THE SILENCE AFTER THE BLAST
Aboy presses his small face up to a cold window pane. It’s an early winter morning, and two ships in Halifax harbour are exchanging a cacophony of horn blasts.
Vessels use these loud whistles as they pass, the boy’s mom explains. But today, Dec. 6, 1917, they do not pass.
The Norwegian relief vessel, the SS Imo, collides with a French munitions ship laden with explosives, the SS Mont Blanc. For 191/2 minutes, a dazzling display of fireworks captivates onlookers as the Mont Blanc drifts and burns.
The toddler, playing with a toy train on the kitchen window sill, watches the flames engulf the ship — the last images he will ever see.
At 9:04 a.m ., the Mont Blanc blows up with devastating force, its 2,600 tonnes of explosives levelling swaths of Halifax and Dartmouth, raining down shards of white- hot iron, blowing off roofs and shattering glass — including the windows of a small wooden house in the city’s north- end Richmond neighbourhood.
There, at age two years and seven months, Eric Davidson is blinded in the Halifax Explosion.
“My father was still looking out and all the glass came in on his face and his upper body,” his daughter, Marilyn Elliott, said in an interview.
“Both of his eyes were removed that day. In an instant, a little baby, a happygo- lucky baby, is without sight.”
Elliott grew up knowing her father was blinded in the horrific blast that claimed nearly 2,000 lives, injured 9,000 and left 25,000 homeless.
But the disaster was mentioned in passing, in hushed tones, with a heavy heart.
“My grandmother was a changed woman after the explosion. She grieved the loss of her baby boy’s eyesight,” Elliott said. “It was a permanent trauma that she carried with her the rest of her life.”
A hundred years after the greatest human- made blast before the atomic bomb, the country is commemorating the explosion’ s cent en- nial with a large memorial service at Fort Needham Memorial Park. Dozens of organizations have received grants for museum and art exhibitions, theatre productions, documentary films and concerts.
But the Halifax Explosion anniversary wasn’t always so publicly remembered.
For many years, Dec. 6 passed quietly, with a small service or private prayers, but no official public ceremony. It would take decades before the blackout was lifted, and the heart-wrenching stories of the Halifax Explosion told.
Jim Cuvelier, a 101- yearold survivor, said the disaster wasn’t spoken of when he was growing up.
“People tried to forget it. You don’t carry that stuff around,” said Cuvelier, a baby who was at home on the outskirts of the blast zone at the time of the disaster.
“I never heard them talk about it.”
Mothers couldn’t bear the deaths of innocent babies. Children disappeared without a trace. Others turned up days later in makeshift morgues. Girls and boys struggled to comprehend being suddenly orphaned. Wives mourned their husbands, killed instantly in harbourfront f ac t ori e s . Soldiers grappled with the insurmountable trauma of watching homes burn to the ground, families still inside, the scent of burning flesh in the air.
“The city was devastated. It was such a cataclysmic event, so traumatic, that I think people probably didn’t want to revisit those horrors,” said Craig Walkington, chairman of the Halifax Explosion 100th Anniversary Advisory Committee.
“It really did do incredible damage. There was virtually no family that wasn’t touched by it, whether injuries, fatalities, or a loss in some way.”
The blast wiped out much of Halifax’s densely populated north end and parts of Dartmouth, including a Mi’kmaq settlement known as Turtle Grove, and badly damaged the African- Nova Scotian community of Africville.
The shock wave of the explosion was felt as far away as Cape Breton, and windows nearly 100 kilometres away cracked. It was followed by a 15-metre tsunami, drowning survivors near the shore and sweeping many bodies out to sea. Upturned cook stoves ignited fires that consumed wooden homes, scorched entire blocks and made the rescue of some injured survivors trapped inside homes impossible.
That night, a blizzard blanketed t he city with more than 40 centimetres of snow. “It got cold and the snow buried bodies. The next three days were a horror story,” author and historian Dan Soucoup said. “They found children two or three days later huddled and frozen in the snow.”
Still, miraculous stories emerged from the rubble.
A soldier walking through the flattened Richmond neighbourhood a day after the explosion heard a f aint whimper coming from a burnt- out house. He walked through the charred debris and there, protected under an ashpan, he found a baby girl. The 23- monthold orphan, nicknamed ‘Ashpan’ Annie, was burned but alive.
In some cases, entire families were killed. In others, one survivor lived on. One woman, Mary Jean Hinch, lost 10 children and her husband in the explosion. She and her unborn son were the only survivors in her family.
“I have newspapers from all over the world. The Halifax Explosion shared the headlines with the major wartime events. It was not just some local thing,” said Janet Kitz, author of several books on the Halifax Explosion.
George H. Cox, a doctor and eye specialist from New Glasgow, about 150 kilometres northeast of Halifax, arrived at the Rockingham train station outside Halifax the next day. With the tracks into the city destroyed, he trudged through deep snow to Camp Hill Hospital. Men, women and children l i ned the corridors, many with glass, pottery, brick, mortar and nails stuck in their eyes.
“He worked for 40 hours removing eyes. He had a bucketful of eyes,” Soucoup said. “He chased everybody out, slept for three hours, and did that again.”
As the body count climbed, bereaved locals, politicians and newspaper editors began demanding to know who was responsible.
When the Mont Blanc, l aden with thousands of tons of explosives, came upon the Imo on the wrong side of the harbour, it asserted its right- of- way using loud whistles — the very horn blasts that attracted little Eric Davidson.
“The Mont Blanc did have the right to the channel. But the Imo was stuck on a course it couldn’t get out of,” said Joel Zemel, an author and historian. “By the time they realized it, it was too late to avoid an accident. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong.”
The initial investigation pinned the blame on three men: The Mont Blanc’s captain, its pilot and the Royal Canadian Navy’s chief examining officer in charge of the harbour. Given the Mont Blanc’s explosive cargo, it was said that the burden rested with its crew to avoid a collision at all costs.
In the end, however, the Supreme Court of Canada and the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council in London found the Mont Blanc and Imo were equally to blame. No one was ever convicted in the disaster.
The ship’s cargo included wet and dry picric acid, TNT, gun cotton, benzol and other ammunition. “They were just a floating bomb. They could have tried to warn people but they didn’t want to die. It was run for your life,” Zemel said.
It took generations for the disaster to be commemorated. After the one- year anniversary, the city didn’t hold another official public memorial until the 50th anniversary in 1967.
“It could have been too painful in the early days,” Elliott said. “Why was it forgotten? No one has the answer to that. It could have been a sign of the times. Back then, people didn’t like to dwell on misfortune. It wasn’t really talked about.”
Kitz wonders if the commemoration of the Halifax Explosion would have been different had it happened in another part of the city.
“It happened in the north end of the city, where it was mainly working- class people. If City Hall had been destroyed or the big businesses of the south end had been decimated, it would have been slightly different maybe. It’s hard to say.
“Somehow you were expected to just get on with it. And that’s what people did.”