Maritime museums document Halifax port

[Andrew Clarkson]

In 1939, my mother was evacuated to Canada. Her father said goodbye to her at Liverpool, where she sailed away along with hundreds of other British children. My grandmother always said that when my grandfather returned home, alone, he looked like an old man.

My mother was travelling with her nanny. She was ten. Her parents thought she would be away for six months. As it turned out, she was away for five years.

I never really thought about how she must have felt, a little girl arriving in Canada with just her old nurse for comfort, until I visited Pier 21 in Halifax, Nova Scotia. This permanent exhibition, based in the original Ocean Immigration Shed on the waterfront at Halifax tells the stories of the 1.5 million immigrants who arrived there between 1928 and 1971.

The war-time evacuees get a whole area to themselves, with pictures and suitcases and testimony from former host families. One eye witness, Marjorie Whitelaw, says in a recorded statement, "I was struck by how lost and bewildered they looked. Five years later, they had become family."

The exhibition reveals how Halifax played its part as a gateway from Europe to Canada; a simulated CN Rail car allows visitors to have the sensation of travelling, as many thousands did, from Nova Scotia to British Columbia, with sights of Canada's unbounded prairies and mountains flashing past the windows and recorded sounds of wheels thundering down the tracks.

The exhibition prefers the first-hand account to the dusty relic, and manages to be moving, without being sentimental, and informative without being obviously didactic.

On leaving Pier 21, while envisaging the intense emotions this stretch of water must have witnessed, I walked straight past a commanding statue of the great shipping magnate Samuel Cunard.

Liverpool, England may well have the awesome Cunard building at its Pier Head, and Southampton may well now be the English port from which the vast Cunard cruisers serenely sail, but Samuel Cunard himself was from Halifax, a brilliant engineer and businessman convinced that the way to cross the Atlantic was by steam.

Cunard's great rival in the early 19th century was that other company which ran "liners", or ships which went from New York to Southampton, namely the White Star Line which commissioned the "unsinkable" Titanic in direct response to Cunard's colossal Mauretania.

The Titanic was launched from Southampton on April 10, 1912 only to steam at full speed into a field of pack ice four days later just off the Grand Banks of Newfoundland, 700 nautical miles east of Halifax. While the survivors were picked up and taken straight to New York on the Cunard liner Carpathia, it was cable ships from Halifax which were given the grim job of collecting up the dead and bringing them back to shore.

The cable ships, so called because they had just been laying the great trans-Atlantic telephone cable, were tough enough to brave the Atlantic swell and the icebergs that had pierced the Titanic. The crew, however, was not so robust.

At the special Titanic exhibit at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, about half a mile along the boardwalk route from Pier 21, accounts from sailors who had the grim job of fishing bodies out of the freezing water make clear what an awful task it was.

"As far as the eye could see, the ocean was strewn with wreckage and debris, with bodies bobbing up and down in the cold sea," is the account from Arminias Wiseman, a sailor aboard the Mackay-Bennett, which was the first cable ship to arrive at the disaster site on April 20. So many bodies were found that the vessel's embalming supplies ran out, and 116 of the dead had to be buried at sea.

In total, 328 bodies were found but 1200 were never recovered. A photograph in the Museum shows the Mackay-Bennett arriving in Halifax on April 30, 1912, with flags at half mast and coffins stacked on the stern.

recent acquistion, a so-called "mortuary bag" from the disaster which the Museum bought this year at auction, shows how the effects of each drowned person (in this case, one Edmond Stone), were gathered, bagged and labeled for easy identification.

On the basis of the Halifax body count, it would seem that the "women and children first" mantra had indeed been adhered to; out of the 200 or so bodies returned to Halifax and laid out for burial (first class in coffins; third class in sacks -- the strict class system was upheld, even in death) -- there was only one child. This so-called Unknown Child, a boy of two, was still in his clothes -- a dress and petticoats, for such was the fashion for little boys at the time. He was even still wearing his little red leather shoes, fastened with delicate bars and buttons.

Much research was done to find out who he was; passenger lists were scoured, but there had been several children of that age and gender on board, and his identity remained a mystery. He couldn't even be identified by his shoes, which had been illicitly kept by the policeman in charge of the investigation. A father himself, Sargeant Clarence Northover from the Halifax Police Department found himself unable to allow the little red shoes to be buried with their diminutive owner. They were discovered in his desk after his death, and given to the Museum.

The tiny body was exhumed and its DNA compared with that of relatives of known Titanic victims. Only then was it confirmed that the Unknown Child was Sidney Leslie Goodwin, an English boy on board with his family. The Goodwins were en route to make a new life for themselves in Niagara, Ontario. All perished.

Of course, little Sidney is not the only celebrated victim of the tragedy in Halifax. Amongst the 200 or so other passengers buried in one of three Halifax graveyards is one J.Dawson. "Oh, he's not the actual Jack Dawson played by Leonardo di Caprio," says Jeanne Church, from the Maritime Museum, "but his name was used in the film by James Cameron. Now there is not a blade of grass before his grave. So many teenage girls kneel down there before it."

Five years after the Titanic disaster, Halifax continued to be affected by European hubris, this time thanks to the Great War. The Maritime Museum also tells the story of the 1917 Halifax Explosion, as it came to be known: the largest man-made explosion until the nuclear age.

It was caused by two European boats; the Norwegian Imo, which had just filled up with coal and was coming out of the harbour heading for stricken Belgium, and a French ammunitions vessel, the Mont Blanc, which was packed full of highly inflammable fuel, 200 tons of TNT, 10 tons of gun cotton and 2,300 tons of wet and dry picric acid. And she was going the other way. The Imo nicked the Mont Blanc; the resultant spark caused a fire and five minutes after the terrified crew had abandoned ship, the entire vessel blew itself sky-high, demolishing the Richmond area of Halifax and everyone who had run down to the harbour to take part in the dubious fun of watching a ship on fire. The death toll reached over 1,700.

The effects of the explosion were studied by Oppenheimer in calculating the strength of the bombs for Hiroshima and Nagasaki.

Halifax may be Canadian, but scratch the city's surface and you will find an intense entwinement with life across the pond. The luxurious hotel where I stayed was named the Lord Nelson, and a statue of Robert Burns stood just opposite. The drum of Europe's history is a constant beat in Nova Scotia's capital.

"Oh yes, we are the gateway to Europe," says Jeanne Church. "We are the closest Canadian city to Europe, and we have always looked out east."

And that's regardless of what comes, be it bewildered child evacuees, or stricken liners.

If you go:

Full information on travelling to Halifax including a downloadable guide for visitors can be found at www.halifaxinfo.com. Details of Pier 21, Canada's Immigration Museum can be found at www.pier21.ca, and of the neighbouring Maritime Museum of the Atlantic at www.maritime.museum.gov.ns.ca.

Source: http://www2.canada.com

[Timothy Trower]

Of course, the shoes supposing to belong to the "Unknown Child" had nothing to do with the child -- they hadn't been immersed in salt water.