The Great Halifax Explosion Page 4

  The United States had already gained most of its territory by buying, annexing, or fighting for land from the English, French, Spanish, Mexicans, and Russians. To Clark and his compatriots, weaned on Manifest Destiny, annexing Canada seemed like the next logical step—and to the Canadians, an entirely rational fear. New York Republican William M. Bennett, who opposed Reciprocity, sought to sabotage the bill by introducing a resolution asking President William Howard Taft’s administration to begin negotiating the annexation of Canada with Great Britain.

  Predictably, the congressman’s actions “roused the opponents of reciprocity in and out of [Canada’s] Parliament to the highest pitch of excitement they have yet reached,” the Washington Post reported. The Canadian Conservatives who opposed Reciprocity shrewdly reproduced the American politicians’ speeches in thousands of pamphlets and distributed them across the country, which had exactly the effect the Conservatives had hoped for: alerting Canadians to the American threat.

  The beneficiary of this turmoil was Halifax’s own Robert Borden, who hoped to unseat Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier in the 1911 election. Borden warned that Reciprocity would “Americanize” Canada, even claiming that Taft’s administration had a secret plan to annex the country.

  “It is beyond doubt,” Borden said in a widely published speech, “that the leading public men of the United States, its leading press, and the mass of its people believe annexation of the Dominion [of Canada] to be the ultimate, inevitable, and desirable result of this proposition, and for that reason support it.”

  Hyperbolic, to be sure, but the Americans had provided him with all the ammunition he needed.

  Reciprocity was finished off by none other than the Nobel Prize–winning British poet and novelist Rudyard Kipling, much loved on both sides of the border, who’d been asked by his publishing friend Max Aitken to write something for the Montreal Star about the upcoming vote. On September 7, 1911, two weeks before the election, Aitken published Kipling’s comments.

  “It is her own soul that Canada risks today,” Kipling wrote. “Once that soul is pawned for any consideration, Canada must inevitably conform to the commercial, legal, financial, social and ethical standards which will be imposed on her by the sheer admitted weight of the United States.” Kipling’s essay ran in every English-language newspaper in Canada.

  On September 21, 1911, the Reciprocity agreement, Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier, and the Liberal government all went down in flames. In his third try, Halifax’s Robert Borden became the nation’s new prime minister. All this raised a lot of questions while providing at least one clear outcome: in 1911, many Canadians, including the new premier, concluded they should not count on the American government in a crisis. But Nova Scotia, at least, felt safer with its native son in power.

  While Halifax was dropping out of the list of Canada’s ten biggest towns, Boston was approaching its fourth century as one of North America’s most important cities—and one of only three U.S. cities to appear in the top seven of every census since 1790, along with New York and Philadelphia. And the best, it seemed, was yet to come.

  In 1901, Boston had 600,000 residents and a new ball club, the Red Sox. By 1912 Boston had grown to 700,000, tying St. Louis as the nation’s fifth biggest city, with a thriving economy. When Red Sox owner John I. Taylor went looking for an architect to design a new ballpark for his team in 1911, he picked James Earnest McLaughlin, a thirty-seven-year-old Halifax native who had risen to become one of Boston’s leading architects. McLaughlin didn’t need to dazzle Red Sox fans with fancy features, but he did give them one architectural advancement: pedestrian ramps for fans to exit the grandstands. Many of McLaughlin’s childhood friends from Halifax would try out McLaughlin’s ramps for themselves during their visits to Boston, the closest big city to Halifax, to cheer for their adopted major league team.

  Booming Boston could afford luxuries like Fenway Park and “America’s First Subway,” which celebrated its inaugural run in 1897, but Halifax was hustling just to get back in the game with publicly funded projects to upgrade the docks and rail service. Without a war to pay for its projects, Halifax relied on taxes, tourism, and shipping. In the homegrown cruise industry, the White Star Line raced to catch up to Cunard, with tragic consequences. In 1873 White Star’s flagship, Atlantic, crashed into the coast off Halifax, killing 562, the world’s worst civilian maritime disaster at the time, followed by the line’s Naronic going down in 1893 and Republic in 1909. After J. P. Morgan bought White Star from the Ismays in 1902, the company came out swinging with three gleaming, new state-of-the-art ships: Olympic, to be launched in 1911, borrowing the name of the popular new athletic event; Titanic in 1912; and Britannic in 1914—each of them designed to set a new standard for the largest and most luxurious ships ever built.

  Titanic left Southampton, England, on April 10, 1912, under the command of Captain Edward J. Smith. He had years of experience on the seas, but with boats half the size of the behemoth he had taken over. Four days later Titanic scraped past an iceberg on her starboard side, gouging a hole in her hull below the waterline. Four hundred miles off the coast of Newfoundland, the grand ship started sinking. To keep the passengers calm, a small band of musicians kept playing instead of seeking safety for themselves. When the great ship finally cracked in half and dropped beneath the Atlantic’s freezing waters on April 15, 1912, at 2:20 a.m., she took 1,503 victims with her, including most of the crew, the captain, and the musicians.

  Harold Cottam, the radio operator on Carpathia, a Cunard ship also heading to New York, was scheduled to end his shift at midnight. But he had kept working at his desk until 12:20 or so, and had just started taking off his boots at 12:25 a.m. when he received Titanic’s plea for help. Thanks to him, help was coming.

  Most accounts of Titanic end with the rescue of the passengers and the court cases that followed, but the dangerous, difficult, and grisly tasks of recovering the floating bodies, identifying, and burying them fell to the Haligonians. The search-and-recovery missions were conducted out of Halifax, starting with Mackay-Bennett, a ship built to lay and repair cable under the sea. It went out to find the victims with a chaplain to administer last rights and enough embalming fluid, coffins, and canvas bags for a hundred victims, plus weights to bury about seventy bodies at sea.

  It took Mackay-Bennett four days to reach the field of debris floating in the sea. The crew saw chairs, tables, and decomposing bodies bobbing in the frigid waters “as far as the eye could see,” one crewman said. Many bodies had been attacked by birds and fish; some victims had clearly been wounded or killed by long falls during Titanic’s descent into the ocean. The Mackay-Bennett sent crewmen out in smaller skiffs to recover the bodies.

  The Mackay-Bennett crew soon realized they had greatly underestimated the number of victims they might find, so Captain Frederick H. Larnder ordered his men to embalm first-class victims on deck and perform burials at sea for second- and third-class casualties. When colleagues on shore sent out another ship with more supplies, including embalming fluid, the crew was able to bring the rest of the victims back to Halifax.

  In all, the Mackay-Bennett retrieved 306 bodies, while two other ships brought back 22 more; 116 were buried at sea. The crew did not attempt to identify the victims, but one casualty they would never forget: a nineteen-month-old boy floating face-up, his arms folded across his chest.

  “I honestly hope I shall never have to come on another expedition like this,” crewman Francis Dyke said. “The doctor and I are sleeping in the middle of fourteen coffins.”

  St. John’s, Newfoundland, is closer to the Titanic site than Halifax, but thanks to Canada’s transcontinental railway, created by Halifax’s Sandford Fleming, Halifax’s North Street Station could access the rest of the continent within two days. Because time was of the essence when dealing with decomposing bodies, Halifax became the recovery’s base of operations. After thirteen days at sea, the Mackay-Bennett approached Halifax on April 30, 1912, eighteen days af
ter Titanic went down. The announcement went out: “The death ship will arrive at noon.” When Mackay-Bennett came into view, church bells rang.

  To handle the sheer volume of corpses, a Halifax doctor named John Henry Barnstead devised the first system for identifying, numbering, and cataloguing mass casualties. He also pioneered the use of mortuary bags to hold the body, unattached body parts, and the victim’s clothing and effects for later identification, and the use of toe tags, which listed the victim’s name and any descriptive information rescuers could provide.

  Of the first-class deceased, fifty-nine would be sent to their homes at their family’s request. Most second-class passengers and almost all third-class passengers were interred in Halifax. The crew, haunted by all they had seen, felt compelled to carry the unnamed infant boy to his grave themselves, and paid for his granite tombstone. The Halifax police chief, who had been instructed to burn all the victims’ clothes to avoid disease and memorabilia mongers, completed the task with one exception: he couldn’t bring himself to destroy the baby’s shoes, which he kept in the bottom drawer of his desk for years.

  The missing included Halifax’s own beloved George Wright. Thanks to his revised will, his fortune helped Halifax build a new YMCA downtown, and supported a group that would help Canadian women secure the vote in 1918.

  They stored the bodies on the ice at the curling rink, then performed two dozen funerals a day for a week. Forty undertakers buried 148 victims in three cemeteries: 119 in Fairview Cemetery, for Protestants; 19 in the Catholic cemetery, where the victims were identified by rosaries or crucifixes; and 10 in the Jewish cemetery, all male, eight identified as Jewish based on circumcision, the other two because their names “sounded Jewish,” although it was later discovered that one was Anglican and the other was Catholic.

  The Fairview Cemetery plots are all marked by simple, elegant cubes of black granite, set on a small slope. They are arranged in three graceful arcs, although the third line has only a few headstones because it was assumed many more victims would eventually be found, though none were. The number on each gravestone indicates the order in which the bodies were found, and they are arranged not alphabetically but in the order they were removed from the curling rink. Their names are chiseled on the front cube faces, all legacies of Dr. Barnstead’s carefully detailed work.

  The mystery of the nineteen-month-old boy, however, was not solved until 2009. With the help of the pair of baby shoes the police chief had passed down to his relatives, it was determined that he was Sidney Leslie Goodwin. Almost a century after he was born on September 9, 1910, Sidney had his name engraved on his tombstone.

  No city was touched by Titanic’s sinking more than Halifax, whose Maritime Museum of the Atlantic holds the world’s largest collection of Titanic artifacts, and whose cemeteries hold the most victims. What the people of Halifax, from the recovery crews to the wagon drivers, storage workers, coroners, undertakers, and clergy performing dozens of funerals every day, could not know in 1912, was that this effort was a mere rehearsal for a much bigger task ahead.

  PART III

  THE GREAT WAR

  Chapter 5

  As Near to Hell

  Right when Halifax was catching up with the rest of the world, a century of peace in Europe and Canada would be shattered on a single day thousands of miles from Halifax. On June 28, 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Duchess Sophie, were celebrating their fourteenth wedding anniversary in Sarajevo. But before they arrived, a small secret society that called itself the Black Hand, outraged by Austria’s annexation of Bosnia, was plotting to assassinate the Archduke. As the Archduke and the Duchess rode in the back of a convertible car, a nineteen-year-old man named Gavrilo Princip shot the Archduke and accidentally hit the Duchess as well. The Archduke bravely declared “It is nothing!” but he and his wife both died from their wounds.

  In a tinderbox of a continent, which had been preparing for war for a decade, this tiny spark was enough to ignite the world leaders’ pent-up desire for war. On July 24, 1914, Austria-Hungary declared war on Serbia, and the fire of war quickly spread across Europe. While the Central Powers of Germany, Austria-Hungary, and the Ottoman Empire were the primary catalysts of the war, the Allied powers were just as eager to fight back, especially the British and their colonies, which sent almost 9 million men into battle.

  No Canadian city supported the war more thoroughly than Halifax. Whenever a regiment of Bluenosers boarded the transport ships in Halifax, the entire city went to the waterfront to cheer them as they waved from their ships.

  Britain’s enthusiasm for the war was shared by virtually every major power except one: the United States, which seemed determined to stay out of Europe’s wars—an option the Dominion of Canada, still under British rule, didn’t have. In the U.S., antiwar sentiment swept the nation from President Woodrow Wilson on down.

  As is almost always the case when a major conflict breaks out, the politicians, generals, and soldiers going to war were not only convinced that their side would win but that it would do so easily and quickly—and that was the problem. One side had to be wrong, and it turned out both were. Even five months into the conflict, few believed they would still be fighting a year later. When the war’s first Christmas approached in 1914, Pope Benedict XV asked for a one-day truce. The leaders refused, but on Christmas Eve, German and British troops sang Christmas carols to each other from their trenches. The next day, some brave German soldiers climbed out of their holes and walked across no-man’s-land, unarmed, announcing “Merry Christmas!” in English and French. Seeing that the Germans were unarmed, the Allied soldiers also emerged, and they were soon exchanging cigarettes and food, singing carols, and playing a friendly game of soccer.

  The next day they climbed back into their trenches and resumed killing each other. Before the war’s first New Year, the positions of both sides were essentially fixed, forming a line of trenches 475 miles long, stretching from Belgium to Switzerland, that barely wiggled for almost four years. With so little movement along the line, transportation took a backseat to munitions, which the Great War consumed like no other. In just one thirty-five-minute segment of the battle at Neuve-Chapelle in northeastern France in March 1915, the British army fired more shells than it had during the entire Boer War, which lasted some thirty-two months. By May of 1915, just two months later, Britain had burned through its shell supply so quickly that it had to restrict its guns to just four shells a day, a shortage that threatened to cost them the war in its first year.

  To prevent this disastrous outcome, the Allies made a bold move for the era: employing women in munitions factories. France alone recruited almost half a million women to make shells so that the men could fight in the fields, fully armed. Soon, Great Britain was manufacturing 50 million shells a year, and France even more, to the Germans’ 36 million. While German U-boats had closed the gap on the seas, the Allies’ factory women prevented them from being overpowered in the fields.

  They called it the Great War because it was far bigger than any war the world had seen, and there was not yet any need to qualify which world war was being referring to. It was the first major conflict to make effective use of airplanes, tanks (originally called landships), machine guns, razor wire, flamethrowers, gas warfare, and submarines—most famously the German U-boats, whose effectiveness initially surprised even the Germans, and allowed them to hold off the Allies despite falling behind in the munitions race.

  The Great War didn’t invent high explosives, but it expanded their use to volumes no one could have imagined in 1914. Before the Great War, military power was measured in horses, ships, and soldiers. Afterward, it was calculated by the capacity to bomb the enemy—and the arms race was on.

  While the science of warfare was advancing by leaps and bounds, medical science was struggling to catch up. It was only at the turn of the century that doctors had come around to the consensus that germs were real, contagi
ous, and had to be countered by vigorous hand washing between operations. When Dr. Oliver Wendell Holmes Sr., father of the Supreme Court Justice, first promoted the practice in two papers published in the mid-nineteenth century, the more established Charles D. Meigs fired back that washing hands was unnecessary because doctors were gentlemen, and “gentlemen’s hands are clean.”

  Fortunately, Dr. Holmes’s position found proponents overseas, where Scottish doctor Joseph Lister picked up on Louis Pasteur’s advances in microbiology to champion antiseptic surgery, using carbonic acid to clean surgeons’ hands and tools. When survival rates soared, he worked to overcome resistance from doctors like Charles D. Meigs to spread the practice.

  One of Lister’s protégés, Dr. Joseph Lawrence, was so impressed by his mentor that, after Lawrence perfected his cure for halitosis, he named it after the pioneering doctor: Listerine. A native Nova Scotian named John Stewart studied under Lister in Edinburgh, where the legendary doctor took a shine to him before Stewart returned to Nova Scotia as an apostle of antiseptic surgery. He rose to become the dean of Dalhousie University’s medical school and president of the Canadian Medical Association, working tirelessly to teach others what he’d learned from Dr. Lister.

  Despite the essential advances promoted by Pasteur, Lister, and Stewart, Sir Alexander Fleming didn’t discover penicillin, for which he won the Nobel Prize, until 1928, and it wasn’t mass produced for two more decades. Halifax was fortunate to have Stewart and his students in town, but the science of healing still lagged behind the practice of killing.

  The Great War also popularized the tactic of trench warfare, which dramatically increased the death rate. A strategy emphasizing defense over offense, trench warfare was highly effective in preventing the advancing force from getting very far very fast, which created a stubborn stalemate, costing thousands upon thousands of lives just to gain small patches of land.