Chapter One
Wednesday
AT A FEW MINUTES past four on the afternoon of Wednesday, December 5, 1917, a pilot boat outside Halifax Harbor swung away from an outgoing steamer and pulled alongside the Mont Blanc. Daylight was already failing and Francis Mackey* knew that he would not have time to pilot the Mont Blanc down to the Bedford Basin that night. As the smaller boat sidled alongside, Mackey reached across the water, gripped the rope ladder, and pulled himself up. That gap, that short space of sea between leaving one ship and standing on the other, was the most dangerous part of his job. Ropes broke, and when they did pilots such as Mackey were never seen again. He clasped the ladder tightly as he scrambled up the side of the hull and pulled himself onto the deck, where Captain Aimé Le Médec met him. Although Le Médec was only thirty-nine, his sixteen years at sea read like a map of red wrinkles. Mackey was the same. At forty-five, he had already spent twenty-four of his years on the water.
Mackey told the captain that he wanted to sail to the examination boat near McNabâs lighthouse before he decided whether or not to anchor for the night, but Le MĂ©dec had difficulty understanding his rapid speech. Although he had studied English for his captainâs exam eleven years before, Le MĂ©dec was self-conscious about speaking it; he was badly out of practice.
âI donât speak very good English,â he told Mackey as they walked across the deck.
When they reached the bridge, the two men took their places on either side of the whistle cord. Alphonse Serre stood at the wheel. Second Lieutenant Joseph Leveque sat to their right, monitoring the telegraph station, ready to transmit orders to the engine room. When Mackey shouted out an order, the captain translated it into French, although the crew understood port, starboard, astern, and all the regular directions in English, just as Mackey understood Ă la droite to mean to the right. To prevent confusion Mackey supplemented his orders with hand signals, indicating that he wanted the ship to drop anchor south of the lighthouse. As the Mont Blanc slipped across the mouth of the harbor in the sunset, Mackey glanced at the bow where canvas straps bound nearly five hundred iron barrels to the deck.
âWe are all explosives,â Le MĂ©dec explained as they waited for the examination officer to board. With his poor English it almost sounded like an apology.
Examining Officer Terrence Freeman watched the Mont Blanc approach from the deck of the examination boat. He noticed her color first.
âWar-color gray,â he said to himself. Even the words sounded depressing. When she finally anchored, he sailed to her side in a lighter and climbed aboard. Once on deck, he was relieved to see Mackey because the captainâs English was limited. Freeman asked to see the manifest. Le MĂ©dec handed him the papers. As Freeman scanned the lading list, he realized that he had never seen a cargo like this one. Despite the increase in wartime traffic, Halifax rarely received ships carrying high explosives. As far as Freeman knew, the Mont Blanc was the first one scheduled to sail all the way to the Basin. As he read further down the list, Freeman reached the benzol and monochlorobenzol, both petroleum products, which carried their own dangers. The combination struck Freeman as dangerous. âI knew it could do some damage all right.â But since the warâs outset, higher risks were more acceptable. Twenty minutes later, Freeman finished signing off and handed the manifest back to Le MĂ©dec, but he addressed his comments to Mackey.
âShe canât go in until morning.â
Although there was still some sun left in the sky, the gates were closed. He was referring to the two antisubmarine nets that were installed across the mouth of the harbor and on either side of Georgeâs Island. The chief examining officer changed their schedule every day, opening and closing the gates intermittently to allow scheduled ships in and out while preventing German U-boats from slipping into the outer harbor. Both gates closed for the night at sundown and although it was only 4:30 p.m.âstill thirty-six minutes before the official sundownâthe sun had already slipped behind the hills. Underneath the cold water between Point Pleasant Park and Mc-Nabâs Island, a diagonal mesh gate anchored to the harbor floor by three-ton concrete weights slammed shut for the night, sending a shiver down the buoys that marked its presence. The Mont Blanc would have to spend the night outside the gates. Freeman gave them their instructions before returning to the examination station.
âStay at the anchorage until morning and then proceed up the harbor at the usual time if you do not hear from me.â
Although Mackeyâs house was just across the water in Herring Cove, the pilot decided to spend the night on board. Downstairs in the cabin, Le MĂ©dec introduced him to First Officer Jean Glotin, who spoke fluent English, and who told him about their arrival in New York on November 9. The authorities had directed them away from their regular berth and instructed the Mont Blanc to dock at Gravesend Bay in Brooklyn. They knew something was up when the Board of Underwriters provided the shipsâ carpenters with a plan to line every inch of the holds with wood and ordered them to use copper nails. Copper nails were used to prevent accidental ignition of a flammable cargo because they did not spark when struck. As soon as the stevedores finished the holds, which were designed to be hermetically sealed when closed, police officers arrived and surrounded the ship, and soon barrels, kegs, and cases began arriving by lighter from across the bay. These were no ordinary munitions. These were high explosives. Never mind the U-boats: All that it required to send them to their death was a heavy storm or a sudden load shift. To a sailor who spent his life surrounded by water, accidental death meant drowning; fire was neither his specialty nor his fate. Yet in New York the crew watched with dread as stevedores wearing canvas slippers loaded the cargo into the holds below deck.
On Friday, November 30, while the stevedores tied down the last of the benzol, Le MĂ©dec and an interpreter returned to the British Admiralty Office in search of convoy orders. Inside the office, he handed the papers to Commander Coates, who opened the heavy registration book to the page where Le MĂ©dec had signed in. He compared the new papers to the original information.
âIs this the speed of your ship?â Coates asked, referring to the new documents.
Le MĂ©dec had originally put down eight knots as their average speed, but
The only known photograph of the Mont Blanc
when he returned to the ship, he reconsidered after checking the log from Bordeaux. It was his first voyage and he was still getting used to the Mont Blanc. At 3,121 tons, she was a heavier weight and class than his two previous vessels. She was also older, with a rĂ©sumĂ© that included sixteen years at sea as a commercial freighter. Her steel hull was 320 feet long, 44 feet 8 inches wideâa big shipâbut she was slow.
âNo, I donât think I will be able to maintain the speed of eight and a half.â
âCan you maintain two hundred miles a day?â
âIn very fine weather I probably would be able to.â
âI will have to see about that.â Coates asked them to wait and stepped briefly into his superiorâs office before returning. âYou will proceed to Halifax for convoy.â
âSupposing I cannot make this speed?â
âThe convoy officer at Halifax will furnish you with a route in a sealed envelope, which you are not to open unless you lose the convoy. This envelope will contain the route if you lose the convoy and have to go alone.â
Le MĂ©dec did not want to make the voyage unescorted. The German U-boats were more adept at finding and attacking a single ship crossing the Atlantic than a well-armed convoy. Plus this was his first time carrying high explosives and he knew almost nothing about them. He did not know that picric acid was the primary ingredient of the shells exploding across Europe or that dry picric acid was extremely sensitive to shock. All he knew was what someone told him about TNTâtake care not to strike the wharf too hard or the whole ship could go up. And even then he did not know whether or not that was true. Certainly, no official from the Admiralty or the owners, the French Line, had advised him how to handle the cargo. What Le MĂ©dec did know was that he did not want to cross the Atlantic without a destroyer to defend him. He returned to the Mont Blanc as the stevedores finished strapping the barrels to the deck. On December 1 at 11 p.m., the Mont Blanc slipped out of New York harbor in the dark. Five days later they made Halifax. The weather had been lousy, the ship slow.
As Glotin talked, Mackey took out a cigar and began to light it.
âYou can smoke in here but not outside,â Le MĂ©dec warned him, adding that cigarettes, lit or unlit, were banned from the deck. Matches too. He told Mackey that there was no alcohol on board either, although the storeâs list of supplies revealed that they had bought thirty dozen bottles of vermouth in New York. Perhaps the Frenchman did not consider fortified wine to be alcohol, or maybe it was for medicinal purposesâwormwood, the principal ingredient in vermouth, was used as a tonic against intestinal worms.
In peacetime a ship carrying such a dangerous cargo would have flown a red flag as a warning to other ships and would have been instructed to dock in the outer harbor. The Mont Blanc would not have been allowed as far as the Basin, but since Canada had entered the war with Britain in 1914, the harbor rules had changed and the British Admiralty had taken charge of all naval traffic. The red flag, or the red burgee, as sailors called it, was reclassified as optional during wartime, and for the Mont Blanc to fly it on the other side of the submarine nets where German U-boats patrolled the coastal waters would be unnecessarily risky. âIt would be suicidalâgiving information to enemy agents.â The men settled in for the night.
LOCKED ON THE INSIDE of the gates, in the southwest corner of the Bedford Basin, Captain Haakon From paced back and forth on the bridge of the Imo as the sun sank behind the hills. The Imo was supposed to have been en route to New York already, but the coal supplier had arrived two hours late and they were still loading. Pilot William Hayes, who was supposed to sail the Imo out of harbor at 3:00 p.m., confirmed what the captain already suspected: The gates were closed. Hayes told him that he was going home for the night but that he would be back early in the morning. Captain From let him go. There was nothing he could do about submarine nets.
Another night in port was hard on the men. The law that sequestered neutral crewsâthose on hospital and supply ships such as the Imoâwas meant to prevent spies from influencing them while in port, because neutral ships had access not only to the Alliesâ but to the Axisâs ports. The Commission for Relief in Belgium was founded in 1917 after the British implemented an effective naval blockade against the Germans, which inadvertently cut off Belgium and Northern France from their food supply. The German army, which could barely feed itself, refused to help the civilians. Millions of people were starving. Herbert Hoover, then a mining consul-
The antisubmarine nets running between Point Pleasant Park and McNabâs Island circa World War I
tant who helped stranded Americans return home after the war broke out in Europe, was appointed the commissioner for relief in Belgium and negotiated with both the Germans and British to allow their neutral ships past the blockades. Raising over $1 billion from around the world, the private charity managed to deliver just enough food to keep the population alive, but after the Germans announced unrestricted submarine warfare in 1917, the situation worsened again when Germans began seizing the Belgian Relief shipments. For the Imo, the result was a couple dozen men who never knew if their cargo would reach the Belgians or the Germans and who were stuck onboard ship for months on end. Only the captain could go ashore, but even he was only allowed to visit the Customs Office. Docking next to a busy port full of seafront bars, women, and rum made the ship even more claustrophobic. At least the Imo was allowed alcohol onboard. On their last crossing out of New York, Captain From had signed out seventy-one bottles of whiskey, wine, claret, gin, and liqueur. Officially, the liquor was meant for visitors, but as a neutral ship the Imo was not allowed visitors aside from naval officers. Captain From ordered the crew to be ready to lift anchor in the morning and retired to his cabin, where his dog greeted him.
AS WEDNESDAYâS FINAL RAYS dipped behind Citadel Hill and shadows lengthened across the city, Captain Fromâs agent, George Smith, who was still working in his Pickford & Black office, looked up and saw William Hayes step out of the tug. That meant the Imo had not sailed. Hayes stuck his head in the office as he walked by.
âIâll be down at 7:30.â
Smith put in an order for a tug in the morning.
At the mouth of the harbor near the lighthouse, Terrence Freeman signaled the chief examining officer, Frederick Wyatt, that the Mont Blanc had arrived and that it was carrying explosives. Not receiving any special instructions, he thought no more about it.
As night settled over the water, residents across the city pulled blackout blinds over their windows and closed the curtains before turning on the lights. In the South End, professionals, merchants, and respectable middle-class families sat down to supper in their dining rooms while their servants ate in cramped back kitchens. Students who lived near Dalhousie campus sat in long rows at tables in their dormitories. Downtown, Christmas trees were starting to appear in windows, and the store displays and newspapers were packed with toys and gifts. Along Albermarle, which the city had optimistically renamed Market Street, streetwalkers in gaudy clothes slipped into damp doorways of the blind pigs* and bawdy houses that polluted the neighborhood. Soldiers and sailors began arriving in cabs and by foot, their boots springing up the stairs to hidden dance halls, poolrooms, and brothels. Further north in Richmond Hill, a working-class neighborhood overlooking the Narrows, twenty-year-old Charles Duggan finished ferrying the last workers to Dartmouth from the dockyards and tied up the Grace Darling, a long low wooden trawler that looked something like an elongated Cape Anne with a sharp bow and a flat stern. Six square windows on either side emphasized its oversized cabin where the passengers sat. The Grace Darling was the latest addition to the family ferry businessâtheir first motorized ferryâa sign that the Duggan family was prospering.
Charles Duggan climbed the steep block to Campbell Road in the dark and entered the house on the corner, 127 Campbell Road, a two-story, semiattached saltbox built into the hill. From the rear windows, the family could see across the Narrows to Tuftâs Cove where the ferry docked on the Dartmouth shore. Inside, Charlesâs wife, Theresa, whom everyone called Reta, was playing with their four-month-old son Warren. His parents, Susie and Charles Sr., lived there as well, along with Charle...
