‘Does Halifax remember?’ 3 new books on Dec. 6, 1917
Most of us know the main details of the Halifax Explosion. In December of 1917, two ships collided in the Halifax Harbour. One was carrying munitions and caught fire, setting off the world’s largest man-made explosion (prior to the atomic bomb in 1945). It left 2,000 dead, 9,000 injured, more than 25,000 without shelter, and the North End of Halifax almost completely destroyed.
But after 106 years, there are still new facts surfacing, still new things to learn. Three books about the Halifax Explosion, published just this fall, all seek to deepen the narrative about this seminal event in Canadian history.
The Halifax Explosion is a beautiful book of poetry, illustrated by Rebecca Bender and written by Dr. Afua Cooper, a multi-award-winning and celebrated speaker, scholar, historian, and author. She was also Halifax’s seventh poet laureate, serving from 2018 to 2020.
Cooper has taught Black Canadian history for years and has done extensive research into the explosion, steadily working to unearth more about the Black experience. These explorations led her to write a poem that incorporates the actual names of Black people impacted by the disaster, including eight-year-old Aldora Andrews, who died in her Africville home. It was this poem that Cooper read aloud at the memorial vigil for the Halifax Explosion in 2019.
In the days and weeks after this reading, many people reached out to Cooper to say how much the poem had meant to them. A publisher, PlumLeaf Press, contacted her to see if she was interested in publishing the poem in the form of a book.
This opportunity allowed Cooper to further highlight the Black presence in the Halifax Explosion. She set about reworking the original poem and added new material, including the story of a Trinidad-born doctor, Dr. Clement Ligoure.
“He was so important to Halifax and to the Black community and was someone who suffered tremendous racism,” says Cooper. After the explosion, Ligoure was denied hospital privileges due to his race, but opened his own clinic anyway. “He drove around Halifax in his horse-drawn carriage, with an assistant, pulling people from the rubble and treating them at his clinic. He worked around the clock for three days straight, tending to the wounded, and was never financially compensated.”
Cooper’s book also illuminates a terrible truth. After the explosion, many of the Black residents of Halifax’s North End and Africville were denied funding to rebuild their lives. Despite the millions of dollars that poured through the region in global relief funds, very little went to Africville or to Black families. “Does Halifax remember?” is a refrain that Cooper repeats throughout her moving poem. Her book shines a light on the impact of racism after the explosion, tells stories long overlooked or disregarded, and helps to fill the gaps in our collective knowledge.
The Dangerous Harbour: Revealing the Unknown Ships and Wrecks of the Halifax Explosion is the latest book by local author Bob Chaulk. A historian and experienced scuba diver, he has written five books about Atlantic Canada’s marine history, but this is his first foray into the explosion.
Chaulk’s interest was piqued in 2021 during a Halifax Harbour dive. He discovered an old anchor in Tufts Cove, across the Narrows from the site of the explosion. In the absence of a shipwreck at the site, he came to believe that the anchor was blasted from a fishing schooner named the St. Bernard during the explosion. It had been the closest moored vessel to the exploding ship.
Chaulk realized that although many books, documentaries, and films had been made about this epic disaster, there was a deficit in knowledge about the ships and the sailors present that day. As someone with a deep interest in the ocean and ships, he felt that these aspects of the story should be given more attention.
One of his most surprising finds was that of the 200 ships in the harbour that day, very few vessels were actually destroyed in the blast. In addition, he learned that very little attention had been paid to the fact that at the time of the explosion, Halifax was one of the most important military ports in the world, with ships in constant movement, laden with goods headed to Europe to support the war.
“We all know that the Halifax Explosion was a human catastrophe, but having the Port of Halifax out of commission was close to a military disaster,” says Chaulk. “It did not turn into one thanks to some quick action in getting the port back to business. That was a huge undertaking, but against such a backdrop of wholesale death and suffering, it gets barely a mention in the historical record.”
The Dangerous Harbour is an excellent reference for those looking for more information about the ships in the harbour that fateful day: when they arrived, where they came from, what they carried, where they were bound, and what ultimately became of them and the sailors associated with those ships.
Out of the Dark is a young adult novel by Victoria-based author Julie Lawson. This isn’t Lawson’s first book about the explosion: it’s her third! The first book, No Safe Harbour, was part of the Dear Canada series published by Scholastic. The second, A Blinding Light, was published in 2017 and is told from the perspective of two young people who live through the disaster.
Lawson’s fascination with the Halifax Explosion stems from a personal connection; her paternal grandfather was stationed on the Niobe, a Canadian warship that was permanently moored in the Halifax Harbour. (The Niobe is written about extensively in Bob Chaulk’s book, mentioned above.) But on Dec. 6, 1917, Lawson’s grandfather was not on the Niobe. He was in the hospital waiting to have his appendix removed and therefore survived the catastrophe in the harbour.
In this most recent historical novel for young people, Lawson combines the explosion with another major historical event that occurred the following year: the Spanish Flu. By using some of the same characters from her earlier book, she was able to explore how the arrival of a pandemic complicated the region’s recovery from the explosion.
“The problem with research of any kind is knowing when to stop. I love doing it,” she says. “Researching historical novels is a long process that involves gathering resources, reading them, making notes and organizing the notes — and, at the same time, thinking of how best to use the information in the story.” For Out of the Dark, she spent four years researching all the different aspects of that time – the explosion and its aftermath, the Great War, and Spanish Influenza.
Lawson’s riveting novel not only adds to our understanding of the struggles Haligonians faced after the explosion; it also sheds light on an earlier pandemic where those infected suffered without the medical equipment, medicine, and vaccines we have today. Interestingly, the author began her research on the Spanish Flu before she was served up the first-hand experience of COVID-19.
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