Halifax - Wednesday

---

We really played tourist today in Halifax. After breakfast, we walked up to the Gray Coach kiosk, thinking we'd take the hop-on-hop-off bus, but it wasn't running today (no cruise ship in port), so we took the 3-hour city tour instead. It was very interesting, including a walk through the beautiful Halifax Public Gardens, a stop at the cemetery where 121 Titanic victims are buried, and a quick stop at the Citadel.

Halifax – or at least the part of Halifax where we have been roaming in – is stuffed chock-a-block with heritage houses. Everywhere you look, there are more of them. Some are being used as residences, some as businesses, and we saw at least one that had been converted into an embassy.

The city tour steeps you in two of the big Halifax stories: the sinking of the Titanic and the Halifax explosion, two events that loomed large in the lives of early 20th Century Haligonians, because they happened just 5 years apart.

The rescue ships (that turned out to be recovery ships) that were sent out to seek further survivors after about 700 were picked up by Carpathia, were cable vessels based in Halifax. These vessels were ideally suited for the recovery operation because they were normally used to conduct difficult operations at sea and the crews were used to working on the high seas. That the operation turned out to be a recovery made it a difficult mission for the crew, but the vessels went out well prepared, carrying ice, coffins, canvass bags, an undertaker, and a chaplain. In all, 209 bodies were recovered; many others, too damaged to bring back, were buried at sea.

In those days, most families could not afford to have their relatives' bodies shipped home. Only 59 bodies were shipped out by train to their families. The rest were buried in three Halifax cemeteries between May 3 and June 12. The city held many religious services and businesses and individuals expressed their sympathy by donating flowers and wreaths. Even the coffins of unidentified victims were adorned with flowers.

Most of the graves are located in the Fairview Lawn Cemetery. Basic headstones were paid for by the White Star Line; relatives who wanted something more had to pay for that themselves. The graves are laid out in something that resembles the shape of a ship.

I've never been a big Titanic buff, but I must say it was a moving experience to walk among those gravestones and reflect on what happened in the North Atlantic the night of April 14, 1912.

Throughout the bus tour a great deal of information was also provided about the Halifax explosion that took place on the morning of December, 1917, when a Norwegian vessel collided with a French munitions ship in Halifax Harbour. The explosion occurred about 25 minutes after the collision but no one in Halifax was expecting it because no one knew the French vessel was packed to the gunwales with munitions. Except for the French seamen on board the vessel, who after the collision jumped in the water and started swimming toward shore. Meanwhile, thousands of Halifax residents gathered to watch the fire on board the ships in the harbour, not realizing they were putting themselves in grave danger by doing this.

The explosion that took place flattened two square miles of Halifax, killing about 2000 people and injuring about 9000 more. One of the most common injuries was eye injury from flying glass. Many were blinded. Not a pane of glass remained unbroken in the blast area. The harbour floor was momentarily exposed by the volume of water that vaporized. A tsunami then formed by water surging in to fill the void, urising as high as 18 meters above the harbour's high water mark on the Halifax side.

It was the largest man-made explosion that had ever occurred, and remained so until Hiroshima. Over 12,000 homes were destroyed in the blast and the fires that followed, and large fragments of metal from the two vessels were found as far as 5 km away from the blast site. The blast itself was felt and heard as far away as Cape Breton and Charlottetown.

There was no shelter. Survivors, many still unsure what had happened and disoriented because there were no landmarks standing, gathered into groups. Then in the evening snow started to fall; it was a huge blizzard. By the next morning 41 cm of snow blanketed Halifax, hampering rescue efforts. However, eventually rescue trains were dispatched from across Canada and also from the Eastern US.

I find it fascinating that the story of this disaster doesn't loom larger in the world's disaster iconography. Perhaps it's the Canadian tendency not to mythologize our national stories (somewhat unlike our neighbor to the south). Before coming here, I certainly knew much more about many other disasters that were of a much smaller scope than this one.

On a cheerier note: the Halifax Public Gardens. We learned this beautiful Victorian garden was severely damaged by Hurricane Juan in 2003, with many old growth trees being destroyed. But a huge volunteer effort has truly revitalized the gardens, and probably restored them to something more like their original state. Because so many trees in the garden had matured since the garden's original creation, it had become a very shady place. With some of the old growth trees gone, it opened up the garden to more light, and plantings were restored to something more like their original state.

We also had a brief stop at the Citadel, without an opportunity to go in. We plan to return for a true visit later in the week.

We went to Murphy's on the waterfront for lunch after that marathon history lesson. Roberta ate lobster roll (I had to resist the temptation to write that as "lobstah roll") and I had a lobster quesadilla (yes, rather unusual that was).

We then went to visit the Maritime Museum. This is an excellent museum. I found myself wishing we'd tackled that earlier in the day, when we were fresher, because there was so much to see, and we were pretty tired by the time we got into it. We had a tour of the Acadia, the largest artifact "in" the museum (it's really tied up at the dock just outside. Acadia is a survey vessel commissioned in 1913.

The museum has a wonderful permanent Titanic exhibit which includes some artifcts recovered from the site of the sinking, incuding a complete intact deck chair. There were a number of instructive short films, amazing ship models, and a plethora of exhibits in this relatively small building.

Our feet and legs were ready for a vacation after all this, so we slowly made our way back to the hostel and had a little siesta before dinner. We had been intending to cook "at home" tonight, but decided we were too tired, so we walked a couple of doors down the street and had a bowl of chowder and some wings (the Wednesday night special).

---

Photos

And more!
This one is actually the Finnish embassy.

Comments

[kathryn]

sounds like the 2 of you are having a fabulous holiday. it is so much fun to armchair travel with your journeys and advntures. the pictures are such a wonderful bonus to your stories. thanks.