Harbour pilot’s log records events
He was a harbour pilot, a man whose job seemed high on the white-knuckle stress and low on the romance of seafaring occupations.
For nearly half a century, Nicholas Lamont Power guided ships in and out of Halifax Harbour, the whole time keeping a meticulous 8,000-entry log of what he did and encountered out on those waters.
These writings, begun to improve his penmanship, give a nuanced, if succinct, view of what Halifax Harbour was like before the great Explosion. They also provide an on-the-water vantage point from one who saw the carnage it wrought up close.
There’s nothing flowery in the prose of this man known to friends and family as “Mont,” who was born in Portuguese Cove and lived most of his life in houses on Quinpool Road and Armcrescent
West Avenue.
His punctuation can be off and he doesn’t always follow the traditional rules of grammar.
Most of his entries consist of a ship’s name, her owners, captain and cargo, along with the duties that Power – who joined the Halifax Harbour pilot service on Jan. 1, 1906, beginning a three-year apprenticeship – performed bringing her in and out of port.
Family events, as his first granddaughter Cathy Enright, whose own birth was an entry on May 26, 1950, has written, usually merit a line. It took something of the magnitude of the start of the First World War to earn two lines of his attention. But the journal, nonetheless, tells a story.
By 1916, for example, the port was closed because a German submarine was reportedly anchored outside the harbour.
In March of that year, one of the dozen ships that Power piloted to and from port was later sunk by a German sub.
Coal ships, including some owned by the Dominion Coal Company then dominating the collieries of Cape Breton, came and went. So did other ships, such as a French cable ship and Cunard line steamers, indicating Halifax’s pivotal location in world commerce.
Increasingly, vessels carrying figures of import like Canada’s new Governor General as well as privately owned vessels – from the looks of the log his duties did not extend to the city’s immense naval presence – carrying troops from as far away as Western Canada came through the harbour. In February 1916, Power noted:
“Halifax is made the examination point for all national ships in place of Kirkwall England to clear German submarine danger zone.”
A month later, instead of being responsible for the fate of a dozen or so ships entering or leaving Halifax Harbour, Power and the other pilots had to handle 27 vessels, four of which were later sunk by German submarines.
By June, the number had risen to 38 as ships arrived to load guns and munitions and to take troops and provisions out to sea. Naturally, as the traffic increased, so did the mishaps.
On Aug. 25, his log states that a Red Cross service hospital boat went aground in dense fog with “600 returned sailors aboard.” Three days later, when the fog failed to lift, a troop ship suffered the same fate. The next month, a tug and an oil tanker collided somewhere in the harbour.
For Power, the fateful month of December 1917 began routinely enough. On Dec. 3 he piloted the Lake Manitoba to join a “slow convoy.” That same day he noted that an oil tanker couldn’t join the convoy because it had to make repairs.
In the days that followed, he piloted S.S. Bratsberg out of the harbour and helped an oil tanker and barge make port.
“He wasn’t on duty that day,” Cathy Enright, his granddaughter, says of Dec. 6. “He was at home with an infant daughter, Clara, and my mom, Catherine, who was two.”
In keeping with his pattern, the big news was delivered in a just-the-facts-ma’am fashion.
“Mont Blanc a French munition ship bound in to Bedford Basin in charge of Pilot Frank Mackey was run into by Belgian Relief S/S Imo . . . Mont Blanc was set on fire by the collision and 20 minutes after blew up destroying the whole North part of the City from North Street station North. About 1,500 people were killed and about 5,000 injured and Homeless.”
Three days later Power and some colleagues boarded what was left of the Imo. There they “found the body of Pilot Wm Hayes which was still on the bridge.”
In the days that followed, he recounted how the pilot’s office was taken over by the Transportation Commission and listed off the well-known people who died in the Explosion, along with the buildings wrecked and vessels damaged by the blast.
On Dec. 14, Power reported:
“Wind Southeast blowing a gale with driving snow several ships dragged their anchors in Harbour.”
“Second relief ship the S/S Northland arrived today from Boston with clothing and foodstuffs for homeless.”
Nine days after the catastrophe – as the city was still reeling from the damage – he was business as usual.
“Piloted out S/S Pretoria 4842 tons . . . C.P.R. Line Capt Landry in for repairs to her engines.”
“He was a man with a sense of duty,” Enright says of her grandfather, who died in 1959, just five years after his retirement.