By Scott Longman
As the aphorism goes, “Your ego is not your amigo.”
A second aphorism states: “Fuck Around and Find Out.” Well, on December 6, 1917, two ships’ harbor pilots and their captains well and truly Found Out, and in the most brutal of ways. If only their Fucking Around had limited their Finding Out to themselves, instead of thousands of innocents.
World War I was still raging with unprecedented carnage, but it was all far away, across the Atlantic. Nobody thought it would show up in Canada. Well, they hadn’t heard of a ship named the Imo, nor one named the Monte-Blanc. The Imo had come to port in Nova Scotia’s inner Halifax basin for a mandated inspection and refueling. The coal was a couple of days in coming, and on the evening it finally did, the harbormaster had already secured the anti-submarine netting, meaning the Imo could not leave, making the ship later than it already was. So, the following morning, its captain and pilot left with a vengeance.
On that morning, the French ship, the Mont-Blanc, was inbound. It was loaded with enormous quantities of ordnance, bound for the war in France. The manifest included TNT, picric acid, benzol, and guncotton, all adding up to the explosive equivalent large enough to be measured by tac nuke standards, of about 2.9 kilotons. For reference, the heavily-videoed 2020 explosion that devastated Beirut was only about 1.1 kt.
Given how constrained the space was in the basin and narrows, there was very particular maritime procedure to be observed there, well-known to the professional harbor pilots, that included a max headway of five knots and staying well to starboard in the passage. The Imo instead flew by two inbound ships and at far greater speed.
The pilot aboard the Mont-Blanc saw them coming, essentially facing a head-on, and issued the appropriate whistle blasts commanding a port-to-port passing, Imo refused. Mont Blanc tried again. Again, Imo told them to pound sand.
Even though the Mont-Blanc was in the right, it yanked back its steam and went into what could be thought of as the oncoming lane to avoid collision, with the pilot and captain profoundly aware of their cataclysmic cargo. Imo, too, finally backed off its steam. That combination damn near worked. But at the last moment, the Imo, fatally compounding its many earlier mistakes, threw its engines into reverse, which caused its bow to swing around, right into the other ship.
There are conflicting accounts as to the causation that followed, but not the outcome. The best-researched account says that the breach caused the ignition of picric acid crystals, while also knocking over barrels of benzol on the deck. That heavier-than-air chemical drifting downward found the flame, and ignited a roaring fire, which in turn found more barrels, and created an exothermic pyramid marketing scheme.
Ironically, wartime measures designed to maintain safety did precisely the opposite. In peacetime, no such cargo as the Monte-Blanc’s would have been allowed in, but in order to protect the ship from the very real threat of U-boats, they did. Further, a pre-war regulation required munitions ships to fly a red flag, but so as not to give U-boats a high-value target, it didn’t apply then. Bottom line: no other ships and few observers knew what was aboard.
The fire metastasized, becoming a billowing disaster. Neither the pilot nor the captain tried to reverse the ship away from population. Nor did either of them even try to drop anchor, to keep the floating Armageddon where it was. No, they and the crew simply fled, jumping in lifeboats and rowing like they had a megalodon chasing them. A megalodon would have been far less dangerous. Without anchor, the then-largest bomb in all of human history drifted into the heart of Halifax, and came to rest against Pier 6.
Crowds gathered, both on the Halifax side of the basin, and the far side, Dartmouth. Others looked out windows to take in the flaming spectacle.
One man who had an unwanted but excellent view of the blazing Monte-Blanc was railway dispatcher Patrick Vincent Coleman: his dispatch office was only about 700 feet from the pier.
Somebody had figured out what was going on, and sent runners, with a warning bellowed at Coleman and his colleague to run, and they started to. Then Coleman stopped. He knew the train schedule intimately, and he realized that a passenger train carrying 300 souls would pull in only a few minutes later, and they’d be very, very close to the ship.
He turned and bolted back to the office and his crucial telegraph.
There’s some historical debate as to exactly what happened next. Nobody debates that Coleman sent at least one telegraph message: the question is exactly what it said, and exactly what effect it had. The widely accepted version, according to, among others, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, is that he sent: “Hold up the train. Ammunition ship afire in harbor making for Pier 6 and will explode. Guess this will be my last message. Good-bye boys.”
Detonation.
Coleman was instantly and heroically reduced to the stardust from which he arose. His office was obliterated, as was every structure within a half mile, and most structures for the next half mile suffered severe damage. And the destruction radiated far past that.
Many if not most buildings were of frame construction, and given that it was Canada in December, most were heated, that by largely coal or wood burning stoves, which instantly started thousands of spreading fires. It was zero-to-hellscape in one-one hundredth.
All told, about 1,600 people died instantly, another 300 would die of wounds, and over 9,000 suffered significant injuries. That leaves aside the psychological anguish of the wounded, and the untold thousands of family members and friends, much of which would echo for decades. The devastating economic effects, as horrific as they were, seem almost irrelevant in comparison to the vast La Brea of human suffering.
So what was the consequence of Coleman’s balls-out sacrifice?
We know for a fact that the inbound train either slowed or stopped well out of the blast zone, saving all aboard, so that’s 300 saved right there, to say nothing of distant family members saved the mental anguish. And more so, Coleman’s message was relayed, with many other inbound trains stopped, the number of people saved, undetermined. Further yet, the emergency response of assembling relief trains with medical personnel and supplies, began to form immediately, and their quick response to treat the roughly 9,000 wounded almost certainly saved some and perhaps even many. There is no verifiable way to quantify how many people he saved, but our bet is into the thousands.
Patrick Vincent Coleman, 1872-1917. The Hero of Halifax.
