“Which one?” Barbara asked.
“The smaller one that was hit.”
“What do you mean, an ‘ammunition boat’?” Barbara asked.
“That’s the kind of boat that carries bullets and gunpowder and things like that. I can see barrels on the deck, too. It’s called the Mont-Blanc.”
“Will it explode?” Barbara asked.
“No, not that I know,” Ian replied.
The men on Mont-Blanc knew better. Having lived in constant fear of the slightest disruption or smallest spark sending their ship to the moon, the haggard and edgy crewmen were certain the ship would erupt at any second. Every moment spent not running for their lives was borrowed time.
They had been trained to stay calm under pressure no matter what the sea sent their way, but no one had ever prepared them for this. Seconds after the benzol fire swept across the foredeck, the men on deck rushed toward the bridge in retreat, and the men below rushed up the steep staircase, where they waited for Captain Le Médec’s orders. His by-the-book approach had already paid off. They were disciplined and obedient—an extraordinary feat when they expected the 6-million-pound bomb heating up beneath their feet to obliterate them at any second. A few men strapped down some loose barrels of benzol at the stern, knowing that if a fire started in the back of the ship, where the two lifeboats were located, they would be trapped in the middle.
Captain Le Médec ran through his options on this unfamiliar ship as quickly as he could, knowing full well he might not finish the exercise. Could they put the fire out? They had no portable extinguishers on board, and the connection for the pressure hose came out of the forward deck—now covered by the benzol fire. Could they anchor the ship in the middle of the harbor and escape while other ships doused the fire, and at least minimize the damage if it exploded? No, he remembered: the anchors were also located in the bow, with none in the back.
Scuttling the ship was probably the most effective way to squelch the dangerous cargo, but it would take at least half an hour to loosen the rusted rivets and bolts to release the valve, and at least two hours to fill the hold with enough water to sink Mont-Blanc. If there was one thing Captain Le Médec knew they didn’t have, as he watched the smoke grow so dark and thick that he could no longer see the gash in the side of the ship, it was a couple of hours to execute a plan.
Out of ideas, Le Médec rushed down from the bridge and spun around, giving orders to everyone on deck to find the rest of the crew and start lowering the lifeboats. While they sprang into action, Pilot Mackey later presented the captain another option: “Full speed ahead?”
Mackey’s idea was simple and quick, with a decent chance of success: point the ship out to sea and mash it down. They would be traveling away from the most populated parts of Halifax and Dartmouth, and might even force enough seawater through the gash to douse the fire and swamp the explosives. That plan could also be cut short by the ship exploding at any second, but it could greatly reduce the potential loss of life.
If Le Médec heard Mackey’s plan, he gave no indication. Instead, he shouted to his men, “Abandon ship!”
Le Médec started shouting at the crew in French, and Harbour Pilot Mackey in English: “Look to your boats!” The men didn’t need any more encouragement to sprint to the sides of the ship, where they anxiously waited for the lifeboats on each side to be lowered. In their haste, someone cut the ropes holding up the lifeboats, which splashed into the water, empty. The sailors all but jumped from the ladders and ropes to save the boats, and did so in the nick of time. At 8:48, the men assigned to the starboard boat started rowing as fast as they could from the burning ship.
The men in the port-side lifeboat held on to a rope, waiting for the remaining men on deck. Mackey stopped one man rushing down from the bridge and told him to run back up to straighten the steering wheel and lock it in place. After he did so, he rushed past Mackey to the ladder, leaving Mackey to make a truly life-and-death decision: stay on Mont-Blanc to try to save hundreds or thousands of lives, or escape and save his own?
Le Médec went to retrieve his chief engineer, Anton Le Gat, and third engineer from their posts in the engine room three decks below, when a crewman grabbed his arm and said, “Captain, we must go. Le Gat is accounted for. When the others went up he remained to lift the safety valves on the boilers, but he is there now.”
Le Médec replied, “You go, my friend; I am responsible and I must stay with the ship. It is correct, isn’t it?”
“No, we will both go. Come, I don’t think we have much time.”
Herbert Whitehead, who captained a Canadian Navy drifter that delivered provisions to ships in his branch, heard “a lot of whistling.” That was never a good sound in the harbor, so he maneuvered alongside Mont-Blanc to see what had happened. To be heard over the roaring fire, Whitehead poked his megaphone through the wheelhouse window to offer to take the men to Bedford Basin. Of course, Whitehead didn’t know Mont-Blanc was carrying 6 million pounds of high explosives that were getting hotter every second he spoke.
“Jump into my boat!”
No one racing down the ropes was about to stop and chat with him, let alone take him up on his offer. But if they didn’t seem to hear or understand him, he certainly heard them, yelling back and forth in French. One of his stokers, a French-Canadian sitting at the bow, “never heard any warning given in French, and I never heard any in English,” despite the fact that Whitehead’s boat now had the unenviable distinction of occupying the single most dangerous spot in North America.
If just one member of Mont-Blanc’s crew had taken a few seconds to do only that much, Whitehead could have gotten word to Niobe, which would have quickly spread the word and saved countless lives. Unaware of the cargo, Whitehead casually circled around the stern of the blazing ship while the crew loaded the lifeboats, until he witnessed three small explosions on deck. He concluded that Mont-Blanc was carrying oil, and it was probably best to head back to Niobe.
Ralph Smith, a marine engineer with Burns & Kelleher, was on a workboat headed for the basin when Mont-Blanc and Imo collided about 350 yards away from his boat. He went to help Mont-Blanc just as the men were scrambling into their lifeboats. “I never saw two boats filled as quick in my life,” he said. “Slid down the tackles and over the side and in the boats in very quick time. Of course, I don’t blame them for it either. They were rowing very hard, but the boats did not move very fast. They are heavy boats.”
Smith recalled one of them stood on a bench in the boat, waved his arms, and started yelling something in French and pointing toward Halifax. Smith said the word was probably foreign, but sounded something like “explosion.”
Like many onlookers, Smith didn’t realize the harbor no longer required munitions ships to fly the red flag, so he didn’t think Mont-Blanc could be carrying high explosives. More likely it was oil that threatened to ignite.
When Captain From’s crew watched their counterparts on Mont-Blanc row past them, they didn’t hear warnings from Mackey or anyone else, so they assumed the fire alone explained why they were escaping. That was hardly a crazy conclusion, as the flames on Mont-Blanc’s deck were later described as “ferocious.” A few Imo crewmen speculated that gasoline or kerosene might be on board.
The other sailors in the harbor that day either didn’t hear or understand Mont-Blanc’s crew, and the crew never slowed down to make sure their urgent message had been understood by anyone. But when Mackey saw a man on a tugboat called Hilford, he said he tried to warn him to stay away from the flaming vessel. The man Mackey saw happened to be Lt. Commander James Murray, who was one of the few in the Examiner’s Office who knew Mont-Blanc was carrying immense amounts of high explosives. It’s not clear if Mackey’s message got through, or if Murray simply needed to see Mont-Blanc on fire to know urgent action had to be taken, but we do know Murray quickly ordered his ship to Pier 9, just below Richmond, so he could warn others.
The men in Mont-Blanc’s second lifeboat waited
anxiously for Le Médec and Mackey to make the defining decision of their lives.
When Le Médec said he would stay on board, the first officer twice took him by the arm and told him to come down to the lifeboats. Le Médec finally relented, walked to the top of the ladder—and turned around. He did not have his coat or captain’s hat, he explained, without which he could be confused for any crewman.
While the same crewman scurried up the ladder to chase the captain again, Harbour Pilot Mackey knew he had to make up his mind, and make it up now—if the ship didn’t blow up while his mind was racing. He could stay on board Mont-Blanc to try to put the fire out, which he knew could spare his city and its people unimaginable harm. But putting out the fire was already looking like an impossible task for the entire crew to accomplish, let alone one man. Attempting to do so would almost certainly cost him his life, and his sacrifice might not make the slightest difference to anyone else.
Or he could stay on deck, waving his arms and yelling at nearby ships, sailors, and civilians about the ship’s cargo and urging them to run away as fast and as far as possible. If he caught the attention of even a half dozen people who could spread the word, they might be able to evacuate the area. Perhaps a tugboat captain could even haul the boat back out to sea, past McNab’s Island, where the potential damage would be much less. This plan carried the same danger, however: if the ship exploded in the next few seconds, as they all assumed it would, his life wouldn’t save any others.
Or he could follow the crewmen into the lifeboats and save his own life. It would not make him a hero, but perhaps he could live with that—if he could get away before Mont-Blanc erupted.
Mackey looked at Captain Le Médec heading toward the rope ladder, then back at the benzol fire growing behind him, knowing what lay belowdecks. He then ran for the lifeboat and hopped in.
As Mackey later said, “There was nothing I could see that could be done to improve the situation.”
While that is certainly debatable, Mackey’s decision resulted in at least one unexpected outcome: he would live to answer for his actions.
While it’s easy to judge Mackey in that situation, it’s worth noting that even a soldier as gung-ho as Ernest Barss, a man who had eagerly volunteered for the army, had no qualms about killing Germans, and had chastised those able-bodied young men at home who were sitting the war out, eventually grew “heartily sick of the whole show” and hoped an officer’s commission or even a bullet in the arm would pull him permanently from the trenches, alive. Barss’s dilemma was simple: he wanted to be brave, but he wanted to live, and he knew his luck was bound to run out.
Those same thoughts were probably going through Mackey’s head, but he was no gung-ho soldier, just a harbor pilot who had drawn the short straw the night before to guide a floating bomb into Bedford Basin. The same questions Barss had mulled over for a year Mackey had to process in a few seconds. For those of us who are certain we would perform the noble, selfless, and heroic act, perhaps we would—but our answers today don’t count for much until we’re standing where Mackey was standing, with a few seconds to make such a monumental decision.
How many would sign up for a year in the trenches? How many would agree to pilot a floating bomb? These men did not seek out these choices, which were foisted upon them by a war started by much older men after the assassination of an Archduke 4,000 miles away.
When the Mont-Blanc crewman caught up to Le Médec, the captain once again insisted he would stay with the ship. The crewman argued there was nothing to be done, so the captain should lead his men to safety.
“I forced him, taking him by the arm to the ladder,” the crewman said.
Le Médec surrendered again, to the relief of the frantic souls waiting in the lifeboat for him to make up his mind. When the captain joined them, he resumed his role, ordering the rowers to get away from the ship as fast as possible—and head toward Dartmouth, not Halifax.
Le Médec and Mackey had always assumed that if it ever came to it, they would go down with the ship. Perhaps they would have if the rowboats had not been available, if the ship hadn’t already seemed doomed, and if they had more than a few seconds to think about the rest of their lives. But that was the predicament they were in. Their decision didn’t make them heroes, of course, but perhaps it didn’t quite make them villains either. Whatever the accounting, Mackey and Le Médec were the last to leave the ship.
Even though Mont-Blanc was drifting toward Richmond, which put the lifeboats’ launching point an estimated 200 feet from the Halifax side and about 800 feet from the Dartmouth side of the Narrows, the men rowed furiously across to Dartmouth. Shortly into their urgent journey, one of the live shells on Mont-Blanc’s forward deck blew up, inspiring them to row even faster.
En route, Mackey claimed, “I was shouting to the men in the vicinity. I called out to everybody in sight that the ship was in danger and likely to explode. . . . I think I was too far from Pier 8 [across the Narrows, in front of Richmond] for them to hear me. . . . I called out there and did everything I could possibly do to let everybody hear me.”
Yet no one did.
The rowboats reached the Dartmouth shore near Turtle Grove, where Jerry Lone Cloud’s Mi’kmaq family lived, in about ten minutes. The Mont-Blanc crewmen beached their boats without bothering to secure them, jumped into the shallow water, and ran for the woods at a full sprint. They couldn’t fathom why their ship hadn’t already blown up, but they didn’t intend to stick around to find out.
Running for their lives, they passed a Mi’kmaq woman named Aggie March, who had wrapped her baby daughter in a blanket so she could go outside and see what the commotion was about. The men running past her were yelling that the boat was about to explode, but only in French, so she had no idea what these crazed sailors were trying to tell her. After a half dozen barrels of benzol launched into the sky, March had calmly turned back to her cabin when a Mont-Blanc sailor came up with a clever idea: he snatched March’s baby from her arms and started running into the woods, following his crewmates. March screamed and chased after him, just as he knew she would. Once he was deep enough into the woods, he stopped, pushed her to the ground, then jumped on top of her with her baby girl between them, waiting for the explosion he knew was going to occur at any second.
Aggie March and her baby would be the only people the Mont-Blanc’s captain, crew, or harbor pilot would save that day.
Chapter 16
Box 83
While the crew of Mont-Blanc rushed past, Imo still lingered near the spot where she had collided with Mont-Blanc, halfway down the Narrows on the Dartmouth side. She had withstood only superficial scratches across her bow. Captain From and Harbour Pilot William Hayes decided to take Imo out of the Narrows and back to the open water of Bedford Basin to assess their situation. After trying for several frustrating minutes to turn the 430-foot-long ship around in the 1,000-foot-wide Narrows, with boats orbiting around the abandoned Mont-Blanc as it floated by, they decided to sail back out to sea and turn around, then return to the basin.
The crew of Mont-Blanc, meanwhile, lay on the ground of the Dartmouth woods, gazing in wonder at their burning boat drifting across the Narrows, dumbfounded that it hadn’t exploded. Francis Mackey thought “it might blow off in an instant.”
With no one on board to guide it and with the steering wheel locked, however, the ghost ship would follow Captain Le Médec’s last rudder command and the current. She started drifting from the Dartmouth side of the Narrows, where the collision occurred, toward Richmond. To most onlookers, where she stopped was largely a matter of curiosity.
A ship named Middleham Castle had been tied up at the Halifax Graving Dock Company wharf, just outside the dry dock at the south end of Richmond. Her crew stared across the water at the smoking ghost ship, less alarmed than amused by the abandoned boat’s hapless yawing across the Narrows toward their side, while their foreman grew irritated with them because they had stopped working.
Jack Ta
ppen, nineteen, worked for marine engineers Burns & Kelleher, which had won the contract to do all the pipe work at the graving dock. Tappen was carrying a large cast-iron pipe to Middleham’s engine room when he heard someone on deck yell, “Two ships just collided off us!” Tappen set down the pipe and dashed up on deck, just in time to see Imo and Mont-Blanc pull apart. He then saw a fire rising from the waterline on one of the ships as it floated toward them and the crew abandoning ship. By then Mont-Blanc was so close to the Richmond dockyard that Tappen could see Mont-Blanc’s cook, who had been serving breakfast when the ships collided, was still wearing his white apron.
One of the older Burns & Kelleher employees told Tappan, “I saw a coal ship burn like that once.” When the same engineer saw the flames growing, he added, “If she has explosives aboard, this is no place for us.” But no one took him seriously, because nothing like that had ever happened in Halifax. Some of the Middleham Castle crew put bumpers out in case Mont-Blanc rubbed up against their ship.
The foreman had more immediate concerns: getting Tappen and his coworkers to move the pipe they had left below deck. When the foreman snarled, they finished the job quickly so they could return to watch the ghost ship gently slip right alongside Pier 6—a perfect landing, as if guided by an invisible pilot. At 8:52 a.m., her nose grounded softly into the shore, directly downhill from the Richmond neighborhood and the Richmond Printing Company, between the Acadian Sugar Refinery and the Hillis & Sons Foundry.
The growing throng of observers gathering near Pier 6 viewed the raging Mont-Blanc not as a harbinger of imminent danger but as an oddity. In the face of deck fires, which were fairly routine during the chaotic days of the Great War and were usually started by scattered coal embers, the Mont-Blanc crew’s hurried escape struck the locals as a strange display of cowardice, not as a caution that they, too, should head for the hills.
The Great Halifax Explosion Page 14