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On a warm July night a year ago, crews dredging as part of an expansion at Irving’s shipyard started pulling out a treasure trove of artifacts believed to be connected to the Halifax Explosion.
In the weeks and months that followed, more than 100 pieces from the explosion were among the 100,000 tonnes of material pulled out of Halifax harbour. In some cases, the artifacts were car-size chunks of metal.
The pieces came from the present-day location of what would have been home to Pier 6 on Dec. 6, 1917. This is the area where the collision happened between the Mont-Blanc, a French munitions ship, and Imo, a Norwegian steamship carrying Belgian relief supplies.
The Halifax Explosion is the worst disaster in Canadian history — and arguably the most important event in the city’s history. Two-thousand people were killed and 9,000 injured, while two square kilometres of the city were levelled.
For the municipal and provincial governments, the artifacts were, literally, too big of a problem. Despite their historical significance, both governments have done little with them, records obtained through a freedom of information request show.
Joel Zemel, who has written several books on the Halifax Explosion, said there’s little appetite for preserving the city’s history, so he’s not surprised the artifacts were not greeted with much enthusiasm.
“If they wanted the space, they needed the space, they’d make the space. Period,” said Zemel.
The records obtained by CBC News include a letter by Amber Laurie, the curator of the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic.
In it, Laurie listed the reasons why some of the artifacts are believed to come from the Mont-Blanc. This included their thickness being similar to existing pieces in the museum’s collection, as well as the irregular shapes of some of the pieces.
“A high force event combined with heat would create such twists in riveted metal,” she wrote in the July 25, 2024, document.
Given where the pieces were found, Zemel said they are likely from the Mont-Blanc. But he questions the methodology that was used by museum officials to reach that conclusion.
“You need experts to come in, outside experts, who are not involved with the [Maritime] museum [of the Atlantic], who don’t have any predisposed ideas,” said Zemel.
Laurie’s letter also highlighted why the artifacts are noteworthy.
“The fragments recently recovered are far larger than most known ones and would be considered historically significant at the municipal, provincial, and potentially, the national level,” Laurie wrote.
Despite this enthusiasm, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic only took two artifacts: a fragment and a rivet.
A bow the museum collected was later determined not to be from the Mont-Blanc because it had welding, which meant it was too new to belong to the vessel. As well, its condition was too pristine.
It’s unclear if the bow is classified as one of the museum’s two latest acquisitions.
A Sept. 25, 2024, email from John Cormier, the co-ordinator of special places with the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage, reveals some of the challenges the province would face in storing the artifacts.
“The pieces in this collection range in size from as small as 30 cm to more than 30 feet in length,” he wrote.
“This, combined with the number of artifacts collected makes curation of this collection impossible for the [Nova Scotia Museum] or [Davis, MacIntyre & Associates], as neither group has the capacity to hold it, and conservation of such an extensive collection would be expensive.” (Davis, MacIntyre & Associates was the archaeology consulting firm working on the dredging project.)
At the municipal level, the response was similar.
“HRM does not have plans to create more Explosion commemorative displays in the near future so are reluctant to take on any large pieces, but we can accept two small fragments (<15cm), along with any accompanying report/description to provide the context of their recovery/provenance etc.,” Susan McClure, the city’s archivist, wrote in a Nov. 27, 2024, email to some provincial and municipal officials.
In a statement, the Department of Communities, Culture, Tourism and Heritage said the dredging turned up 127 items that are believed to be from the Mont-Blanc.
Besides the pieces given to the city and the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, the remainder are at an Irving-owned facility in Dartmouth, the department said.
To determine with certainty that some of the recovered artifacts were, in fact, from the Mont-Blanc, Laurie recommended that metallurgical testing be conducted.
The archaeologist working on the project, Travis Crowell, asked Irving if they would pick up the tab. Irving, under no obligation to pay for this given the terms of their permit application, declined.
No metallurgical testing was ever done.
In a statement, the province said that given where the items were found and because of research done by department staff and the project’s consulting archaeologist, they did not go ahead with the testing.
“[W]e are confident that some of the materials are related to the Halifax Explosion and/or are pieces of the Mont-Blanc,” it said.
