Wrecked and Remembered: Two Canadian Catastrophes and their Stories in Stone
The natural beauty of Canada can seem almost unreal. Mountains meet glaciers and dense, sprawling forests while other areas look like epic desert landscapes. Intertwined with all the amazing rock and soil are Canada’s many stunning coastlines, rivers, and lakes. Canada has had an important connection with its bodies of water and waterways, relying on them throughout history to provide growth, food, and avenues for travel and commerce. Like many other regions deeply connected with their waters, there is always a chance for disaster when navigating the routes, carrying potentially dangerous cargo, and dealing with uncontrollable weather conditions. The coastlines of Canada are littered with shipwrecks, but some of these ships fell into circumstances that went far beyond unfortunate and resulted in utter disaster for those involved.
Located on a coastal road near the St. Lawrence River in Pointe-au-Père in Rimouski, Quebec, Canada is a tall stone structure inscribed with a grim tale of an excessive loss of life. The words are not alone in telling their tale; this monument is situated alongside a mass grave commemorating the spot where Canada experienced one of the greatest peacetime maritime disasters ever seen.
The RMS Empress of Ireland was a Scottish-built ocean liner measuring 570 feet long and had ninety-five voyages under her belt by May 1914. She was a relatively young ship, just under eight years old, with no reason to suspect that there was anything for any of her thousands of passengers to worry about.
On the morning of May 29th 1914 the Empress was setting out on her latest journey, traveling to Liverpool England from Quebec City, a routine trip headed by the newly promoted Captain Henry George Kendall who would be making his first venture up the St. Lawrence River. The passengers of the ship bid farewell to Quebec City, serenaded by the jovial sounds of the Salvation Army Band. The ship was manned by 420 crew members on hand to attend to the 1,057 passengers on board, some of which belonged to the higher classes of British, Canadian, Australian, and New Zealand society. The first-class passengers occupied cabins on the upper deck and lower promenade decks which encircled the ship. There were plants, a café, smoking room, a library, a string quartet, and a private dining area for the children of first-class passengers. Second class passengers traveled in the stern of the lower promenade and upper decks with a smoking room and access to the first-class café. The largest number of passengers on this voyage were traveling third class with cabins below decks with access to a section of the upper decks. They were all anticipating a comfortable and peaceful voyage to Liverpool.
A colorized image of the Empress of Ireland. Image via Wikimedia Creative Commons.
By 1:38am on the morning of May 29th the Empress had departed Pointe-au-Père and was making their way along their normal course. The conditions were clear when ship lights were first spotted approximately six miles from the Empress. The lights belonged to a Norwegian collier, SS Storstad, who also saw the Empress’s masthead lights off in the distance.
The clear conditions deteriorated extremely fast, enveloping the ships in a fog so dense that visibility was lost and the only indicator to the locations of the ships came from sounding their fog whistles. It was not enough. The next thing Captain Kendall saw were the lights of the Snorstad plowing out of the fog and heading directly for his ship.
At 1:55am the Snorstad made a direct hit onto the Empress at a 45 degree angle, slicing through the ship and sealing the fates of many. The situation escalated terrifyingly fast. Given the early morning hour most passengers were asleep in their cabins at the time of the collision and had no time to realize what was happening, let along scramble to the upper decks in hope of a lifeboat. Water poured into the ship, trapping and drowning those below deck. As the Empress listed sharply to its side water began pouring in through the open portholes. The ship was tilting over at such an extreme angle that even if anyone could get to the lifeboats, they could not be launched. Ten minutes after the collision the ship lay completely on her side in the water and only four minutes later the RMS Empress of Ireland sank beneath the river taking 1,012 of the 1,477 souls who had boarded the previous day. The death toll was even larger than that of the Titanic which had occurred two years earlier.
The SS Snorstad with damage sustained from the collison. Image via Wikipedia.org. Public Domain.
The wreck of the Empress came to rest only 130 feet below the surface and shortly after the disaster crews began diving in the search for bodies and valuables that had gone down with the ship. In 1964 a team of Canadian divers were able to recover a brass bell and due partially to the influx of divers the site of the wreck became protected under the Cultural Property Act in 1999 and was added to the Register of Historic Sites of Canada. While diving expeditions to the wreck are still carried out the dive has taken the lives of six more people since 2009.
The mass grave located at Pointe-au-Père was marked on the site several years after the disaster by the Canadian Pacific Railway Company. Several other memorials have been established in the region with monuments in the Mount Herman Cemetery in Quebec, a memorial in Saint Germain Cemetery in Rimouski, and a monument erected by the Salvation Army in the Mount Pleasant Cemetery in Toronto where an annual memorial service is held on the anniversary of the disaster next to their statue reading “In Sacred Memory of 167 Officers and Soldiers of the Salvation Army Promoted to Glory From the Empress of Ireland at Daybreak, Friday May 29, 1914".
Empress of Ireland Memorial. Image via Wikipedia Creative Commons.
The wreck of the RMS Empress of Ireland quickly faded from many minds with some saying it simply got overshadowed by pre-WWI tensions. Only three years later though Canada would suffer another horrific wreck with an impact that reached far beyond the ship itself.
The SS Mont Blanc was less than twenty-five years old on December 6th 1917. Measuring at 320 feet long, it was a steamship that transported general cargo to wherever the shipment was needed freeing it from standard schedules and a port of call. In November 1917 the ship was chartered to carry a cargo of miscellaneous munitions and explosives from New York to France and on December 1st the SS Mont Blanc departed for Halifax, Nova Scotia under the command of Captain Aime Le Medec.
The ship was very slow moving, and on December 5th it arrived in Halifax, intending to join a convoy of other ships gathered in the Bedford Basin before heading to Europe. But, the ship arrived too late to enter the harbor that evening and was forced to sit and wait with a cargo full of explosive TNT, picric acid, gun cotton, and barrels of high-octane benzol sitting on the deck. When it first arrived the ship was boarded by harbor pilot Francis Mackey who asked if they had and “special protections” or a guard ship to help guide them into the harbor given the extremely volatile cargo. They did not.
Early the next morning on December 6th 1917 the Mont Blanc began traveling through the strait that connects the upper portion of the Halifax Harbor to the Bedford Basin with its cargo of over 2,500 tons of explosive materials. Mackey was keeping an eye on the waters around them, but approximately ¾ of a mile out he caught sight of the SS Imo, a Norwegian ship with no cargo due to head back to New York. The Mont Blanc blew their whistle signaling the Imo, but the Imo simply responded with their own whistles, indicating they had no intention of changing their course. The Mont Blanc tried to shift, the ships cut their engines, but momentum carried them dangerously close to each other. The crew of the Mont Blanc knew they had to be extremely careful, their ship was essentially a massive floating bomb, something that no one on the Imo or anyone else gathering to watch the ships was aware of. After some maneuvering, the ships were nearly parallel, but then the Imo put their engines in reverse, sending them into the Mont Blanc’s starboard side.
Stern of Mont-Blanc before the explosion during a prewar visit to Halifax, Aug. 15, 1900. Image via Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, MP18.196.11, N-4,395.
The severity of the situation may not have been obvious at first. The two ships collided at extremely low speeds at approximately 8:45am, knocking over the barrels of benzol, and sending the fuel spilling onto the deck and flowing into the holds. At this point people on other ships were beginning to gather on their decks to watch. When the Imo disengaged from the Mont Blanc it caused sparks, igniting the fuel and starting a fire. The crew of the Mont Blanc knew they, and everyone around them, were in extreme danger. Captain Le Medec ordered his crew to abandon the ship and the fire quickly grew out of control. People were still watching from other ships, and now people living on the coast were coming out of their homes and staring out their windows at the inferno. They had no clue what was about to happen. The smoke and noise muffled anything the frantic crew of the Mont Blanc were screaming, and even if they could be heard no one understood the warnings being yelled in French.
The Mont-Blanc, now engulfed in flame, began to drift and it made its way to Pier 6, setting it ablaze, before finally grounding itself at the foot of Richmond Street. Then, in the blink of an eye, everything changed for the people of Halifax, Nova Scotia.
Just before 9:05am the fire reached the cargo hold and an explosion erupted in a blinding flash of white light. The shockwave ripped through Halifax, traveling more than 1,500 meters per second with the heat at the center of the blast reaching 5000C pushing a fireball of chemicals, debris, and shrapnel miles into the air and temporarily vaporizing the water around the ship. Soon after a tidal wave surged through Halifax bringing more devastation to the already nearly-leveled city. The Mont-Blanc itself was blasted into pieces and twisted parts of it would later be found miles from the site of the explosion. The Imo was lifted by the tidal wave and slammed into the shoreline. Halifax, a bustling city mere moments earlier, was hit by the largest man-made explosion in history before Hiroshima.
The SS Imo after being tossed by the tidal wave from the Mont Blanc explosion. Image via Wikipedia.org Public Domain.
The toll of the explosion was disastrous to Halifax with approximately 1,600 people losing their lives and another 9,000 sustaining injuries. More than 12,000 homes and buildings were damaged or completely leveled with the entire Richmond district laid to total waste. Structures were reduced to rubble and splintered wood, every window was shattered, every door ripped from their hinges, and rail cars and boats in the vicinity were simply crushed. Miraculously, all but one crew member of the Mont Blanc survived.
The devastation of Halifax after the Mont Blanc explosion. Image via Wikipedia. Public Domain.
Recovery efforts came in from hundreds of sources and six weeks after the explosion the Halifax Relief Commission was formed to take on the monumental task of managing and re-building Halifax with the North End being rebuilt as the Hydrostones, Canada’s first public housing project.
Halifax Exhibition Building in the aftermath of the explosion. Image via Wikipedia. Public Domain.
In 1966 the Halifax North Memorial Library was constructed with the first monument to the disaster, the Halifax Explosion Memorial Sculpture, placed in its entrance (the statue was later dismantled in 2004). Constructed in 1985, the Halifax Memorial Bell Tower stands today overlooking the site of the disaster and is the site for an annual remembrance ceremony that takes place every year on December 6th. It is the largest reminder among several still remaining in the Halifax region, with large pieces of the SS Mont-Blanc standing in Dartmouth and the clock tower of Halifax City Hall housing one clock on its north side permanently set at 9:05am to commemorate the minute that the city was nearly erased from the map.
Halifax Explosion Memorial Bell Tower. Image by Jesse David Hollington from Toronto, Canada - Halifax Explosion Memorial Bell Tower, CC BY 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=3670253
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Sources:
Halifax Explosion https://www.britannica.com/event/Halifax-explosion
Explosion in The Narrows: The 1917 Halifax Harbour Explosion, Maritime Museum of the Atlantic https://maritimemuseum.novascotia.ca/what-see-do/halifax-explosion
The Great Halifax Explosion, History.com https://www.history.com/this-day-in-history/the-great-halifax-explosion
Kiloton Killer The Collision of the SS Mont-Blanc and the Halifax Explosion https://sma.nasa.gov/docs/default-source/safety-messages/safetymessage-2013-01-07-ssmontblancandhalifaxexplosion.pdf?sfvrsn=d4ae1ef8_6
Two ships collided in Halifax Harbor. One of them was a floating, 3,000-ton bomb by Steve Hendrix washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/2017/12/06/two-ships-collided-in-halifax-harbor-one-of-them-was-a-3000-ton-floating-bomb/
SS Mont-Blanc Explosion – 1917 https://devastatingdisasters.com/ss-mont-blanc-explosion-1917/
The Empress of Ireland, National Museums Liverpool https://www.liverpoolmuseums.org.uk/merseyside-maritime-museum/maritime-museum-floor-plan/lifelines-gallery/empress-of-ireland
On this day: The Empress of Ireland, 'Canada's Titanic,' sinks in 1914 by Kayla Hertz https://www.irishcentral.com/roots/history/empress-of-ireland-sinking
RMS Empress of Ireland https://www.shipwreckworld.com/maps/rms-empress-of-ireland