This is something I found out because of my travels - Halifax is one of the places my ship visits regularly and somewhere along the way I heard that this was the place of terrible tragedy, kind of Hiroshima before Hiroshima. When I read the book, I was startled with the sheer scope of explosion that completely wiped Halifax and its people.
Right in the middle of WW1, sleepy little town of Halifax witnessed collision of two ships in the port.
One of them was Norwegian SS Imo, another French SS Mont-Blanc that was bound for Europe and full of highly flammable explosives, packed for the delivery in France. In normal circumstances, the ship full of explosives would not even be allowed close to populated area but this was in the middle of the war so regulations were not so strict. It was just another clear December morning, with local people minding their business and kids going to school, nobody expected anything out of ordinary, when two ships - for reasons that even today nobody can really explain - collided in port of Halifax and very soon SS Mont-Blanc caught fire, ramming into pier right in the middle of Richmond district where locals gathered in curiosity to watch the ship in flames. Resulting explosion was so powerful that it completely erased Richmond district and all the people, destroying big part of Halifax in process and survivors didn't even understand what hit them. In fact, at first people thought it was German attack (as this was in the middle of WW1) but the worst thing is that this was not a war zone, this actually happened in far away little Canadian sleepy port where all these civilians were far removed from any front lines. Survivors remembered the strength of explosion and what they did at the moment - one boy was playing with toy car at the window sill (he got blinded by the glass), another was going to school, one girl was blown far away from her family home and returned to find house and its inhabitants erased forever, the vicar was standing at the door while his wife and daughter played piano (he never saw them again), in short people lived perfectly ordinary lives on that cold Thursday morning when sudden explosion completely changed their lives forever.
Tragedy could have been ever worse if train dispatcher Patrick Coleman didn't send a warnings to incoming trains about ship full of explosive on fire - he died while sending telegraphs, knowing that new train is supposed to arrive any moment. The train from Richmond stopped immediately in a safe distance and some 300 people survived only because of Coleman. Boston immediately sent train full of medical staff that helped survivors and army searched for possible survivors amongst the ruins of completely destroyed city - this is why even today, traditionally, Halifax always sends Christmas tree to Boston. What always deeply moves me are photographs of so called mortuary bags - many of the bodies were later identified by what they had in their pockets and these items were placed in numbered cotton bags. One of such cotton bags had few pencils, marble ball and pencil eraser, this belonged to seven year old little boy who was going to the school, completely unaware of disaster that would soon destroy the whole town and take his life. One of the surviving baby orphans would later become major of Halifax.
Halifax today is a very beautiful little city and I just marvel at the fact that so many of my passengers walk around completely clueless that this place was completely destroyed almost century ago. I have serious intention to check out few more books about this tragedy.
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