. Nothing unusual by the standards of the North Atlantic, but it was enough to send the crew repeatedly belowdeck to make sure the barrels and boxes of high explosives were not shifting, toppling over, or colliding with one another. The storm also forced Captain Le Médec to run closer to the coast. Reducing one risk, however, increased another: the shallower coastline was more likely to be patrolled by German U-boats, which often left mines in front of major ports for Allied ships to find. The crew’s collective paranoia was well supported by the facts.

  For four harrowing days, the floating powder keg bobbed up the Eastern seaboard, with the anxious crew scanning the horizon for U-boats and Halifax Harbour’s 158-year-old Sambro Island Lighthouse, oldest in the Americas. On Wednesday, December 5, it finally came into view, promising an end to the rough seas and the fear of shifting cargo.

  When Captain Le Médec slowly turned Mont-Blanc toward Halifax Harbour, the weary crew was rewarded with a view of one of the world’s prettiest ports. The harbor opens like a funnel to the sea, with almost no development on the outer edges of either side—just a thick cover of pine trees on gentle slopes. After Mont-Blanc entered the calm waters, she sailed to McNab’s Island in the middle of the channel. If all went well, Mont-Blanc would be permitted to continue the remaining 10 miles past George’s Island, then through the neck of the harbor, known as the Narrows—a mere 1,000 feet across—followed by the wide expanse of Bedford Basin at the end, which measured almost 3 miles in diameter, where Mont-Blanc would anchor to refuel and wait for the next convoy to leave for Europe, her safety assured until she headed out again.

  But when Captain Le Médec checked in at McNab’s Island, he saw a line of steel buoys, each about four feet in diameter, spanning from McNab’s Island to the shore. Their path was blocked.

  While the Mont-Blanc’s crewmen basked in the apparent conclusion of their nerve-fraying trip up the East Coast, their destination port hummed with a confidence it hadn’t felt since its glory days had ended a half century ago.

  The Great War had multiplied Halifax’s shipping eightfold, fueling unprecedented wealth and status as North America’s most important port. When men, munitions, or medical supplies were going from North America to Europe, they were probably passing through Halifax. That was good news for its fourteen harbor pilots, who boarded the bigger ships to guide them in and out of the harbor safely. At a time when the average Canadian made about $70 a month, a harbor pilot could earn an astounding $1,000. Nova Scotia native Francis Mackey, forty-five, a short, thick, bald man known for his natty attire and precisely groomed mustache, was one of the fortunate harbor pilots, and among the best. In his twenty-four years piloting ships in Halifax Harbour, he could still boast a spotless record, with nary an accident against his name.

  When they said Mackey “knew every rock and bend of land around the harbor,” he replied, “Well, some of the pebbles I might not know.” Captain Le Médec had never been to Halifax before, so he was lucky to get an experienced pilot like Francis Mackey on board Mont-Blanc that day.

  With Halifax Harbour’s traffic expanding exponentially, the captains and harbor pilots had grown increasingly lax about nautical conventions and communications. This was a particular problem for the harbor’s chief examining officer (CXO), F. Evan Wyatt. Noticing the disorder and confusion among the sea captains growing daily, Wyatt wrote to his superiors, “It is not possible to regulate the traffic in the harbor, and it is submitted that I cannot in this regard accept the responsibility for any accident occurring.”

  But Wyatt’s commanders apparently weren’t worried about Halifax Harbour’s rush-hour traffic. Winning a war required accepting risks, after all. Wyatt’s warnings went unheeded.

  Back at McNab’s Island, Captain Le Médec learned those steel buoys spanning the harbor were holding up a metal gate that ran from McNab’s Island to the western shore, and that was anchored to the harbor floor by three-ton concrete weights. They had installed the gate to keep the U-boats out, lest the submarines sneak in and decimate a dozen sitting ducks, or leave mines behind for all the rest. Just a couple nautical miles beyond that first gate, the authorities had stretched another fence from George’s Island to both shores, just to be sure. They worked: not one U-boat had yet made a strike inside McNab’s Island.

  Mont-Blanc reached McNab’s Island just a few minutes after Wyatt had decided to pull both gates across the channel that day at 4:30 p.m. Captain Le Médec, his crew, and Harbour Pilot Mackey would have to spend a sleepless night atop their floating bomb, exposed to any U-boat that was bold enough to come so close and lucky enough to stumble upon one of the most dangerous and defenseless ships the Allies had ever commissioned.

  While Mont-Blanc was anxious to get inside Halifax Harbour, the Norwegian ship Imo was just as eager to get out and go in the opposite direction to New York. There it would load relief supplies intended to alleviate the desperate situation of the civilians in German-occupied Belgium.

  Imo’s captain, Haakon From, forty-seven, was an experienced skipper who had already sailed Imo into Halifax twice without incident. Usually self-possessed, he also had a violent temper that could erupt at odd times. Captain From’s latest assignment, however, looked simple—until the coal he had ordered for the trip arrived late, leaving his ship on the wrong side of the harbor when CXO Wyatt ordered the gates closed for the day.

  No one on shore knew anything about the concerns of Captain Le Médec, Captain From, or Chief Examining Officer F. Evan Wyatt, and they might not have cared. They were busy making money and having a good time.

  Halifax’s population had grown from 47,000 in 1910 to an estimated 60,000 during wartime, which that didn’t include the thousands of transient sailors, soldiers, and workers passing through—not to mention the bootleggers and prostitutes who arrived from all over Canada to support the troops, in their way. They seemed to work with impunity throughout downtown, with taxi drivers often serving as rum runners.

  A beautiful port city, Halifax’s Victorian homes and sloping terrain resembled a miniature San Francisco, while its population, dominated by English, Irish, a stew of immigrants, and generations of sailors, suggested a smaller Boston. The town had been founded at the midpoint of the 18-mile-long harbor and then expanded south, where wealthy residents like the Cunards of cruise-line fame built their mansions. Then the town expanded up the coastline, where the working class in the North End neighborhood of Richmond earned solid livings in the dockyards, railyards, and factories that framed their district.

  Few in Richmond were doing better than the Orrs, who lived, worked, studied, and prayed in the middle of the growing neighborhood. Samuel Orr Jr. had founded Richmond Printing Company, which supported forty-plus employees, including his father and brother. Samuel Jr. and his wife, Annie, had recently moved into a handsome new home with their six children a few blocks from the printing plant; the Richmond School, which their children attended; and Grove Presbyterian, where they worshipped.

  Their oldest child, Barbara, fourteen, helped raise her five siblings while still finding time for dancing and ice skating. Ian Orr, just two years younger, spent so much time studying the warships in the harbor that his parents gave him books on modern ships and a pair of binoculars to watch them from their bay window.

  “You’d be of great value to German spies, Ian,” their father joked. “You must know more about these convoys than any of them.”

  Like mos
t Haligonians, the Orrs saw the war only from a distance, largely unaware of the carnage occurring daily in the trenches. Not so Joseph Ernest Barss, who had returned from the Western Front a changed man. The great-grandson of Canada’s greatest privateer, Joseph Barss Jr., who had captured, burned, or sunk dozens of American ships in the War of 1812, Ernest had inherited more than a little anti-American sentiment. But in 1917 that was true of most Canadians, who resented the Americans’ persistent threats to annex their land from the time the United States was born to as recently as 1911.

  Standing five-eight, Barss had starred on the baseball, football, and hockey teams of his hometown Acadia University, graduating cum laude in 1912. Three years later, when he learned Germans had gassed a famed Canadian unit, he signed up to fight. A year later, a German shell found Barss, launching him into something hard and knocking him out. The blast seriously injured his back and his foot, and left him with shell shock, insomnia, nervousness, and hand tremors, but he knew he had beaten the odds just by surviving. Back in Nova Scotia, Barss forced himself to relearn to walk with a cane, a very painful process, to prove the doctors who said he’d never walk normally again wrong. But beyond recovering, he still didn’t know what he wanted to do with his life. At twenty-five, with no money and shaky health—in an era when forty-seven was the average life span—he felt time was slipping away.

  That Wednesday night Haligonians were rewarded with a warm, calm, and dark evening, due partly to the strictly enforced blackout regulations, which required the lights on Halifax’s streets, businesses, and homes to be turned off to prevent the Germans from identifying a target-rich environment. Instead of spending the beautiful night sitting behind drawn curtains, however, they took advantage by strolling the sidewalks, visiting the town’s many parks, and talking about the famed Ringling Brothers Circus, which had just arrived in town.

  In Richmond, the Orrs’s neighbors attended a special midweek event at Grove Presbyterian to celebrate paying off the construction loan to build the church. As of that night, the congregation owned its beloved building free and clear.

  Ernest Barss was still struggling with his health, his finances, and his future, but he was home from the Great War, and he was safe. He knew it could be worse.

  With fresh troops due to depart for Europe the next morning, Halifax buzzed with anxious energy. The darkness inspired many of the bolder sailors and soldiers to take their girlfriends and dates—hired and otherwise—to the Citadel’s sweeping “Garrison Hill,” which was so dark passersby walking below on Brunswick Street couldn’t detect couples having sex on the sloping grass just a hundred feet away.

  Nineteen-year-old Ethel Mitchell, a budding pianist who had been studying for the Halifax Conservatory of Music entrance exams, took a break to get ready for a big night out. She was one of five lucky young ladies to be invited to meet five officers from the celebrated HMS Highflyer at a local home, a common practice in Halifax during the war. Mitchell wore her finest: a rose-pink evening dress and matching satin slippers.

  The night was such a success that after dinner the officers invited Ethel and her friends aboard Highflyer—a clear violation of rules prohibiting civilians on board during wartime. The women, sworn to secrecy, were enjoying cookies and wine in the Captain’s Quarters when a small dance party kicked up, and they joined in.

  In the wee hours, Highflyer’s Lieutenant Commander Percy Ingram escorted Miss Mitchell to the door of her parents’ home, where they said good night. After climbing the stairs to her room, happily spent, the normally fastidious Ethel made an exception that night and draped her best dress over a chair, crawled into bed, and fell asleep with her fluffy white cat, Buttons, nestled at her feet.

  The next morning, Thursday, December 6, Captain Le Médec and his crew woke early to make sure Mont-Blanc would be one of the first ships to slip into the safety of Halifax Harbour. At the other end of the harbor, in Bedford Basin, Captain From and his crew did the same, to ensure the Imo would be the first to leave Halifax Harbour for the open sea.

  PART II

  O CANADA

  Chapter 3

  “Why Aren’t We Americans?”

  1497–1865

  Halifax came to life as a military base, and quickly made itself invaluable by supplying just about everything nations needed to wage war.

  Europeans first set foot on what is now Nova Scotia in 1497, and soon recognized the land’s strategic importance. Nova Scotia was not only the gateway to the St. Lawrence River, which provides access to present day Montreal, Toronto, Detroit, Chicago, and Duluth, as well as the vast lands west, but it was also the last stop for European ships sailing to New England. Thus, when the French set up a base called Louisbourg on Nova Scotia’s northern island of Cape Breton in 1713, New Englanders feared the French would cut the colonists’ shipping lifeline with England. At the colonists’ urging, England countered by appointing Edward Cornwallis the first Governor of Nova Scotia, Latin for “New Scotland,” on June 21, 1749. The first structure Cornwallis built was a humble log palisade, right by the Narrows, but daunting fortresses would follow.

  Cornwallis picked his spot very well. Halifax is the world’s second-biggest natural harbor, behind only Sydney, Australia, and is almost ideally formed. The late Halifax lawyer and writer Donald Kerr described the shape of the harbor as that of a wine bottle standing upright on a table with a basketball balanced on top. In Kerr’s model, the table represents the Atlantic Ocean, and the fat part of the bottle is the body of Halifax Harbour, 5 miles long and a 1 wide, with the city of Halifax on the west side and Dartmouth on the east. The neck of the bottle is the Narrows, which runs 1.5 miles long but a mere 1,000 feet across. Once a ship gets beyond the Narrows, she is rewarded with the vast expanse of Bedford Basin, the basketball in Kerr’s model, which stretches 2.5 miles by 3.5 miles, a naturally sheltered deepwater anchorage—so big and safe that entire fleets of Allied warships gathered there during both world wars.

  Halifax Harbour is sheltered from wind by granite slopes covered by trees and later homes, factories, and offices, and the water almost never freezes. Cornwallis also found Halifax Harbour very easy to defend against intruders, who have to travel 18 miles from Chebucto Head (satisfyingly pronounced “She-BUCK-toe,” a bastardized version of the native Mi’kmaq term for “big harbor”), which marks the entrance from the North Atlantic. The British later built forts at Chebucto Head and York Redoubt, four more on McNab’s Island alone, plus more garrisons on Fort Ogilvie, George’s Island, Citadel Hill, and Fort Needham, which sits near the top of the Richmond neighborhood, directly above the Narrows. The odds of running that gauntlet are so slim that no invading ship has ever attempted it.

  Halifax’s climate is much more temperate than most would guess. The city sits at 44.69 degrees latitude, which places it south of Grenoble, France; Bangor, Maine; Champlain, New York; Minneapolis, Minnesota; and the entire states of North Dakota and Washington. Halifax’s winters are typically not as cold as those at the same latitude, thanks to the Atlantic’s warming effect.

  Less than a month after founding the town, Cornwallis granted a license for the town’s first bar, predating its first churches by a year, and that first bar, the Split Crow, is still thriving today. Halifax’s identity quickly fell into place: a military base that likes its beer, with more pubs per capita than any city in Canada. Of course, the English weren’t paying their men in Halifax to drink but to defeat the French up the coast.

  After a twenty-two-year-old lieutenant colonel named George Washington ambushed a thirty-five-man French patrol near present-day Pittsburgh in 1754, the French and Indian War was under way, a conflict that would shape the future of the continent. Halifax cemented its central role in the New World on a moonless night in July 1758, when four hundred ships sheltered in Halifax Harbour sailed up the coast and mounted a surprise attack on the French in Louisbourg. The English quickly boarded France’s meager fleet of five ships, burning one and capturing another, then brought it ba
ck to Halifax with her crew intact. The British owned the gateway to the continent, and Halifax became its most patriotic city.

  While young Halifax was becoming one of Great Britain’s most important ports, Boston was already a full-fledged international capital.

  Settled by Puritans in 1630, it quickly became New England’s economic, political, and intellectual hub, starting with the nation’s first university, Harvard, which opened in Boston’s sixth year. All that power came to bear on December 16, 1773, when Boston’s “Sons of Liberty” protested “taxation without representation” by dressing like Mohawks, dumping dozens of boxes of tea—which were lined with lead to keep it dry, and weighed 300 pounds each—and destroying $1.5 million of East India Company property. The Tea Party erased any doubt that Boston was the center of colonial resistance.

  After the American Revolution sparked the continent’s first civil war, the newly minted Americans were not above abusing their neighbors who remained loyal to the Crown, often branding, tarring and feathering or simply killing United Empire Loyalists. Not surprisingly, some 60,000 United Empire Loyalists became refugees, with half of them heading north to what is now New Brunswick and Nova Scotia, often leaving their property behind for the Americans to take without compensation. In North America’s first civil war, the southern rebels won. The Nova Scotians’ misgivings about the American government started the day the United States was born.