WITH HINDSIGHT, AND THE KNOWLEDGE OF WHAT NORMALLY happens in the wake of widespread destructive incidents, it is easy to get an overall sense of the response to the explosion by piecing together the accounts of individual survivors and rescuers. At the time, however, each individual and each group thought theirs was a unique experience. People in the south end, where the damage consisted mainly of broken windows, had no immediate idea of the devastation in the North End, where many homes were flattened, on fire, or both. Firefighters fighting the hundreds of fires in the North End were unaware for hours that the explosion had killed their chief and a number of their colleagues. Soldiers at the Wellington Barracks were so involved in treating their injured that they had no idea the Armouries had been damaged. While some people were moving around and gradually getting a sense of what had happened, many streets were blocked by debris, and before long by flames, and could not be reached.
Once they realized they had survived the explosion and the hail of debris that followed it, most people, if they were at home, began helping family members and neighbours. If they were away from home, they helped those nearest at hand. Most outsiders who came into the North End started working alone. Even the soldiers and sailors who came first, came as individuals, concerned about their families or simply wanting to help. Other people came because they were curious, and, when they realized what had happened, they stayed to assist. Gradually, however, these people teamed up into informal teams or what sociologists call “emergent groups.” Gradually, some took a lead role in directing others and getting them to work more efficiently.
The first concern for the survivors was avoiding the hail of debris that followed the explosions. On Niobe, one man paused to watch for a second, and then tried desperately to find cover:
There was a momentary stillness and then boiler tubes, rivets and jagged plates of steel from the hull were flying all around us. I saw a large piece hit the foremost funnel of our ship and completely flatten it, flying debris destroyed our other three funnels. It was imperative to take cover quickly but I could find none as the crowd in the forecastle deck must have thought the same thing. Every conceivable hole and corner was occupied. Some were hanging down ventilators. There was nothing for me to do but run the whole length of the deck to reach the other companionway. I would be behind armour and safe.
Far below in the ship, William Crossman from Prince Edward Island was in the engine room of Niobe when Mont-Blanc exploded. He got on deck as quickly as he could, and there he found almost everyone covered in blood. Then, seeing the destruction all through the North End where he lived, he left his ship. “I went to the North where my friends lived,” he said, “and all you could see was dead people laying around everywhere and I did all I could to help the wounded people.”
Many on Niobe lived in Halifax with their families and their homes were in the North End. When the explosion hit, their first thought was of their wives, children, and friends. As some fled their ship to help the wounded, a warrant officer, Gunner William O’Reilly, got on a megaphone and ordered all hands “to stand fast and keep cool.” He told the men to remember the Birkenhead, a Royal Navy frigate that sank off the coast of South Africa in February 1852 while acting as a troop ship with 436 lives lost. Presumably O’Reilly saw the men as in panic and thought the loss of life from Birkenhead was also the result of panic. A young rating, A.H. Wickens, recalled nearly forty years later that one of the crew “yells back at him, to hell with you and the Birkenhead we got wives and kids ashore, so there was a general stampede for the gangplank which was somewhat out of kilter, it was good thing these ratings took the law into their own hands, they did a lot of good saving lives and putting out fires.”
Normally, “breaking ship”—leaving without permission—is a severe breach of discipline, but the circumstances were anything but normal. Captain Percy Newcombe, the Royal Navy officer seconded to the Canadian navy to command Niobe, emphasized the terrifying shock of the blast, and the fact that the bulk of his ship’s people nevertheless did well. Newcombe was qualified to judge—he had seen combat and had been severely injured in the Gallipoli campaign in 1915. But Newcombe had never experienced anything like the heaving of the ship by the explosion and tidal wave. Moreover, Niobe, as he explained to MacMechan in an interview a few weeks later, was not “organized as a ship”—that is, with a cohesive crew built around seasoned junior and senior leaders and technical specialists who managed all routines with the care and precision needed for operations at sea. Rather, as a floating barracks, Niobe housed many people new to the navy who were undergoing training. It was some of these inexperienced personnel, together with some of the older hands whose families were living in the North End, who jumped ship.
What impressed Newcombe was the cool professionalism and courage of many of the crew. When the tidal wave washed some sailors from Niobe off the gangplank and into the harbour, a warrant officer standing on the dock pulled off his coat and dived in after them. He was unable to reach them and had to swim back to the docks before he succumbed to the cold water. By jumping into Niobe’s cutter, however, Gunner O’Reilly was able to pull some of the sailors to safety. In addition, as soon as the debris stopped falling, Acting Gunner John T. Gammon and Able-Bodied Seaman W.G. Critch rescued two stranded divers who had been working over the side at the time of the explosion. They were trapped underwater with their lines dangerously entangled. Gammon “and the pumping party were blown yards from the pump, on which the shed had collapsed. The first man to recover [Critch] rushed to the pump, got it going with one hand, while holding up the roof with the other. [Gammon] dashed down the divers’ ladder … struggled desperately to disentangle the divers’ breast-ropes and air pipes.” Though it usually took four people to operate the pump, the two men managed to save the divers.
On shore, Willet Brock, who had fled the Royal Naval College, had no place to go for shelter against the debris: “When I reached the lawn, I threw myself on my face whether from instinct or from subconsciously following the example of others I don’t know.… There were large quantities of rivets, pieces of plate, and other debris whizzing through the air and they caused me to wonder if the Germans were raiding the town. Later I dug up some rivets from the lawn to use as souvenirs.” Some of that debris travelled an incredible distance. One of Mont-Blanc’s funnels flew over the two Canadian submarines as if it were a low-flying aircraft. One of her two guns sailed over 3 kilometres. Her anchor flew 3.2 kilometres through the air before landing near the Northwest Arm. There were thousands of smaller pieces of debris.
The shock waves created other debris. For example, as windows shattered and buildings came apart, glass and other debris showered on those below, whether they were outside or inside. Fred McCullum was in his teller’s cage at the Bank of Nova Scotia: “A lot of our staff were badly hit by flying glass. I got hit all over the face but I never got cut. It never as much as drew the blood. By the time the glass stopped falling on my cage [there was a glass skylight above it] everybody was in the basement. I hopped under my desk as quick as I could gather sense and saved myself: everyone expected to see me killed but my cage saved my life.”
Nine-year-old Kelly Morton was outside. He had just finished walking the two blocks from his home to his school when the explosion occurred. “I … was waiting with other kids at the side entrance to enter the building when the ear-splitting blast threw us to the ground. We got up and ran in zigzag directions like ants whose sovereign anthill had been stepped on by a giant foot. It was fortunate that we did take to the open field because, if we had attempted to shelter near the building, we would have been struck by the flying glass and debris shot from the windows above.”
Most people acted instinctively, doing their best to save themselves. A few tried to protect others. Young Gertrude McAuley was with her father at the time. Her first thought was her father’s safety. Her sister, Marjorie, tells what happened: “When the explosion came, Gertie and Daddy lay on their faces until it was over. Then Gertie heard something coming through the air. She thought it would hit Poppa on the head so she crawled over and kind of laid on his head. It came down and hit her in the back.”
One of the few dazed by what happened was George Murphy, a surgeon at the Victoria General Hospital. Murphy was waiting for a patient to be anaesthetized for a gall bladder operation when he heard a rumbling. He went to the window and the skylight fell on his head: “I instinctively put my hands to my head. I thought the hallway became dark and I had difficulty in keeping my feet. I now have a hazy recollection of moving along the hall and down the stairways, but I do not remember seeing anyone en route. With the first crash, I got the impression that the building was collapsing, and the thing to do was get out of it.” Murphy said that as soon as he got outside, the “brisk morning air” brought him to his senses. He went back inside for treatment.
One reason the myth survives that panic occurs in disasters is that flight behaviour is often confused with panic. The sailor who ran along the deck of Niobe did not push others out of the way. He just kept running and looking until he found a place to hide. That was not panic—it was plain common sense. Those who dug their way out of damaged buildings were also behaving sensibly. There are only three reports from Halifax that suggest people may have acted without regard to others. The first involved an army drill sergeant in the Armouries:
At five past nine o’clock to be exact there was a tremor, and the sergeant who was drilling us, a real “live” wire, a little Canadian “gym” instructor who had served two years in France was the first to notice it. He “halted” us and asked if we had noticed it. We replied we did but nobody seemed to think anything more about it so we proceeded with our drill.
We had been marching in two ranks from the east to the west side of the Armoury on which a number of very large windows were, and were as close to the walls as was possible when the order “about turn” was given. A very lucky order indeed, for us. We had proceeded about three or four yards away from the windows when that terrible crash … that dull reverberating roar, fell upon our ears …
On recovering my senses and hearing for I was deaf for several minutes. All was silence, all was darkness. A choking, blinding, impenetrable cloud of dust filled the Armoury, turning day into night. After a while through a hole in the roof, a little daylight could be seen, directly over where I was. I saw the form of my little Canadian friend, the “gym” instructor, go by at a great pace, whereto I did not know; but I afterwards learned he had made for the cellar as he knew the Armoury and I did not.
Though the sergeant forgot his duty and ran for cover, he did not push anyone out of the way to get where he was going. The only place that may have happened was at the Halifax Ladies’ College, where the students were in the gymnasium for prayers when the building shook. In the general rush for the exits, one student, Jean Gunn, suffered minor injuries. The only place where there was terrified flight was at the Nova Scotia Hospital for the mentally ill. When the building shook and glass flew across rooms, some patients were so frightened that they jumped through the open windows. One woman escaped.
The Halifax explosion instantly killed roughly a thousand people, fatally injured several hundred more, and trapped 500 to 600 in burning wreckage, most of whom died within minutes. Some 9000 survivors were left with everything from burns and severe lacerations, to broken bones, cuts, and bruises. Most of the injured were in the North End, where those at home were women, preschool children, and the elderly. Inevitably, the first to help others were the women.
Gladys Harris was downstairs and her four children—Edward, eight, Nora, six, Alice, five, and Dorothy, ten months—were upstairs. The explosion wrecked the stairs. Even though she was injured, Harris managed to make her way upstairs and get her children out of the house. “I had to take them one by one down the shattered stairway,” she said. “They were frightened to death. How I ever did it is a wonder.” Harris not only rescued her children, she found blankets to wrap them in. Then she took them to the Citadel, where soldiers gave them shelter and a hot drink. After that, she left for Boston, vowing never to return.
Violet Smith was also alone, in her case with two children—and she was seven months pregnant. Despite her condition, when she found the door to her house jammed shut she mustered the strength to wrestle it open. She then started off on foot toward her husband’s store, with a child under each arm. “People offered to carry the children for me but I wouldn’t let them. I’m glad I didn’t,” she says. “A lot of people lost their children that way.” Smith’s fears were valid: one of the ads that ran later in the Halifax Herald asked for information about two-year-old Robert Myers of 10 Union Street. He was taken from his mother at Victoria General the morning of the explosion.
Marjorie McAuley was at home with her brother, Donald, her two sisters, Ethel and Violet, and her mother. Her father and one other sister were elsewhere. When Mont-Blanc exploded, only Marjorie escaped injury. Her sisters were cut by flying glass, her brother was trapped under debris, and her mother was cut to the bone when she tried to climb out the shattered door of the house. Marjorie helped all of them: “Ethel’s face and clothes were all blood. Violet’s hands were all bloody and Donald’s nose was bleeding. I pulled Donald out from under a door…. Then I went up and got clean clothes and wrapped Ethel’s face and Violet’s hands up…. I carried bedclothes and everything we could get our hands on to the school. By this time, the houses were burning … so we went back and forth from the house to the school house carrying everything we could get our hands on.”
While people in the same house did most of the initial rescuing, it was not long before survivors began helping their neighbours. Two sisters survived the explosion, but their father did not. When they found him dead, they left his body and went to help a neighbour, a Methodist minister named William Swetnam. Swetnam’s wife and son had been killed in the explosion, but his daughter, Dorothy, was trapped in burning wreckage. Swetnam was trying to cut away the debris so he could reach her before the flames did. The sisters pulled the child to safety. Dorothy Swetnam Hare, who died in 2002, heard the author of Shattered City, Janet Kitz, recount her story in a talk at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, in Halifax.
Alfred Monaghan, his aunt, and his mother were trapped when their backdoor key was blown from the lock, and a stove shifted and blocked their front door. Monaghan remembers the neighbours coming to help: “They managed to force the front door open and to put the hall stove back in place. We were fortunate that it had not been completely knocked over on its side. We were so lucky that the only windows broken in our house were the three windows in the parlour, in a bay window…. The glass was shattered and spread all over the room.” The stove blocking the door was a pot-bellied Isinglass, the main source of heat for many homes. Like the Monaghans, most families had another stove for cooking.
In many homes, when a stove moved, it tipped over and started a fire. Pastor George Adam from Toronto was driven around the North End by Harry McLean of Cook Construction, contractor for the new ocean terminals at the south end of the waterfront. “Houses had been blown over by the hundreds,” he said, and “many [residents], unable to break their way out, were burned to death.” Charles Upham managed to rescue two of his injured children, but his wife and three others burned to death. Jenny Heisler has a similar memory. She was working as a nursemaid and managed to keep the baby she was holding from being burned by the scalding water on the stove. But she, the baby, and the baby’s mother were trapped upstairs and the stairs were gone. They were rescued by the child’s grandparents, who came with a ladder. As Heisler climbed down, she could hear two children crying for help in the house next door. They died before anyone reached them.
Soon, new arrivals joined family members and neighbours. These people were mainly, but not all, men. These included soldiers; sailors from Niobe and other ships in harbour; men and women who rushed from work to search for their families; and men and women from the downtown hotels and offices. Joseph Hinch had seen the collision and fire and was blinded in one eye from a splinter from the Mont-Blanc. Still, he headed for home. As he did so, he heard a man screaming for help. The man was trapped in burning wreckage and wanted someone to get him out or to kill him before he burned to death. Hinch and some others tried to pull him free, but were unable to do so. Similarly, Margaret Mooney left work and headed toward her home in the North End. Before she got there, she met a woman who told her that her family had been taken to hospital, so she and a Mrs. Murphy started pulling people from the wreckage. One was a Mrs. Austin, whom she knew. They laid Mrs. Austin on a counter at a nearby shop, where she died.
Some soldiers happened to be in the area. Lance-Corporal Andrew Spicer of No. 6 Special Service Company, CEF, for example, was passing by a building on Union Street that was damaged by the explosion. He rescued a young woman. Private C.G. Canning pulled a child from a wrecked home. Gunner J.J. Spruce, of the 10th Siege Battery, CEF, got so badly burned rescuing a ten-year-old child that he spent a month in hospital. Duncan Grey, a former soldier who had been “inspecting shells in a shed on the waterfront” and “barely escape before the building collapsed,” told his story to the Canadian Press the day after the explosion:
I have been in the trenches in France. I have gone “over the top.” Friends and comrades have been shot in my presence. I have seen scores of men lying dead in the battlefield, but the sight that greeted me yesterday was a thousand times worse and far more pathetic.
I saw people lying under timbers, stones and other debris; some battered beyond recognition, others groaning in their last agonies.
Half strangled by the smoke, I kept pulling out bodies from under beams and fallen chimneys and under wreckage. Some of the bodies were without clothing. Many were so mutilated that it was difficult to realize they were human. Some men were virtually demented. Thinking only of their wives and children, they dashed about in the burning debris hazarding their lives with the single thought of rescuing them.
I shall never forget how I felt in that hour. I saw little kiddies running about, some with blood streaming from them. All were crying for their parents, while fathers and mothers raced about in frenzy. I have never seen anything so pathetic even on the battlefield.6
Most of the soldiers who came from elsewhere at first came on their own. Among them was a recruit from the Armouries: “Now to the rescue. I wish it could be understood that although we were soldiers there was no command given to go to the rescue. This was absolutely and entirely outside our line of duty as soldiers…. Not one of that gallant little band needed a command (even if commands could be given) to go to the rescue of their fellow human beings. We proceeded towards the scene of the disaster, some fellows without their great coats, some without their caps, but nearly all wearing bandages of some sort or other.”
Major-General Benson said that the army made a controlled response “as soon as the location and nature of the disaster were determined.” The immediate difficulty was that the Wellington Barracks, the main garrison within the city, was itself at ground zero. The buildings were wrecked and there were hundreds of injuries to soldiers and their families. There were also fires. At the barracks, for example, two sergeants, Horace Croscup and Edward Hamilton, got a captain, Jesse Turner, out of the ruins moments before fire reached him. (All three were members of No. 6 Special Service Company, having volunteered for the CEF, but became unfit to go overseas because of illness or injury during training and were therefore assigned to home service.)
The quickest large-scale response came from the Armouries, led by Captain John Armitage, the officer responsible for the CEF and British Expeditionary Force (BEF) recruits training there. He was a long-serving member of the Canadian permanent force who had gone overseas with the CEF in 1914 and returned after being gassed and wounded by a shell fragment in 1915. Although badly cut in the head by debris from the explosion, he rounded up 150 soldiers, many also injured, and within a half-hour had them bandaged and on their way to assist the fire department. His sergeant-major worked all day with three broken ribs. The other main stations for troops were more than ten kilometres from the Halifax waterfront on McNabs Island and at York Redoubt, and boat transport had to be arranged. The first body of troops, a hundred members of the Princess Louise Fusiliers from York Redoubt, reached King’s Wharf to the south of the devastated area about 11 a.m., and 162 soldiers from the Halifax Rifles, in garrison on McNabs Island, sailed sometime before noon and would have arrived within the hour.
Before the soldiers arrived in the North End, one response unit had come from the nearby prison. A staff member and four prisoners used two teams to drive the injured to hospital. But most of the initial response was by individuals. For example, William Baxter wandered toward the North End out of curiosity, and then started to help when he saw how bad things were: “Towards Citadel Hill we wended our way and the further we went the more horrible the aftermath. Improvised stretchers met us on both sides converging into the main thoroughfares from the highways and byways. Blood was everywhere dripping, hideous wounds still unhid from prying eyes. But most of the unfortunate could hobble or walk. We kept going.” Baxter soon teamed up with others, as did Roy Laing from the Royal Bank. When Laing found five soldiers, including a sergeant, doing nothing to assist an injured man, he took charge. He found a boat and prepared to set off for the dock nearest the hospital by boat. Just then, a second injured man appeared. One of the two died before the group reached hospital, the other was alive.
The incoming Boston Express escaped serious damage and its conductor kept its six cars—a baggage car, a postal car, a first-class passenger car and a second-class car, and two Pullman cars (sleepers)—moving until it reached what was known as Willow Park Junction, beside the Black settlement of Africville. A passenger, A.S. Goldberg, described the scene: “When we got to Africville the train made a complete stop. We got out and we were horrified at the sight. The platform of the railway station was crowded with wounded people, most of them children. Many of the children were groping about. They could not see. Their eyes were filled with small bits of glass. I noticed, too, that most of the children were cut about the neck. It seemed just as if a keen knife-edge had slashed each little throat.” The passengers took axes from the train and used them to chop away at the wreckage of nearby homes. They estimated that they rescued forty to sixty people.
A few people took time to get involved because they had no idea of the extent of the damage. Samuel Henry Prince and his companion had cleaned up the broken glass before going outside for a look. Dorothy McMurray had the same experience. “We all set to work with brooms,” she recalls, “sweeping up the dangerous glass splinters.” During that cleaning up, the streets in the south end of the city remained empty—so empty that author Hugh MacLennan, a ten-year-old schoolboy at the time, remarked on the stillness when he reminisced about that morning in a school publication. After cleaning up the glass, Prince ended up using his Hupmobile as an ambulance. McMurray, as a fully trained member of St. John Ambulance, headed for Camp Hill Hospital.
A few, very few, survivors were too stunned by their own experience to do much of anything. That was true, for example, of the cadets at the Royal Naval College: “Somehow I expected to find officers or at least one duty officer calmly waiting on the road to tell us what to do. We had become used to that, and it seemed very disconcerting to find no one there. We decided that they were either dead or streaming out with us: no one was thinking clearly but I later realized that we should have gone back to find out. However, we were very young and the explosion had stupefied everyone.” Other naval personnel, however, did what they could. Niobe rushed about seventy sailors to the army’s artillery magazines on the waterfront immediately to the north of the dockyard, where the encroachment of fires on the damaged buildings threatened a further disaster. Walter Critch, who had just saved the divers off the ship’s side, was one of the group: “My first job, in company with several others, was to assist several sailors who were removing small cases of ammunition stored in huts to a safe place right on the water front. Fires were raging in all directions; ‘live wires’ were strewn all over the place. It was a ‘ticklish’ job but thanks to the goodness of God nothing happened.”
The Canadian patrol vessels moored at or near the dockyard, none of which had been severely damaged, took on board casualties for treatment. Tugs and some of the recently arrived wooden drifters ferried the most severe casualties to the south end of the waterfront for transport to hospital, or out to the British and American warships. These efforts were organized by Captain Pasco, assisted by Captain Hose, who were on the move through the dockyard surveying damage and directing recovery operations. Pasco had been injured in the face by flying glass, but carried on until late in the morning when the swelling of his wounds interfered with his vision. He turned command over to Hose, who had been in Niobe at the time of the explosion and escaped injury by getting into an armoured space as the debris fell.7
Parties of sailors from the Changuinola and Knight Templar used boats to reach the dockyard by about 9:30 a.m., and parties from the USCG Morrill and USS Old Colony appear to have arrived at around the same time. The British and American sailors assisted the Canadian naval personnel and soldiers in recovering casualties in the dockyard, removing artillery shells from the North Ordnance Yard magazine, fighting fires, and rescuing people from the flaming buildings of the North End. The railway on the east side of the dockyard acted as a firebreak, allowing the rescue personnel a somewhat secure base, although by 11 a.m., as the conflagration grew to its greatest intensity, it became difficult to move along the tracks. The British and American seamen encountered the same problems as everyone else—too much to do, too few to do it. Lieutenant H. Percival, Royal Naval Reserve, leader of one of the parties from Changuinola, said he tried to get some soldiers to work with his sailors, but “unfortunately the demand exceeded the supply.” He and his team, like other parties, pulled people from the burning wreckage, but watched others burn to death when houses collapsed before they could reach them. Temporary Lieutenant S.W. Baker, Royal Naval Reserve, the leader of another party from Changuinola, later confided to a shipmate that he wished he had been able to shoot some of those to end their agony.
J.P.D. Llwyd, the dean of All Saints Cathedral, described the scene when he reached the North End at about 10 a.m.: “The houses were mere heaps of boards with, here and there, bits of furniture showing themselves. The whole of the area was practically in flames. I found a relief party of soldiers taking out the wounded with a young Roman priest helping them. I joined the party and assisted in the taking out of a number of poor crushed and mangled forms, many of whom must have died before they reached hospital. They were being taken down to the shore line and placed on tugs sent to convey them to one of the ships [USS Old Colony], which was being used as a hospital.”
The most organized response was in Dartmouth. When Mont-Blanc exploded, the chief engineer from the Highflyer, Commander John W. Hopkyns, was ashore running a training program for fifty ratings from the engine room. He spent the next six hours directing his sailors in a door-to-door search of the damaged homes. While some picked up injured and carried them to hospital, others collected extra beds and bedding to make sure the hospital was properly stocked. A number of crew with first-aid training took over a school and started bandaging injured children. At 3 p.m., the sailors were called back to the Highflyer when the captain decided to make steam on the main engines. When they returned, they brought along the crew from Mont-Blanc. (There was a suspicion Mont-Blanc’s crew had deliberately set their ship on fire before fleeing.)
While others were worried about their loved ones or doing their best to assist strangers, Rear-Admiral Chambers worried about the harbour’s ability to sustain the vital convoy operations. He had a war to fight and Halifax was an important part of that war. He boarded the tug Maggie so he could find out how badly the explosion affected the harbour. After visiting Changuinola and Highflyer, he had Maggie’s captain take him to Bedford Basin so he could check the ships waiting for convoy. He found that there was no significant damage to any ships loaded and awaiting convoy. Bedford Basin proved to be an entirely safe anchorage.
On the way back, Chambers noticed someone waving from shore in the area around the Richmond Depot. As the Maggie moved closer, the admiral realized the wreckage on top of Pier 9 was Hilford. He found two of Hilford’s crew alive and, with them, the body of his convoy officer, Lieutenant-Commander Murray. Because the survivors needed medical attention and Murray was dead, Chambers re-boarded the tug with the injured, leaving his assistant’s body behind. He told London, “There could be no question either as to the identity or the impossibility of life existing.” (The stop proved especially painful not just for Chambers, but for Captain Alexander Gordon of Maggie. Not only did he own Hilford, and know everyone on board, he had been unable to insure her. His contract with the Admiralty did not cover his loss.)
After returning from his survey, Chambers went to the dockyard at about 12:30 p.m. to consult with Captain Hose, now the senior Canadian naval officer because of Captain Pasco’s injury. Chambers had authority only over convoy arrangements, and none over Canadian navy facilities and resources. Seeing that Hose had his hands full in the “very badly shattered” dockyard, Chambers tactfully asked if he might speak for Hose in coordinating more general recovery measures with the city government and the army. Hose was “very glad” to have this help, which explains why Chambers, a Royal Navy officer, and not Hose, now the top Canadian naval officer on the scene, joined in the subsequent meetings with General Benson and municipal leaders. Hose quickly agreed to Chambers’s request to have soundings taken in the Narrows to make certain there was no obstruction to shipping. Until that was done, no ship would be allowed in or out of the Narrows. At 6 p.m., Hose reported the channel was clear.
Chambers, during his visit to Hose, noted that the fires near the dockyard were being brought under control but raging “rather fiercely” to the north near the dry dock, where Picton had been. When the crew from Changuinola took the surviving longshoremen from Picton, they left the ship, which was partly flooded and not apparently an immediate danger. By the time Chambers arrived he noted with evident relief that the ship, with her cargo of ammunition, had been towed out into the harbour and thus clear of the spreading fire. Picton’s removal had been achieved by the local manager of the Furness-Withy line, James W. Harrison. He refused to talk about it, but he wrote an account for J.E. Furness. Harrison said he started for the harbour by car before the explosion. He heard that a ship carrying munitions had been in a collision and he wanted to assist in towing it. Once the explosion occurred, he was forced by police and soldiers to load his car with injured. Finally, he persuaded a towboat captain to take him on board, but the man was reluctant to go near Picton:
I ordered the captain of the towboat alongside. For some time, he refused to go near her, as steam and smoke were visible coming from the after part of the bridge. However, after considerable time I got alongside and got on board. Two men from the tow boat followed me. I ordered the tow boat to make a rope fast anywhere they could near the bow of the Picton at the same time the two men and I got to work and cut the moorings, both wire and manilla rope.
For some time I was unable to find out where the smoke was coming from, but eventually found out that it was coming from burning debris that evidently had blown on board or found its way on board when the burning sheds fell. This I personally threw overboard. The Picton’s bow was within a few yards of the burning pier. Her hatches had all been blown off and the explosive matter in the holds was all exposed. I examined the holds to see if there were any burning embers and at the same time to see if there were any injured men.
I found nothing and came up again and completed, with assistance of the two men, to cut adrift the moorings and ordered the towboat to commence towing…. Eventually I hailed two more tow boats and it took the whole three of them to haul the Picton from the wreckage of the wharves. When we got the steamer well clear of the range of fire, I had another anchor dropped down to hold her…. The ship was at this time, in my opinion, safe.
(Two days later, Harrison was ordered to have Picton beached.)
Harrison’s feat in towing Picton to safety in fact followed closely on a similar act of courageous seamanship in the waters off the dry dock during the late morning of 6 December. Highflyer’s captain was alarmed to see the large naval tug Musquash, with a gun and ammunition on board, in flames and drifting down toward Picton. He called on a nearby civilian tugboat to tow Musquash away from the shore, but the crew refused to board the burning vessel. Two of Highflyer’s people, Leading Seaman Thomas Davis and Able Seaman Robert Stone, immediately volunteered, and climbed into the tug. On the other side of the Narrows, the British seamen boarded Musquash and secured the towing line so she could be pulled away from the dangerous shore. The pumper Lee then arrived. Davis and Stone took the line to transfer the tow to Lee, retrieved the scorched ammunition and dumped it into the harbour, and broke open the doors to the spaces that were on fire so that Lee’s hoses were able to extinguish the flames. Musquash suffered only superficial damage, and they thus saved a valuable vessel at a time when Allied navies were short of powerful seagoing tugs. Their captain recommended them for the Albert Medal. “At any moment,” he said, “the ammunition might have exploded.” The King presented them with the medal on 23 March 1918. (Those and other shells thrown into harbour the day of the explosion keep appearing even today. Occasionally, when a ship raises its anchor, an old shell is hooked on.)
Not everyone was so heroic, or so helpful. Sailors from Niobe boarded a ship that was dragging its anchor. At first, they found no sign of life. In fact, one of them, while trying to make his way across the deck, stepped on something, looked down, and discovered it was a body. After trying to see their way with matches, the sailors finally found a lamp below decks. There, they found two of the ship’s crew lying injured in a bunk: “Those two men were the only living men on the boat and they were both injured in their bunks. What could we do? We couldn’t do nothing? We could not do nothing. We couldn’t take them away. There was thousands in Halifax at that time that had no beds, no houses, all blown to smithereens. We couldn’t do nothing with those men and we just left them there and made a report back to Niobe.” The sailors did not know if those receiving their report ever sent anyone to help the two injured men.