From The Smithsonian
SMITHSONIAN MAGAZINE
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JULY 14, 2017
"We
turn out of our hammocks at 6.30am and lash up and stow in the usual way,” a
Royal Navy sailor named Frank Baker wrote in his diary on December 6, 1917. “We
fall in on the upper deck at 7am and disperse to cleaning stations, busying
ourselves scrubbing decks etc. until 8am when we ‘cease fire’ for breakfast.”
Baker was pulling wartime duty as a ship inspector in the harbor of Halifax,
Nova Scotia, on the lookout for spies, contraband and saboteurs.
But there were no ships to be inspected that day, so after
breakfast he and his crewmates aboard HMCS Acadia went
back to their cleaning stations. “We...had just drawn soap and powder and the
necessary utensils for cleaning paint work,” he wrote, “when the most awful
explosion I ever heard or want to hear again occurred.”
What Frank Baker heard was the biggest explosion of the
pre-atomic age, a catastrophe of almost biblical proportions. The 918 words he
wrote for December 6 make up the only eyewitness account known to be written on
the day of what is now called the Halifax Explosion. After World War I, his
diary sat unread for decades. Now, it has been included in an exhibit on the
explosion’s centennial at the
Dartmouth
Heritage Museum, across the harbor from Halifax. It is published
here for the first time.
“The first thud shook the ship from stem to stern and the
second one seemed to spin us all around, landing some [crew members] under the
gun carriage and others flying in all directions all over the deck,” Baker
wrote. Sailors 150 miles out to sea heard the blast. On land, people felt the
jolt 300 miles away. The shock wave demolished almost everything within a
half-mile. “Our first impression was that we were being attacked by submarines,
and we all rushed for the upper deck, where we saw a veritable mountain of
smoke of a yellowish hue and huge pieces of iron were flying all around us.”
Unseen by Baker, two ships had collided in the Narrows, a strait
linking a wide basin with the harbor proper, which opens into the Atlantic to
the southeast. An outbound Belgian relief ship, the Imo,
had strayed off course. An inbound French freighter, the Mont-Blanc, couldn’t get out of its way.
The Imo speared the Mont-Blanc at
an angle near its bow. The freighter carried 2,925 tons of high explosives,
including 246 tons of benzol, a highly flammable motor fuel, in drums lashed to
its deck. Some of the drums toppled and ruptured. Spilled benzol caught fire.
The Mont-Blanc’s crew,
unable to contain the flames, abandoned ship.
The ghost vessel burned and drifted for about 15 minutes,
coming to rest against a pier along the Halifax shore. Thousands of people on
their way to work, already working at harborside jobs, or at home in Halifax
and Dartmouth, stopped in their tracks to watch.
Then the Mont-Blanc blew.
“A shower of shrapnel passed over the Forecastle, shattering
the glass in the engine room and chart room to smithereens, which came crashing
down into the alleyways,” Baker wrote. “...The fires all burst out on to the
floor of the stokehold [the engine room’s coal storage] and it was a marvel
that the stokers were not burned to death, but all of them escaped injury as
did all the other of the ship’s company.
“A tug was alongside us at the time and part of her side was
torn completely out and three of the crew were injured, one of them getting a
piece of flesh weighing nearly 2 pounds torn off his leg. A hail of shrapnel
descended about 20 yards from the ship, this came with such force that had it
struck us we should certainly have all been lost.”
The Mont-Blanc had
disintegrated, showering iron fragments and black tar across Halifax; the shaft
of its anchor, weighing 1,140 pounds, spiked into the earth more than two miles
away. The explosion tore a hole in the harbor bottom, unleashing a tidal wave
that tossed ships as if they were bathtub toys and washed away a Mi’kmaq
fishing settlement that had been at the northwestern end of the basin for
centuries. A volcanic plume of gray smoke, sparkling fragments and flame rose
miles into the sky before billowing outward.
“This was the last of the explosion, the whole of which had
taken place inside of five minutes,...” Baker wrote. “Then came a lull of a few
minutes and when the smoke had cleared sufficiently, we saw clearly what had
happened....One ship had been hurled wholesale for a distance of about 400
yards, dashing it close to the shore, a total wreck with dead bodies battered
and smashed lying all around in disorder.
“Fires broke out on ships all around and hundreds of small
crafts had been blown to hell and the sea presented an awful scene of debris
and wreckage. Our doctor attended to the wounded men on the tug as quickly as
possible and we laid them on stretchers in a motor boat and took them to
hospital. The scene ashore was even worse.
“The N.W. part of Halifax was in total ruins and fires were
springing up all over the city. Part of the railway was completely demolished
and everywhere were dead and dying among the ruins. When we arrived at the
hospital, the windows were all blown out and the wards were two feet deep in
water owing to all the pipes having burst. We had to return to our ship as
quickly as possible, as we are Guard Ship and responsible for the safety of the
other vessels in harbour.”
Back on the Acadia,
Baker beheld a desolate scene: “What a few hours before had been beautiful
vessels, were now terrible wrecks, their crews all dead and bodies, arms, etc.
were floating around in the water.” That afternoon the Acadia’s crew was called upon to quell a mutiny aboard
the Eole, a French ship
running relief for the Belgians. After doing so, they returned to their ship.
“We quickly got hurried tea and proceeded ashore,” Baker wrote. “Here the scene
was absolutely indescribable…
Read the rest.
