On 6 December 1917, the Mont Blanc, a French munitions ship
collided with the Imo, a Belgian relief ship in the narrow channel of
Halifax Harbour. The TNT and picric acid aboard the Mont Blanc caused
the worst death toll by an explosion in history: two thousand dead, ten thousand
injured and six thousand left homeless. The explosion had always fascinated me
as a child, as I had first read about it in the Guinness Book of World
Records in its Worst Accidents and Disasters in the World chart, yet,
oddly, never heard about it anywhere else. I didn't research the explosion until
prior to my first visit to Halifax ten years ago, and I made it a priority to
visit the Halifax Explosion Memorial Bell Tower and to see the permanent
exhibit, entitled Halifax Wrecked, at the Marine Museum of the Atlantic. I have
since read many books on the topic before I started writing book reviews in
2010. Curse of the Narrows: the Halifax Explosion, 1917 by Laura Mac
Donald ranks among the best of the explosion histories.
Mac Donald used her access to court documents, survivor testimonials, news
articles and public archive finds to create a chronological story from just
before the explosion to the inevitable court cases that followed it. She
profiled several families who were devastated by the explosion and created
real-life suspenseful narratives of horror. We followed family members as
they dug through their collapsed houses, looking for family members, their
children and babies, and finding only body parts and decapitated corpses. The
explosion flew people in all directions, and Mac Donald's descriptions of
corpses impaled on lampposts and literally faceless people walking
around dazed and confused will make you feel the magnitude of the sudden horror
that befell the city. That Mac Donald drew upon eyewitness accounts and strung
them together to create a respectful story means that what she was telling was
not a fabricated dramatization but a true story.
We followed several families, some almost wiped out by the disaster and
some who suffered only surface injuries. The Duggans, for example, lost
four households with the remaining members of three families living in one
house. Mac Donald fleshed out her biographies of those she profiled so the
reader got to know about those who perished as well as those who survived the
explosion. Billy Duggan was one of Canada's champion rowers and Ned Hanlan was
one of his predecessors. Mac Donald however unfortunately misspelled the
surname as Hanlon three times on a single page, which was a glaring
error to anyone from the Toronto area.
The blast, which occurred at the time of World War I, was not a totally
unexpected phenomenon. As long as ships were transporting munitions in and out
of Halifax Harbour, they were considered possible targets. Thus, in spite of the
collision which was witnessed by hundreds of people who lined
the harbour:
"But the first reaction to the devastation--even by those who watched the
Mont Blanc's barrels explode and crash onto the deck, who watched the
flames turn the sky strange colors--was to search for the German plane that had
dropped the first bomb on North American soil. Even the military was unsure of
the cause for the first hour, and sought to establish whether they were under
attack before sending their men out on rescue missions. The city was so
conditioned to believe that the Germans could strike Halifax that they did not
make the connection between the burning ship and the explosion."
The devastation flattened the city, and the accompanying photos do not
exaggerate. Houses were blown apart, stoves toppled and fires started. The city
was not only levelled but set ablaze. When rescue parties started the search for
survivors, they found:
"...Tilted, windowless, and doorless houses stared at them like
shell-shocked soldiers. Despite this introduction, Cox was still unprepared for
what he would see when his party rounded the hill. Richmond [the area of the
Halifax peninsula immediately across the harbour from the explosion] was gone.
And the detritus that replaced it no more resembled the neighborhood than a pile
of unraveled wool resembled a sweater."
Doctors and nurses came by train from the neighbouring provinces and
states, most notably Massachusetts. Any large building not blown apart was
converted into a hospital, and medical staff worked nonstop for days, literally
days, without a break. The damage caused to eyes took the greatest toll on
doctors' time. There were hundreds of witnesses standing inside on that December
day who watched the Mont Blanc and the Imo collide. The smoke
and fire had them all glued to the windows, and the explosion that followed blew
those windows into their eye sockets. Glass daggers pierced eyes, faces and cut
glass panes became flying guillotines. Doctors worked through the
endless lineups of people injured by flying glass. I read of buckets overflowing
with excised eyeballs, and of the horror of the volunteers when they were asked
to empty them. In many cases, however, no operations could be performed as
minuscule glass shards embedded themselved deep into the skin. Doctors advised
these patients to let nature take its course:
"Like many survivors, Lottie continued to remove pieces of glass and wood
from her face and neck for the rest of her life. It would start as a bump or a
black spot and slowly work its way to the surface, until it expelled
itself."
Confusion reigned for days as families searched hospitals and shelters for
loved ones:
"Displaced children proved to be a particular challenge for social workers
because they could neither register themselves nor provide much more than their
names and, if lucky, former addresses. Plus children were scattered all over the
city and, in some cases, the countryside without anyone to supervise
them."
Many of the cases will bring a tear to the eye. Fathers who were serving in
the war overseas came home to no one, as their entire families had perished. In
some cases, only a baby was the sole survivor, and when the authorities could
find no next of kin, not even a relative, the infant was adopted out while the
father was still serving in the war. Some fathers never saw their infant
children again:
"Others were haunted by missing children and continued to look for them for
the rest of their lives."
The end of the book deals with the court cases and appeals that followed.
Had the explosion occurred today, the cases and appeals would take years,
perhaps a decade, to resolve. A century ago due process was meted out at a far
more accelerated pace and even the appeals were resolved within a couple years.
The blame game provided an extremely interesting read, with one crew--the only
surviving crew, that of the Mont Blanc--laying blame on the deceased
crew of the Imo.
The only time I really laughed during Curse of the Narrows was
over a case of mistaken identity:
"Life on the wards at the Victoria General was starting to return to normal
as well, although Dr. Puttner had collapsed on the floor Saturday afternoon.
They put him in the same room as the chief surgeon, Dr. Murdoch Chilsholm, whose
condition had improved since Pharmacist Bertha Archibald had helped him up the
stairs after the explosion. When she entered the room, he was sitting up and
reading the paper. 'There, in striking headlines, was the notice of the death of
Dr. Murdoch Chisholm--the old gentleman was reading his own obituary.' His blue
eyes peeked at her out from behind his glasses and he smiled with some
satisfaction.
"'That man Chisholm. He was quite a man.'"
In the immediate aftermath of the explosion, one couldn't even be sure who
was alive and who had died. Canadian history is alive with a multitude of books
about the Halifax explosion, and no doubt there will be a surge in new editions
and reprints of older accounts upon the explosion's centenary in three years
time. For one of the most detailed and accurate accounts of the Halifax
explosion of 1917, I highly recommend Curse of the Narrows by Laura Mac
Donald.
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