Book Review: Curse of the Narrows by Laura M. Mac Donald

An unusually pleasant December day in Halifax, Canada, saw the largest pre-Hiroshima/Nagasaki artificial explosion on record. The city's already-bustling harbour was getting busier each day that the First World War went on. There were the usual cargo ships, schooners, tugs, and ferries, but there were also submarines, minesweepers and troop transport ships.

On December 6, 1917, the Halifax harbour had a ship come in unlike any that had entered it before. The Mont Blanc was loaded with high explosives. It was there to meet an escort ship and then to transport its load for use in the war effort. Instead, the Mont Blanc was struck by the Imo, a Belgian relief ship leaving the harbour. The collision killed almost 2000 people and injured 4000 more in a city of 60,000. 

In the Curse of the Narrows, Laura M. Mac Donald's account of these events and the days that followed brings the unimaginable scale of the disaster to light. Lingering lessons gleaned from the tragedy are also illustrated.

The book begins by outlining the confluence of events that made the Halifax explosion possible: the miscommunications, the bad timing, and the fuzzy procedures. Minute by minute, Mac Donald glides through what was going on in the harbour and on the pier.

As I've mentioned before, I've always had a soft spot for disaster books. Curse of the Narrows is a great example of why. With each event, I found myself compelled to shout at the book, wanting to prevent the inevitable. Mac Donald makes it clear that there are dozens of things that could have given the story a different ending. Halifax was unlucky; the same mistakes and misfortunes could have happened anywhere. The odds would say the disaster shouldn't have happened anywhere at all.

Though I'd heard of the Halifax explosion, I hadn't known that it was immediately followed by a tsunami and a significant blizzard. The snow was a mixed blessing. It helped to put out fires, but it delayed the arrival of relief workers. Worse, people who had survived the blast but were trapped beneath debris were at risk of dying from exposure.

To Haligonians, it must have seemed as though they had done something very, very wrong to deserve such monumental punishment, a scourge of fire, sea and snow. Mac Donald personalizes the disaster through the stories of a handful of survivors, ranging from students to sailors to doctors. These individual stories act as a necessary balance. They help us understand the experience of the disaster as well as its scale.

Sometimes, the accounts of eyewitnesses and survivors allow us to understand both at once. The Mont Blanc burned quietly long enough to draw people to their windows before it exploded, shattering glass in Halifax and beyond. Consequently, a doctor talks about having a pail full of injured eyes that he had to remove. 

Article Author: Bonnie

Bonnie writes about books every Thursday at Fourth-Rate Reader, about everything else at Signifying Nothing, and sometimes she resorts to pictures. She lives in Toronto.

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