THREE TIMES IN LESS THAN A DECADE, SAMUEL HENRY PRINCE was exposed to mass death: first in 1912, second in 1917, and third in 1920. Influenced by his experience, Prince wrote his doctoral dissertation on Canada’s 1917 Halifax explosion, one of the worst explosions prior to the atomic bomb. That made him the first serious scholar to study disaster.
Prince came from United Empire Loyalist stock—Loyalists were American colonists who fled to Canada after the American Revolution—and grew up in Atlantic Canada in the tiny community of Hammond River, New Brunswick, completing his high school education in nearby Saint John. During his teenage years he and a friend decided they wanted to study medicine and become medical missionaries, but the friend died and Prince chose another profession—the ministry. While completing a bachelor of arts (first-class honours) and a master of arts in psychology at the University of Toronto, Prince lived at Wycliffe College and studied divinity. He was ordained an Anglican priest in Hamilton, Ontario, and his first assignment was as chaplain at nearby Ridley College, a private boys’ school in St. Catharines, in the Niagara Peninsula near Niagara Falls.
Although he came to central Canada for his university education, Prince wanted to go back to the Maritimes, and he managed, without telling his bishop, to wangle an appointment as curate at historic St. Paul’s in Halifax, Nova Scotia. St. Paul’s was the first Anglican Church in Canada, constructed in 1750, the year after the founding of the city. It was also a church whose parishioners had strong views about being Anglican and not Roman Catholic. There was a debate when the rector wanted to put a cross on the altar and a bigger debate about the choir wearing white cassocks over their black robes. Such things smacked of popery and the parishioners of St. Paul’s didn’t want that. They were similarly alarmed by some of the hymns in a new Anglican hymn book: the book was placed in the pews, but a note pasted on the cover stated that “the following hymns are not approved for use at St. Paul’s.” Prince managed to avoid taking sides in these debates: as clerk of the vestry, he could record the views of others without expressing his own. Perhaps he disagreed with much of what was said. Certainly, later, with support from all religions, including Roman Catholics, he was the founding director of the Maritime School of Social Work.
Prince seems to have enjoyed life in St. Paul’s and Halifax. He found time to take occasional sleigh rides in Point Pleasant Park with his Wycliffe classmate Dwight Johnstone, and his growing income—St. Paul’s gave him annual increases—allowed him to buy his first car, a Hupmobile. Few young men owned their own cars in the early part of the twentieth century. Prince might have continued his quiet life, but in 1912 an ocean liner making its first Atlantic crossing hit an iceberg and sank in the North Atlantic, and Halifax—and Prince—responded. As part of that response, Prince and a Roman Catholic priest were sent to sea on the SS Montmagny to search for survivors and to say funeral services for Titanic’s dead. Among the bodies recovered was that of a young girl wearing a cross. Prince never forgot her, and every couple of years he remembered her when he preached what he called his “Titanic sermon,” the text of which is with his papers in the archives at Halifax’s King’s College. Titanic was the first of his three encounters with mass death.
In 1914, two years after Titanic, Canada went to war and Halifax immediately became a major naval and army base, while many Nova Scotians volunteered for military service overseas. Amid the frenetic wartime activity, as thousands of soldiers and sailors on leave crowded the city streets, Prince kept involved with other matters, consoling those who lost a loved one on the European battle fronts. Though there were sometimes memorial services, there were no funerals: Canadian soldiers were buried with their fallen comrades close to the battlefields where they died.
On the morning of 6 December 1917, Prince was at his boarding house eating breakfast, engaged in a discussion about church evangelism. Unknown to him and many in the more prosperous south end of the city, events were unfolding that would change the face of Halifax forever. A French ship, Mont-Blanc, was heading into harbour en route to the large anchorage known as Bedford Basin, where she would await a slow convoy to Europe. She encountered an outgoing Norwegian ship, IMO, and the two collided. About eighteen minutes later—at precisely 9:04:35 a.m., 6 December 1917—Mont-Blanc’s cargo of munitions detonated with one-seventh the power of the atomic bombs that would drop on Hiroshima and Nagasaki in 1945. The harbour was clogged with broken ships, the North End of the city reduced to burning wreckage, and its railyards crowded with overturned cars and steam engines; 1963 people were dead or dying, 9000 injured, thousands more were homeless.
The explosion shattered the windows in the room where Prince and his friend were eating breakfast. Unaware of its cause or the extent of the destruction, the pair swept up the broken glass before heading outdoors. So many were doing similar cleanups at home that for a few minutes the streets in the south end remained empty. Once outside, however, Prince and his companion saw the fires in the North End of the city and the horse-drawn carriages bringing injured people, many horribly cut, to St. Paul’s Hall. It is not known what happened to his friend, but Prince spent part of the day in his Hupmobile driving badly injured survivors to the overcrowded hospitals or to St. Paul’s Hall. Prince and other clergy also spent endless hours conducting funerals as the dead were identified. St. Paul’s escaped with minor damage, but some of its parishioners had been killed and injured. The situation was far worse for Roman Catholics: at St. Joseph’s Church in the North End, where the explosion did the most damage, 125 of its 600 families were wiped out—every family member dead.
Prince remained at St. Paul’s until after the war ended on 11 November 1918, but a few months later he handed in his resignation and accepted a post at St. Stephen’s Protestant Episcopal Church in New York City, where he would preach each summer for decades. (The topics of his sermons can be found in the index of the New York Times: each week he would write out a brief précis of what he intended to say and each week the Times dutifully printed that.) However, it was not St. Stephen’s that attracted him to New York. Prince had enrolled in the Ph.D. program in sociology at Columbia University, where he could work with one of the leading American sociologists, Franklin Giddings. Realizing that Prince’s mind was filled with images of the explosion, Giddings suggested he use them to build a thesis. That must have happened fairly quickly, for not long after his arrival in New York Prince was asking friends in Halifax to find data for him. Perhaps his interest was spurred on by something else: in 1920 he had his third encounter with tragedy. He found himself trying to comfort the injured and dying when an anarchist bomb went off on Wall Street, the worst terrorist incident on US soil in terms of lives lost until the Oklahoma City bombing of 1995, a forerunner of 9/11.
In Catastrophe and Social Change, Prince presents an unsavoury view of society in the wake of a disaster. He portrays the survivors as stealing from the dead and fleeing in terror—actions, he says, that show that disasters turn humans into savages:
Men clambered over the bodies of the dead to get beer in the shattered breweries. Men, taking advantage of the flight from the city, because of the possibility of another explosion, went into houses and shops and took whatever their thieving fingers could lay hold of. Then there were the nightly prowlers among the ruins, who rifled the pockets of the dead and dying, and snatched rings from their fingers … (quoting Johnstone, “The Tragedy of Halifax,” 50)
In catastrophe, these primitive instincts are seen most plainly and less subject to reconditioning influences of ordinary life. This was especially noticeable at Halifax. The instinct of flight for self-preservation was reflected in the reaction of thousands … (40)
Instinctive tendencies are buried beneath barriers of civilization, but they are buried alive … a very thin veneer over the primitive tendencies which have held sway for ages…. (49) Catastrophe shatters the unsubstantial veneer…. (50)
His thesis also reveals somewhat negative views about the role of women in the response. Though he drew on a full-length book manuscript by his friend Dwight Johnstone (Johnstone had become editor of a Dartmouth newspaper) for much of his descriptive detail, Prince left out passages where Johnstone made positive references to women.
Prince’s negative views of post-impact behaviour are understandable. At the time, about all he had available as references were Gustave Le Bon’s book, The Crowd, and his supervisor Giddings’s views about social welfare. Le Bon had seen the Reign of Terror during the French Revolution and concluded that such events turn people into savages or what he calls the lower orders, which he saw as including women and children. Giddings wrote that social sciences must be used by social workers to weed out those who are cheating the system. In his book, The Scientific Study of Human Society, he wrote:
That brings us back to my main contention, that the major value of a scientific study of society is moral. It is only by methods of making sure (which constitute scientific study) that we can ever know what our public policies, our religious endeavours and our social work are accomplishing. Therefore, nothing but the scientific study of society can save us from the sin, the scandal and the humiliation of obtaining money under false pretenses, for the attainment of righteous ends which, like enough, we are not attaining.
One thing is certain. Our social workers and our uplift organizations do now know what results they are getting, and by what methods they are getting them, in the same rigorous sense in which a well-managed business corporation knows what it is getting out of its personnel, its machines and its methods. (41)
Despite Le Bon’s negative views of women, and Giddings’s views of those on social welfare, it is not clear why Prince avoided praising women: perhaps he felt compelled to take that slant to have his thesis accepted. Certainly in later life he was seen as a supporter of women: he was asked, for example, to preach the sermon when the first Anglican woman was ordained in Nova Scotia. However, many of the ideas in Prince’s thesis were common at the time. Giddings’s views, for example, were part of the philosophy American social workers brought to Canada in the wake of the explosion, and help explain why social-service agencies asked so many questions of those receiving aid and created a blacklist of victims not entitled to assistance. The red tape involved in this approach helps explain why the victims reacted so negatively to the way they were treated.
Prince had other convictions about the explosion. First, he believed disasters shake up society, creating the conditions for social change. That change might be positive or negative, but it would occur. He said that in the same way the sinking of Titanic led to improved procedures for safety on the high seas, the Halifax explosion led to a better Halifax. He tied that claim to his religious convictions. Christ died on the cross to atone for the sins of others. Suffering brings redemption. Catastrophe brings social change. In addition, Prince was convinced, despite substantial evidence to the contrary, that the explosion was a result of German sabotage. In 1931, fourteen years after the explosion, he maintained that view in a talk to the Nova Scotia Historical Society. Prince’s theory that catastrophes inevitably lead to social change remains largely untested, although—as the material in this book will show—there is little to suggest he was right about Halifax. He was definitely wrong about German involvement in the explosion, but his statements reflect the fact that people want to cast blame for such events: they want a scapegoat. For most residents of Halifax, the search for a scapegoat started with the Germans, then switched to the Norwegians, and finally settled on the crew of the French ship, Mont-Blanc.
To do him credit, Prince was aware of how little he had to draw on. Early in Catastrophe and Social Change, he states explicitly that his was the “first attempt to present a … sociological treatment of any great disaster.” He goes on to express the hope that others will follow in his footsteps: “The whole subject is a virgin field in Sociology. Knowledge will grow scientific only after the most faithful examination of many catastrophes…. this little volume on Halifax is offered as a beginning. It is hoped that the many inadequacies … will receive the generous allowances permitted a pioneer” (24).
Since Prince’s dissertation was completed in 1920, there has been a great deal of research into disaster. American scholars like Charles Fritz, E.L. Quarantelli, Russell Dynes, their students, and others have carried out or supervised hundreds of studies of emergency incidents, and have documented their findings in case studies, monographs, articles, book chapters, and books. There is also a growing body of research by Canadian scholars such as J.S. Tyhurst, Ben Singer, Ian Burton, Ken Hewitt, Rick Ponting, and Rod Kueneman, as well as scores of field studies and other publications from those associated with the Emergency Communications Research Unit (ECRU) at Carleton University in Ottawa. With this knowledge, it is now possible to show that Le Bon and Prince, and others like them, were wrong about the way individuals behave in disaster and that much of what Prince concluded was not correct.
The first thing we know about disasters is that getting people to believe warnings—even in the most serious situations—is very difficult. Because people want to believe that nothing will happen to them, they discount warnings when they receive them. If there are the slightest cues that a warning is false—for example, if no one else is reacting—they will ignore the most clear-cut signs of danger. However, when something does happen, individuals behave extremely well. Instead of being dazed, confused, and in shock, they look around them, see what needs to be done, and do it. In a real disaster where there is widespread impact, most initial search and rescue and most transportation to hospital is done by survivors, uninjured and injured. Police, fire, ambulance, and other emergency personnel do not get as involved until later.
While the initial response will be by individuals, it seldom takes long for those individuals to start working together in teams, forming what sociologists call “emergent groups.” Some of these groups will become involved in search and rescue, others in helping the injured. There are other organizational changes in the wake of disaster. Some organizations will expand by adding new members; others will shift from their expected roles to new unexpected tasks. There is some indication that men are more likely than women to get involved in initial response tasks such as search and rescue, but that is not the case if men are not available. Under those conditions, women will do whatever needs to be done. Inevitably, women will also carry the main burden of looking after their families as men rush off to assist others or join the official emergency response.
We now also know that panic is mostly a myth—it is so rare, it is difficult to study. It is true that when there is continuing danger people will try to flee to safety, but flight is not panic. It is perfectly rational for someone to run when the alternative is injury or death, as long as that person does not hurt others in the process. Studies of fires in buildings and of crowd crush incidents in football stadiums show that most people in a threatening situation help others, especially if those others are family members. The rational way individuals behave was shown when occupants calmly evacuated both towers of the World Trade Center on 11 September 2001. Furthermore, despite what is said by Le Bon and Prince, disasters do not turn people into criminals. Crime rates fall in the wake of disaster. Looting is extremely rare.
Finally, to the surprise of those who offer assistance, survivors of disaster do not always welcome with open arms those who come to help them. Studies show that survivors often do not welcome the red tape that frequently comes with such assistance, and that they become increasingly irritated when voluntary relief agencies start asking endless questions, making them feel more like suspects than victims. In any case, survivors, for the most part, tend to look after their own needs. Except where conditions make this impossible, they find their own accommodation, staying with family, neighbours, or friends rather than accepting public accommodation. They also resist attempts to force them to leave even the most devastated areas. They prefer to stay home, even if home is a shattered wreck.
Why do the myths survive? One reason is that the media perpetuate them. The media are so convinced that people panic, they report the absence of panic as if that were unusual. Reporters are so convinced looting occurs, they question officials continually about the steps taken to prevent it. They are also so unaware of the crucial role played by individuals that they usually miss this part of a disaster story. Instead, they report what American disaster scholar E.L. Quarantelli calls the “command post view” of disasters, making it sound as if the response was handled entirely by emergency organizations in a top-down way. In fact, in contrast to the image presented by the media, organizations perform far less well in the wake of disasters than individuals. That is partly because it is easier for individuals to see what needs to be done in their immediate vicinity than for an organization to get a clear view of the overall situation. It is also partly because disasters require difficult choices. If persons are trapped in hundreds of burning homes or the injured are piled up on the doorsteps of hospitals, it is difficult for emergency personnel to choose who should be rescued or treated first.
In the case of looting, there are two other reasons why myths persist. One is that disasters are confused with riots. Disasters hit everyone and usually pull communities together. Riots, in contrast, occur when communities are split—they pit one group in a community against another. The other is that in the wake of disaster people do things that might normally be unacceptable. They break into buildings to get the tools needed for rescue work, or they commandeer vehicles so these can be used as ambulances. Breaking into a private home or seizing a vehicle from its owner would normally be criminal; in the wake of a disaster such actions are not only acceptable, they are admired. The fact that vehicles were seized to be used as ambulances in the wake of the explosion made sense, given what had happened.
One oft-unexpected problem in the wake of disaster is that everyone wants to assist. They do so by sending messages offering to help and, even if there are no replies, by sending supplies to the troubled area and coming to offer assistance. The results, and even the messages themselves, can be overwhelming, creating what two American scholars, Charles Fritz and J.H. Mathewson, call “convergence.” Fritz and Mathewson say convergence comes in three forms: too much information, too many people, and too much materiel. They blame convergence on the media and they suggest news blackouts might reduce some of the problems. Canadian research suggests that even official convergence can be overwhelming, and that convergence can occur with limited media activity. Even today, convergence remains an unsolved problem—after 9/11, officials in New York desperately appealed to outside emergency personnel to stay away.
Since Prince’s thesis was published in 1920, scores of people have written about the 1917 Halifax explosion.1 There are four novels, including Hugh MacLennan’s Canadian classic, Barometer Rising, one short story, and one children’s book. There is an official history by a Dalhousie University professor, Archibald MacMechan. There are detailed accounts by Michael Bird (1962) and by Janet Kitz (1989), who more fully covers the relief effort. And books keep appearing. There is also a great deal of new information about what happened before, during, and after the explosion. Records have turned up in places as far away from Halifax as London, Oslo, Paris, Washington, and Victoria, British Columbia. Naval and army records that were once secret are now available.
It is now possible to take a revised look at the 1917 explosion on the basis of two things: the new information that is available on the explosion and the response to it, and the research during recent decades of wide-ranging natural and man-made disasters that illuminates patterns of human behaviour. This book is the story of the Halifax explosion told in a way that allows us to see that what we now know about disasters applies to 1917, especially when the story of what happened is told using extensive new information. As will become clear, if what happened had been properly documented at the time, it would have been possible to identify most of the things discovered by later scholars. However, it is easier to look back and see “obvious” patterns than it was without the benefit of three-quarters of a century of research. When Prince wrote he had nothing to go on. Now there are scores of works in disaster studies.
Scholars who study emergency incidents classify them into three categories: accidents, disasters, and catastrophes. An accident is something like an air crash or train wreck, something that may cause injury and death, but does not affect a community. It usually occurs at a specific location. A disaster is more like an earthquake, flood, or tornado, where the impact is widespread and a community is disrupted. A catastrophe is an event that not only disrupts a community, it undermines its ability to respond. Samuel Henry Prince was correct when he chose his thesis title, Catastrophe and Social Change. The 1917 Halifax explosion was truly a catastrophe.