Halifax, December 6, 1917, 3:00 p.m.
In addition to the Mont-Blanc and the Imo, twenty-six of the ships and boats in Halifax harbour on the morning of December 6 suffered damages, while the explosion sank three others.1 Both HMCS Niobe and HMS Highflyer, two of the largest and most visible warships in the harbour, were among the vessels damaged.
Wreckage littered Niobe’s deck. Two of the ship’s four funnels were down, and there were gaping holes in her superstructure and stanchions. Some of the nineteen men felled by the blast were still alive, but others had died instantly. Their crewmates who had escaped serious injury quickly set about cleaning up the damage, tending to the wounded, and recovering the bodies of the dead. Other men helped deal with emergencies in the Naval Dockyard and surrounding area. Teams of sailors working under the direction of Captain Walter Hose, CXO Evan Wyatt, and other RCN officers battled fires, rescued blast survivors, and recovered bodies. A contingent of sailors—Able Seaman Bert Griffith among them—volunteered to help remove explosives from the Wellington Barracks magazine, which was ablaze.
Although Highflyer was a front-line fighting ship with armour plating six inches thick in places, she suffered damage to her superstructure. The explosion tore a hole on the ship’s starboard side and wrecked the captain’s upper deck cabin and the chart house. Fifty sailors had suffered injuries, while three men died. In addition, Commander Tom Triggs and those half-dozen sailors who had ventured out in Highflyer’s whaler to help fight the fire aboard the Mont-Blanc were missing and presumed dead. Their mates, who searched for them later, found “no trace of [most of] . . . the whaler’s crew.”2 Searchers did find Able Seaman William Becker, who was more dead than alive after washing up on the Dartmouth shore. Unconscious and in shock, he suffered from hypothermia. His rescuers carried him to some nearby railway tracks where they saved his life by warming his body with heat from a locomotive’s firebox.
It was also in Dartmouth that the British naval search party encountered the crew of the Mont-Blanc. The British sailors escorted the Frenchmen to Highflyer, where they joined the crew of the Imo in protective custody. Later that afternoon, Le Médec and his men would take refuge in the home of the French consul while they waited to learn what would happen next. In far-off Ottawa, that decision had already been made.
WITHIN HOURS OF the news of the explosion in Halifax, federal government bureaucrats were scrambling to formulate plans for a public inquiry. Crew members from both the Imo and the Mont-Blanc would be called on to testify before they would be allowed to go home.
Alexander Johnston, a deputy minister in the Ministry of Marine and Fisheries, was quick to set the wheels in motion to launch such a review of the events of December 6. Johnston, a fifty-year-old Cape Breton native, had served as the local member in both the Nova Scotia House of Assembly and the federal Parliament. He also owned the daily newspaper in Sydney. As such, he was well aware of the political situation in his home province; with a bitter election campaign under way, Prime Minister Robert Borden was in a delicate position. Halifax was Borden’s home, and it was his former riding. “Arguably [he had] failed to protect his people from terrible harm. Should blame be laid at federal feet, there would be huge financial and political consequences.”3
Johnston called Captain Louis Auguste Demers, “the redoubtable and much feared” Dominion Wreck Commissioner.4 His job was to investigate shipping accidents that happened in Canadian waters, and he did so with the zeal of an inquisitor rooting out heresy. When an incident was minor, Demers held a hearing over which he or a delegate would preside. If there was considerable damage and loss of life, or if the accident was high profile—the 1914 sinking in the St. Lawrence River of the passenger liner Empress of Ireland being a prime example—the process was more complicated.
The Canada Shipping Act gave the minister of Marine and Fisheries discretionary authority to launch a formal inquiry.5 When that happened, Demers helped the deputy minister organize proceedings, and if needed, he acted as a nautical advisor to the presiding judge.
In the wake of the disaster in Halifax, Johnston and Demers immediately began making plans for an inquiry. Johnston had been a deputy minister for seven years and knew that his boss, Minister of Marine and Fisheries Charles C. Ballantyne, was a political novice. When Borden appointed him to cabinet in October 1917, the Montreal businessman was still trying to win a seat in Parliament; he would be one of the handful of Unionist MPs from Quebec who won their seats in the election on December 17. Given his inexperience, Ballantyne had no choice but to depend on his deputy ministers for guidance; George Desbarats was in charge of Naval Services; Alexander Johnston oversaw Marine and Fisheries.
Time was of the essence for Ballantyne and the Borden government in terms of coming to grips with the disaster in Halifax. In addition to the domestic political concerns, Halifax was Canada’s most important port in the Allied war effort. Thus, “pressure came directly from the top, with instructions from Prime Minister Borden to Minister of Marine [Charles] Ballantyne that the investigation be instituted without delay.”6 Left unsaid, but understood by everyone involved, was the implicit message that the “blame game” had begun in earnest.
SENIOR BRITISH AND CANADIAN naval officials, politicians, Halifax newspapers, and the city residents were all demanding an explanation of how things could ever have gone so horribly wrong in Halifax harbour. Rumours ran rampant.
With German U-boat activity in the North Atlantic spiking, many people suspected the explosion was the work of saboteurs. To unsophisticated ears in Halifax, the accents of the Imo’s Norwegian crewmen sounded German. That notion added fuel to suspicions that a German agent had murdered pilot William Hayes and that the killer had been in control of the Norwegian ship as it entered the Narrows. Others in Halifax believed—or wanted to believe—that the Mont-Blanc’s captain and crew were responsible for the collision. “Only four months earlier, Canada had passed a Conscription Act despite strong opposition from the province of Quebec. It was easy for the local populace to focus its anti-French sentiments on the Mont-Blanc.”7 Captain Le Médec and his crew, well aware of the hostility, kept a low profile and welcomed police protection. On the afternoon of December 6, having made his way to the home of Emile Gaboury, the French consul in Halifax, Le Médec set about organizing his defence to the questions he would inevitably be obliged to answer. Le Médec had initially declined to speak with journalists; however, on December 10 he issued a three-page written statement in hopes of countering some of the malicious rumours about the role he and pilot Mackey had played in the events of December 6. The captain’s statement—which he would repeat almost verbatim when he was called to the witness stand at the public inquiry into the disaster—was published in the Boston Herald-Journal on December 11 and reprinted in newspapers across the United States and Canada.8
NO LESS DISMAYING than concerns about how the disaster in Halifax had happened were a couple of vexing questions. For one, why had the French ship, a rusting tramp steamer laden with a devil’s cargo of munitions, ever been allowed to enter Halifax harbour? For another—and this question cut to the core of the matter: who was at fault for the collision? Apart from the political imperatives that were in play, the answer to that latter question was vital for both moral and legal reasons. Knowing who had been responsible would channel people’s anger and would dictate who would ultimately pay when it came time to assess liability.
Wreck Commission inquiries did not normally make findings of negligence. “Marine inquiries were entrenched within the judicial system and often [were] the prelude to corrective action, resolution of insurance claims, and subsequent litigation.”9 However, the legal distinction between an inquiry and a trial to determine “who done it” was lost on most people. In the disaster’s aftermath, officials in Ottawa knew that a public inquiry would divert attention and shift blame away from the federal government and senior naval commanders in Halifax. Both wore a measure of blame for the disaster. They had been lax in enforcing safety regulations that would have prevented a munitions ship such as the Mont-Blanc from ever entering the harbour; they had failed to clarify—let alone define—the chain of naval command in Halifax or the relationship between senior naval officers and the civilian harbour commission and pilots. Given the federal government’s priorities and political motivations, it was inevitable that there would be an inquiry sooner rather than later, and also that there would be enormous pressure on the presiding judge to have an expanded mandate.
THE LOGISTICAL DETAILS to be sorted out before a Wreck Commission inquiry could begin were myriad. Time was of the essence, and so the day after the disaster, Deputy Minister Johnston retained Halifax lawyer William A. Henry to act as Crown counsel at the inquiry. Johnston wanted the proceedings to begin just six days hence, on December 13. It was a tall order, but Henry was up to the challenge.
The fifty-four-year-old Antigonish native was one of Halifax’s most prominent and skilled lawyers. The son of a Father of Confederation who had also served as one of the inaugural judges of the Supreme Court of Canada, William Henry had received his early education in France and Scotland before studying law at Harvard, Cambridge, and Dalhousie. By 1917, he had been a lawyer for thirty-seven years. His role in organizing the Wreck Commission inquiry would be one of the biggest challenges of his career.
Provincial and municipal politicians, the public, and the media, in particular the ever-strident Herald newspaper, were demanding that the proceeding focus on the question of guilt—who had been responsible for the disaster?—and why the Mont-Blanc and her deadly cargo had been allowed into Halifax harbour. Part and parcel with both concerns, there were loud calls for sweeping reform of the port’s pilotage system.
Henry wrote to Deputy Minister Johnston to caution him how “improper” it would be for the Wreck Commission—or any Canadian government inquiry—to delve into issues relating to the details of how Allied ships were transporting munitions to Europe in wartime. Halifax was a Canadian port, but Rear Admiral Chambers and his RN officers directed all convoy operations originating there. As for the Mont-Blanc, Henry reminded Johnston that the French ship had been carrying American-made munitions, which had been loaded in New York. Further complicating matters, the Mont-Blanc had sailed under British Admiralty orders. “The war interests . . . of our greatest allies are involved, which would make, I think, the holding of . . . an investigation a very delicate matter,” Henry advised.10
He went on to advise the deputy minister that any reorganization of the Halifax harbour pilotage—sorely needed though it might be—was a matter beyond the Wreck Commission’s jurisdiction. If Ottawa was intent on broaching such a thorny issue, Henry recommended that it do so in a separate proceeding. As for the suggestion that the planned inquiry should affix blame for the Halifax harbour explosion, Henry was more sanguine. There was nothing, he opined, to stand in the way of the Wreck Commission rendering a verdict. That view was shared by Judge Arthur Drysdale, the jurist who would preside over the inquiry. Drysdale already had some very definite ideas on what matters the Wreck Commission inquiry could and should deal with. Like most Haligonians, he demanded to know who had been responsible for the events of December 6.