Maritime Museum–Titanic and the Halifax Explosion

Saturday, July 27 – Day 39

We make a point of getting an early start today as we have found that getting a parking spot in the harbour area of Halifax is almost impossible.  We were able to get a spot right next door to the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.  The museum does an exceptionally good job of telling the stories of the numerous shipwrecks along the coast of  Nova Scotia, which is often called the “Graveyard of the Atlantic”.

It has been 101 years since the sinking of the Titanic on April 5, 1912 and since the movie came out a few years ago, it has created a new generation of interest.  The museum tells the story of the recovery operation and how Halifax served as the base of operations in the recovery effort.  Among the artifacts are this pair of shoes recovered from a young boy who was buried in the Fairview Cemetery in Halifax.  For many years his identity was unknown as was indicated on the gravestone.  In recent years however he has been identified as Sidney Goodwin. He was the youngest of eight children in a family, all of whom perished that night. 

Many of the markers in the Titanic area of the Fairview Cemetery have no names, just the number that was assigned when the body was recovered. As each body was recovered all the possessions were put into a small canvas bag with a corresponding number and a description of the person was entered in a journal.  Some of the bodies were identified through this system but a great number never were…their last time on earth as a number.

This system was used 5 years later during the Halifax explosion of 1917.  Briefly; a French munitions ship was struck by another ship in the harbour.  The impact created sparks that ignited benzene being carried on the deck; it also disabled the ship which drifted towards a pier.  The fire attracted many people to watch at the harbour front.  When the fire reached the cargo of TNT, the ship was ripped apart and everything within a square kilometer was leveled by the blast.  Five other ships in the harbour were totally destroyed; a piece of shrapnel is still to this day embedded in the wall of St. Paul’s Church, almost two miles away. The shockwave from the explosion shattered windows into the faces and eyes of many people who were watching from their homes.  A tsunami was created in the harbour that wiped out an entire Mikmaq Indian village. The blast was the largest man made explosion before the detonation of the nuclear bomb.

Quite obviously, Halifax is no stranger to disasters.