We sit in a small boat in Halifax Harbour with two grandkids and listen to a story, a tragic one. Beauty is all around us, a blend of rugged coastal landscape and the historic charm of the city’s boardwalks, stone plazas, and merchant shops.
It’s hard to believe that in this very spot, the largest non-nuclear explosion of its time killed nearly 2000 people and blinded another 600. Here is where two ships collided—one of them, the Mont-Blanc, loaded with explosives to be used in the Great War.
The shock wave from the blast, our guide tells us, was felt across the whole of Nova Scotia. It disintegrated buildings, flattened trees, tumbled horse-drawn carriages and streetcars, and lifted ships from the water, dropping them on land. Nearly everything within 2.6 miles was destroyed.
All this happened right here, where our small boat rocks us gently. The guide is silent, so are the dozen people in the boat. The story is sinking in.
Later, after we’ve trudged along the pier through a cold, driving rain and we’ve changed into dry clothes, our grandson asks, “Why haven’t we heard this story before?”
“Right,” his cousin says, “way more people died than when the Titanic sunk.”
All the way to Halifax we’d listened together to a book about the Titanic disaster, learning that Halifax was the primary base for recovery ships sent to retrieve bodies from the North Atlantic. Earlier that day we had toured the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic and gazed at Titanic artifacts. But the Titanic story was not new for them. They’d known about it long before our trip.
They wait for an answer. And I’m not sure what to say.
Is it because the Titanic caught the imaginations of movie makers and writers? Is it because the Titanic disaster unfolded in agonizing slow-motion while the explosion in Halifax was an instant nightmare? Or is it because the Titanic’s passenger list included some of the richest people in the world, while Halifax was primarily a working-class community?
“We hear some stories,” I say. “And not others. It’s our job to find stories hidden from us. And to figure out why they’ve been hidden.”
Apple to Apple 