The RMS Titanic sank a hundred and one years ago today. Ships were dispatched from Halifax to recover bodies, since Halifax was the nearest big port with continental rail connections.
The
Mackay-Bennet, a Halifax-based steamer normally used for laying
communications cable, led the effort. Two days after the sinking she set
out with a cargo of coffins and canvas bags, an undertaker and a
preacher.
Over
the next four weeks two ships from Halifax followed, the Minia and the
CGS Montmagny. Altogether they and the SS Algerine, sailing from St.
John’s, Newfoundland, recovered over three hundred bodies. Some were
buried at sea, but 209 bodies returned to the Halifax shore.
Just
59 were sent away to their families. The rest, including the Titanic’s
unidentifiable and unclaimed victims, were buried in Halifax, and local
businesses donated bouquets of lilies.
•••••
An even more horrible tragedy still lay five years down the road. In 1917 Halifax harbor fell victim to the greatest
conflagration of the Great War. I don't know if it's just me, but
polling people I know, it sounds like nobody else knew about the largest
man made explosion before Hiroshima, either.
Halifax, Nova Scotia
Halifax
is a good-looking, purposeful, working town. With a population just
under a million, it hosts 200,000 cruise ship passengers a year and some
40 percent of Canada’s defense assets. Nova Scotia is the world’s
largest exporter of lobster and Christmas trees.
It
doesn't look at all like a place afflicted. Perched on two rocky
shores, Halifax and it's sister city Dartmouth, across the water, enjoy
refuge from Atlantic storms, set back from the ocean. Still further
back, the Bedford Basin affords a strategic ice-free port, invaluable in
wartime.
With
one of the world's deepest and most protected harbors, Halifax always
prospered in wartime, from the Napoleanic wars and the War of 1812, and
continuing to the onset of World War One, providing men and materiel for
various war efforts.
Canada
entered the Great War in 1914 as a colony, when Britain declared war on
Germany. Canadians were just about unanimous in support. Halifax
boomed, and harbor traffic ultimately rose to seventeen million tons a
year, from just two.
By
1917, businesses were bursting. Industry struggled to keep up with
demand. A quarter of the men in Halifax were serving overseas.
Foreshadowing
the U.S. experience in World War Two, women took jobs formerly thought
of as men's work. Ultimately, women's suffrage came to Canada in 1918,
two years ahead of the United States.
The
U.S. held to a position of neutrality. But after a German declaration
of U-boat warfare against Atlantic supply lanes and the sinking of both
merchant and passenger ships with Americans onboard, the U.S joined the
Great War in April 1917.
The
first regular, systematic convoy of war material from Canada left
Sydney, Nova Scotia’s easternmost harbor, on June 24th, 1917. By October
as many as 36 supply ships were assembled for each convoy.
The
Maritime Museum of the Atlantic in Halifax describes a typical convoy
as five ships abreast with two corvettes out front and one on each
flank.
Typically,
freighters with deck cargo of tanks, trucks and tankers, other
freighters with aircraft, and maybe a heavy lift ship with locomotives
sailed alongside rescue ships and an oiler with fuel for the corvettes. A
destroyer carrying the escort force commander brought up the rear.
Convoy
traffic moved to Halifax from Sydney during winter, owing to the back
bay, the ice-free Bedford Basin. The basin, with a surface area of just
six and a half square miles, was jammed with ships.
•••••
By
winter 1917 a jittery uncertainty had prevailed across the twin cities
for months. The Canadians dragged submarine nets across the harbor each
night to prevent German U-boats from sneaking in.