Curse of The Narrows: The Halifax Disaster of 1917 [Hardcover]

Laura M. Mac Donald (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: September 22, 2005

The dramatic story of one of the greatest disasters in history

In 1917, the port of Halifax, Nova Scotia, was crowded with ships leaving for war-torn Europe. On December 6th, two of them—the Mont Blanc and the Imo—collided in the Narrows, a hard-to-navigate stretch of the harbor. Ablaze, and with explosions on her deck filling the sky, the Mont Blanc grounded against the city’s docks.

As thousands rushed to their windows and into the streets to watch, she exploded with such force that the 3,121 tons of her iron hull vaporized in a cloud that shot up more than 2,000 feet; the explosion was so unusual that Robert Oppenheimer would study its effects to predict the devastation of an atomic bomb. The blast caused a giant wave that swept over parts of the city, followed by a slick, black rain that fell for ten minutes. Much of the city was flattened, and not one in 12,000 buildings within a 16-mile radius left undamaged. More than 1,600 Haligonians were killed and 6,000 injured; and within twenty-four hours, a blizzard had isolated Halifax from the world.

Set vividly against the background of World War I, Curse of the Narrows is the first major account of the world’s largest pre-atomic explosion, the epic relief mission from Boston, and the riveting trial of the Mont Blanc’s captain and pilot. Laura M. Mac Donald is as adept at describing the dynamics of a chain reaction explosion as she is at chronicling unforgettable human dramas of miraculous survival, unfathomable loss, and the medical breakthroughs in pediatrics and eye surgery that followed the disaster

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Using primary sources--many of which haven’t been read in decades and--with a wonderful feel for narrative history, Mac Donald chronicles one of the most compelling and dramatic events of the 20th century.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

Assiduous research, beautiful writing, and a great talent for historical reconstruction make Laura MacDonald's Curse of the Narrows the definitive account of the Halifax explosion of December 1917. MacDonald is a master of minutia--chemistry, laws of navigation, the horrors visited on the poor people of Halifax's north end--and she writes with supreme authority and exquisite detail.

MacDonald begins her account with geography and she sets the scene by examining the bustling port of Halifax in the First World War. Using the very best recent scholarship, she then reconstructs the accident itself, describing closely the series of small errors that lead the Norwegian freighter Imo to ram into the French munitions vessel Mont Blanc in the narrows of Halifax harbor: "The Mont Blanc, with 2,925 tons of explosives, packed in hermetically sealed holds inside a super-heated hull was now the most powerful bomb the war and the world had yet produced." When it exploded, thousands of innocent people were killed in an instant. If MacDonald had limited her investigation into the causes of the accident her book would still be worth buying. She offers much more: examinations of the inquiries and court cases, the official response to the devastation, and above all the ways in which families were challenged by the appalling effects of the explosion. By tracing the struggles of these families, the Duggans, the Frasers, and the Galloways among others, MacDonald brings the scope of the tragedy home to the reader in a way that few would have believed possible. Be warned. Parts of this book are book have an impact on the reader's soul no less than the concussion of the explosion itself. This is a magnificent accomplishment. --William Newbigging

From Publishers Weekly

In this recounting of the December 6, 1917, explosion that leveled much of Halifax, Nova Scotia, Mac Donald gives a minutely detailed if not particularly lively rendition of what legend holds to be the most powerful manmade detonation before the testing of the atomic bomb in 1945. The unique natural characteristics of the city's harbor had long made it an ideal naval base of operations, and by 1917, Halifax had become a key transit point for war material bound from the ostensibly neutral United States to the beleaguered European allies. The merchant ship Mont Blanc, loaded with thousands of tons of TNT and the notoriously unstable explosive picric acid, was passing through the harbor's Narrows when it was struck by a Belgian relief vessel and exploded. More than 1,600 died, thousands more were injured and the blast wave collapsed buildings, in the words of a survivor, "like a grain field in harvest before a gust of wind." A television producer and Halifax native, Mac Donald draws out her narrative with excessive detail and flat prose, failing to bring her trove of first-person accounts to life. 40 b&w illus. not seen by PW. (Oct.)
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Product Details

• Hardcover: 350 pages
• Publisher: Walker & Company; 1 edition (September 22, 2005)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0802714587
• ISBN-13: 978-0802714589
• Product Dimensions: 9.3 x 6.4 x 0.9 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.5 pounds (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.4 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (36 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #333,846 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

30 of 30 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Another City Unprepared For A Disaster, October 2, 2005

By 

C. Hutton "book maven" (East Coast, USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Curse of The Narrows: The Halifax Disaster of 1917 (Hardcover)

Ms. MacDonald has researched the definitive account of the destruction of the City of Halifax, Nova Scotia during World War I. Everything that could go wrong did go wrong : from the right two ships colliding (one of them carrying nearly 3,000 tons of munitions) to the bomb ship drifting to Halifax before exploding and the blizzard that struck the City afterwards.

The disorganized search and rescue attempts through the snowstorm of the City in rubble (think of the destruction caused by hurricanes or by an atomic bomb) takes up the last half of the book. Nearly 2,000 people were killed by the blast with disabling injuries for the thousands of survivors. Ms. MacDonald writes of her native City with more detail than was perhaps necessary but the story is a page-turner and serves as a warning to the reader that life has not changed much in terms of disaster relief over the past century.

25 of 27 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Excellent, November 27, 2005

By 

Mark K. Mcdonough "Mark McDonough" (Reston, VA USA) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Curse of The Narrows: The Halifax Disaster of 1917 (Hardcover)

This is an exemplary and very interesting bit of historical writing. Oddly enough, I have a couple of other books on massive industrial explosions, including the Texas City disaster in 1947 and the explosion of the Ft. Stikine in Bombay harbor in 1944. MacDonald's book is by far the best. It's well organized, gracefully written, and mediates between the perspectives of the present and the lessons of the past in a particularly sensitive way. Most importantly, I think, it treats those caught up in the disaster with the utmost respect, avoiding the easiest trap for writers of historical non-fiction: the unconscious assumption that people in the past, because they wore funny clothes and had attitudes strange to us, were somehow quaint and not as bright as we are. MacDonald tells this story with great compassion and insight without milking it for melodrama (which would have been very easy).

Because she allows the past to speak for itself whenever possible, there are some really thought-provoking bits to those interested in modern disaster planning. I found it particularly interesting that the Red Cross of that day, for example, strongly preferred to work with citizen committees rather than political leaders, regarding the latter as being nearly useless because of the way they start to pursue their own agendas the instant in the initial shock wears off.

As a military history buff, I've known about the explosion of the Mont Blanc for a long time. I'm really glad to have such a wonderful book on it.

15 of 17 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars The Winter's Tale, August 1, 2006

By 

Kevin Killian (San Francisco, CA United States) - See all my reviews
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This review is from: Curse of The Narrows: The Halifax Disaster of 1917 (Hardcover)

My great grandparents were young people around the time of the First World War, and with the boys called away to service overseas, my great grandmother and plenty of other "land girls" were called to man the plows of the little farms in upstate New York, where a struggling rutabaga truck farm kept all the neighboring women pon the job morning, noon and night, with time only off for Sunday school and church worship at the nearest community center, some twelve miles out. My great grandmother heard the noise of the Imo explosion and never forgot it, for the mule she was behind got skeered and ran into the next man's acreage, a feat he never did again, that lazy gray mule they called Buster. The harvest was long gone, for this was the beginning of winter right after American Thanksgiving, but my great-grandmother was once again tearing up the ruts, a weekly chore even in a nor'easter or snowstorm.

"The sky was full of black dust," she swore to me, as a very old woman in the early 1970s. "Looked like a billion locusts. And then we sniffed the air and we knew, them was part of people!" Laura Mac Donald, a topnotch TV producer, has interviewed many survivors of that long ago tragedy in Halifax, many of whom suffered permanent hearing loss as a result of the fiery explosion, the shock waves of which were heard not only in the Finger Lakes but, it is said, even in the Caribbean paradises of Cuba and Santo Domingo. In truth, it was a tsunami, and the producers of THE DAY AFTER TOMORROW should hold on to their footage for when the day comes and the studios want to bring this Canadian tragedy to life.

As usual, the poor people paid the most, the people of the North End who couldn't get out in time. There were so many people killed and dying that they ran out of gravediggers. Why, they even ran out of preachers, and when did that ever occur before or since? My great grandmother said the Catholics got it worst, and Mac Donald's figures show that in one parish alone, St. Joseph's, nearly five hundred members lost their lives in a single instant. "Some clergymen simply remained in or near the cemetery during the day," writes Mac Donald, "performing funerals until it got too dark to read."

And all of this in the days and weeks that should have been happy ones, the weeks before Christmas!

An inquest was held and Mac Donald somehow got hold of the complete transcript, which illuminates who was to blame and who was completely innocent. You have to know a lot about intercoastal shipping to understand this material, it's dense, like the very thickest parts of the Warren Report. Otherwise the book grips you like three magnets.