A Canadian town with Titanic history
It is common knowledge that the Titanic was built in Belfast, sailed from Southampton and never made it to New York. But you might not know the Canada connection,
Acruise hardly seems like the most appropriate occasion to be contemplating the Titanic. But that is what I found myself doing on my first ocean voyage, which took me from New York to Halifax, a port city on Canada’s Atlantic coast.
A few cities are closely associated with the doomed ocean liner. You probably know it was built in Belfast, Northern Ireland, set off on its maiden voyage from the English port of Southampton, and that it struck an iceberg on the way to New York.
But it was only when I looked at the shore excursions offered on my cruise that I discovered the Canadian connection.
Halifax, the capital of the Nova Scotia province, is the final resting place for many Titanic victims.
A visit to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, on the city’s waterfront, offers more explanation.
Much of the second floor is taken up by a permanent exhibit detailing the grim role Halifax played in the days and weeks after the disaster.
As one of the closest ports to the site of the sinking – the Titanic went down 1300km to the east – and with decent rail connections making it easy to bring in undertakers from other cities, Halifax was deemed the best place to centre the body recovery effort.
Local cable ships, well-acquainted with the icy waters of the Atlantic, were chartered by Titanic’s owner White Star Line to retrieve the dead.
The first, the Mackay-Bennett, set sail on April 17, loaded with body bags, coffins, ice and embalming fluid. Health laws required that bodies had to be preserved to be able to return to port.
Of the approximately 2200 passengers and crew onboard the Titanic, 1500 perished when the ship plunged into the North Atlantic Ocean.
Crew on the MackayBennett recovered 306 of those bodies – the vast majority of all the ships sent out, and so many more than expected that they soon found themselves running low on embalming supplies.
The captain figured identifying wealthy men might be critical in settling estate disputes, so made the decision to only preserve firstclass victims. They ended up burying 116 bodies at sea.
In total, 209 bodies were brought back to port by the four recovery ships, and transported to a makeshift morgue that had been set up at a local curling rink.
Of these, 59 were claimed by relatives and shipped home. When it became clear the rest would remain in Halifax, authorities arranged to have their clothing burned, in a bid to stop souvenir hunters.
Most of the Titanic artefacts on display at the museum are what is known as ‘‘wreckwood’’.
In coastal communities such as Halifax, it was an acceptable tradition for wooden fragments of notable shipwrecks to be kept, and sometimes fashioned into keepsakes such as picture frames or paperweights.
But one memento stands out amid the pieces of panelling – a pair of brown leather children’s shoes, buckled across the front.
A local police sergeant who had been tasked with guarding the bodies and their belongings couldn’t bring himself to add the tiny shoes to the pile destined for the furnace. So he kept them in a box in his desk and, in 2002, his grandson donated them to the museum.
The small soul who once wore those shoes is thought to be the same who is described in a coroner’s report for ‘‘Body No 4’’ – an unidentified boy about 2 years old, who was the only baby to be recovered from the water. The description includes a pair of brown shoes. The report also noted the toddler’s body bore ‘‘no marks whatsoever’’.
He now lies in Fairview Lawn Cemetery in Halifax with 120 other Titanic victims, making it the largest collection of Titanic graves in the world.
My cruise offered a bus tour that included a visit to the cemetery, and I joined the dozens of other tourists who traipsed through the leafy burial ground until we reached the sign declaring we had reached the ‘‘Titanic grave site’’.
Many graves in this section are uniform slabs of granite, bearing only the victim’s name (where known), the number their body was assigned upon recovery, and their date of death – April 15, 1912.
But there are some more attention-grabbing stones. A grave belonging to one ‘‘J Dawson’’ attracts a crowd of photographers.
No, it’s not Jack, the fictional heart-throb from James Cameron’s 1997 blockbuster, Titanic. The real J Dawson was Joseph, a 23-year-old from Ireland, who shovelled coal in the engine room of the ship.
Back to the little boy in the brown shoes. He has an elaborate grave, ‘‘erected to the memory of an unknown child’’. It was paid for by the crew members who found him, and has since come to represent all the young lives lost in the sinking.
But in recent years, a plaque has been added to the foot of his grave. In 2007, Canadian researchers used DNA testing to identify the body as Sidney Leslie Goodwin, a 19-month-old English boy who had been travelling in third class with his family. All eight members died, and Sidney’s was the only body recovered. The day I visited, a small collection of toys, painted stones and flowers sat beside his headstone, seemingly put there by those who still feel a deep connection to the tragedy, even 110 years on.
As I made my way back to the cruise ship, looking up at the comforting abundance of lifeboats dotted along its side, I too couldn’t help but feel something – perhaps gratitude – for what we know now.