Marked Like Any Other

The Bottleneck in The Narrows

Eli: On the evening of December 5th, 1917, harbour pilot Francis Mackey boarded a French freighter at Halifax, the Mont-Blanc. She was carrying picric acid, a high explosive, TNT and guncotton, with barrels of fuel stacked on deck, all bound for the war in Europe. Mackey asked the Canadian navy's examining officer for special orders to get her through safely. Protection, like a guard ship. None came. That's how Janet Maybee tells it. She went looking into his story after coming across his photograph.

Mara: Someone wrote in asking what happened in Halifax in 1917, when a burning ship caused the biggest accidental explosion before the atomic bomb. Today's angle is the initial blame and legal exoneration of harbour pilot Francis Mackey.

Eli: After his release from prison, Mona remembered men calling him “Murderer.”

Mara: Halifax in that war was Canada's maritime nerve centre. It was crowded with ships gathering into convoys for the Atlantic. The inquiry later put the logic plainly: 'whilst the war goes on under present conditions explosives must move.'

Eli: Move, yes. Marked, no. Because of the submarine threat, munitions ships in the harbour weren't allowed to fly warning flags, and nothing required this one to be escorted. Maybee says the cargo, loaded in New York on British Admiralty orders, was 'a concoction of chemicals that never should have been transported all on the same boat.' And the examining officer, she says, had 'absolutely no basis on which he could refuse entry to the ship.'

Mara: So the most dangerous ship in port looked like any other ship.

Eli: Next morning, December 6th, Mackey took her in. Another ship was heading out.

Mara: That was the Imo, a Norwegian ship chartered for Belgian relief, empty and in a hurry to load supplies in New York. She'd meant to leave the afternoon before. But her coal came too late, so she spent the night in Bedford Basin, the innermost part of the harbour. Her way out was the Narrows, the tight channel between Halifax and Dartmouth that joins the basin to the outer harbour.

Eli: So one narrow doorway, and two ships coming at it from opposite sides.

Mara: A doorway with rules. Ships were meant to pass port to port. At about a quarter to nine they met in there, each one out of position. Mont-Blanc's pilot gave a single whistle blast, signalling she had the right of way. Imo answered with two: she would not, or could not, yield. Signals were exchanged and misread. Then Imo's bow opened Mont-Blanc's starboard side.

Eli: Two people put the weight on Imo. Walter Brannen, mate of the tug Stella Maris, testified she was on the Dartmouth side 'going as fast as any ship he had ever seen in the harbour,' foam at her bow. Maybee says that by the rules of the road Imo should have moved to the Halifax side, and why she didn't is still not known.

Mara: Whatever the readings, Eli, a hole had just been opened in a ship full of explosives, with fuel stacked on her deck.

Twenty Minutes to Pier 6

Eli: As Imo backed away, the friction threw sparks into benzol pouring from burst barrels on Mont-Blanc's deck. Benzol is a volatile motor fuel refined from coal, and it lit. The crew saw they couldn't fight the fire or open the valves to flood and sink her. Their captain ordered two lifeboats down, and they rowed hard for the Dartmouth shore. In that part of the city, people poured out of their offices to watch.

Mara: Mackey's guard ship never came. She drifted twenty minutes, onto Pier 6.

Eli: On the Dartmouth side, Mackey was shouting. In his own words: 'I called out to everybody in sight that the ship was in danger and likely to explode.' The French captain came back and put a hand on his shoulder: 'Come on! Come on!'

Mara: The fire department sent its new engine, the Patricia, to the wharf, with eight-odd firemen.

Eli: Near the pier, in the Richmond railway yard, a passing sailor told dispatcher Vince Coleman that the burning ship carried munitions. Then Coleman remembered a passenger train from Saint John, New Brunswick, due within minutes. He went back to his telegraph key, alone.

Mara: That was No. 10, headed for Halifax, full of passengers.

Eli: The version of his message repeated most often reads: 'Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys.'

Mara: Word came back down the line that his message was received.

Eli: By then it was too late for Coleman to run, and No. 10 was still somewhere up the line.

The Fireball and the Blizzard

Mara: At about four minutes past nine, the Mont-Blanc blew apart. The force is estimated at around 2.9 kilotons of TNT. At its centre it reached an estimated five thousand degrees Celsius. A fireball went up, and the shock wave demolished almost everything within half a mile.

Eli: In 1994, a Halifax historian compared it with other major explosions. Weighing casualties, force, radius, explosives and property damage together, he found it 'remains unchallenged in overall magnitude.'

Mara: The harbour water came back as a wave up to sixty feet high. The blast lifted Imo out of the water and threw her onto the shore. Her captain and her pilot were killed. One man on a ship nearby saw 'a veritable mountain of smoke of a yellowish hue.' And Richmond, in the city's north end, was destroyed by the concussion and the fires after. About 1,600 homes were gone.

Eli: One Patricia fireman lived. After the wave receded, he saw nothing of the others.

Mara: And Mackey: the blast threw him into the branches of an uprooted tree on the Dartmouth shore. He came to beside the French captain, alive.

Eli: Coleman was killed at his desk. Out at Rockingham, No. 10 was standing still, with minor damage and injuries. Its conductor said that though running on time, 'his train was held for fifteen minutes by the dispatcher at Rockingham.' Historians still debate whether Coleman's message is what held it.

Mara: And the crowds who'd gone to their windows to watch the fire were standing behind glass.

Eli: Windows all over the city shattered with enormous force. One soldier wrote home that very few in the city escaped being 'cut with flying glass that came with the force of bullets.'

Mara: About forty people lost both eyes. About 140 more lost one.

Eli: One eye surgeon there operated so long his knives began to dull. He described eyeballs 'laid open and then stuffed with pieces of glass' that would clink to the touch. Surgeons performed an unprecedented number of enucleations, removing the whole eyeball from its socket. Some later wondered whether fear of damage in one eye spreading to the other led them to take too many.

Mara: In all, somewhere between 1,600 and 2,000 people died.

Eli: Around 9,000 were injured. Counted with the dead, that's nearly a quarter of the city. Across the water at Tufts Cove, people from the Mi'kmaq settlement of Turtle Grove had gone to the shore to watch the ship burn. The blast and the wave destroyed it. The next day came a blizzard: sixteen inches of snow on the ruins, on rescuers, on relief trains trying to get in, on people with nowhere left to live.

Mara: Mackey walked across that city looking for his family. He found them on the Commons, his oldest daughter bleeding from glass in her face. That night he fitted storm windows over the broken frames, swept up the glass, and made tea around midnight.

Eli: What's still unknown, Mara, is who will answer for any of it.

The Inquiry and the Scapegoat

Mara: The formal inquiry opened on December 13th, 1917. Its commissioner, Arthur Drysdale, sat with two nautical assessors, sea captains brought in to advise on the seamanship, one of them Louis Demers. They heard every witness who could throw light on it. The finding: the collision came from violations of the rules of navigation, and the blame went to Mont-Blanc's side alone. It recommended that Mackey, 'by reason of his gross negligence,' be dismissed and his licence cancelled. Criminal charges followed, against him and Mont-Blanc's captain.

Eli: And those charges went nowhere. In March 1918, Judge Benjamin Russell found no evidence at all to support manslaughter or criminal negligence against Mackey, and the case against both men ended without a conviction. Still, the marine minister resisted giving Mackey his licence back for four years, until that minister was defeated in the 1921 election. His daughter remembers walking beside him in Halifax after his release from prison, when she was four, and men calling him 'Murderer.'

Mara: The civil fight over the ships went higher, to the Supreme Court of Canada and then the Judicial Committee of the Privy Council. In the end, both ships were ruled equally at fault. That ruling holds two readings. Brannen's testimony, Russell and Maybee point at Imo's speed and her side of the channel. Drysdale, Demers and the Privy Council held Mont-Blanc responsible too, for how she was handled with that cargo aboard.

Eli: Maybee also holds a third reading. With military, port, convoy and pilotage authorities all in one harbour, she says it was 'very difficult to determine who, in fact, was giving the final answer.' The inquiry, in her view, 'became a fight between the two shipping companies to make sure that neither one had to take the blame.' Historical analysts note that blaming the French crew conveniently shielded harbour authorities from scrutiny over congested wartime traffic controls. And the man that blame landed on first had asked, the night before, for a guard ship.

Legacies of Care and Law

Mara: Long before any court sat.

Eli: Less than two hours after the blast, the governor of Massachusetts telegraphed Halifax's mayor to ask whether help was needed. He started preparing a relief train before any answer came. On news that was only fragmentary, he wired: 'Massachusetts stands ready to go the limit in rendering every assistance you may be in need of.' The train and its medical unit left Boston that night and reached Halifax on the morning of December 8th. The team's first night there was spent on an unheated train, with no food or water.

Mara: Within a day, a Boston hospital's nurses had turned St. Mary's School for Boys into a 150-bed hospital.

Eli: One Boston surgeon there treated mainly children. He was the last doctor to go home. Pediatric surgery literature widely credits him with turning to injured children after what he saw in Halifax. That school ward is now recognised as a pioneering one for children's surgery.

Mara: And all those enucleated eyes?

Eli: They shaped an institution. The Canadian National Institute for the Blind was founded in March 1918, generally credited both to soldiers blinded in the war and to the Halifax casualties. A Dalhousie University professor says that, with it, 'Halifax became internationally known as a centre for care for the blind.'

Mara: In Canada, the disaster and the inquiries after it drove lasting reforms in harbour navigation, the handling of explosives, and emergency response, beyond the pilot sharing the blame.

Eli: The dead are still being counted. Early lists held about 1,600 names. Researchers kept finding more, hundreds only recently confirmed, and a modern book of remembrance now records nearly two thousand. The province's archives caution that 'it is unlikely that the names of all victims will ever be captured.'

Mara: So there are three signals to watch. Archival finds or demographic modelling that move the death toll. Modern explosion modelling that pins the force down more precisely than today's estimate. And railway logs that settle whether No. 10 stopped for Coleman's message or for its own schedule.

Eli: A name to read up on: Francis Mackey.

Mara: Listeners can follow law and justice alongside us, asking who bears responsibility after a disaster.

Eli: Thanks for listening. I'm Eli.

Mara: And I'm Mara. Until next time.