and there was a man laying there and his head was split open and I thought he was dead so I kept on down. See, there wasn’t a soul around. Nobody moving. I went around to the quarter deck and there was a fella laying there and he was split from the oxter right down to his hip. He was split right open.

So I followed right up till I came up to the foremast. And when I came up to the foremast there was this pillar of smoke going up right up into the sky from the ship that blew up. It was a bright sunny day. And it went right up. You’ve seen these atomic blasts: you’ve seen that? Well, this is what it was like. And I was so fascinated with looking at this smoke that I heard these fellas, like in the distance, saying, “Ginger, get under cover! Ginger, get under cover!” I used to be red-headed at that time and they used to call me Ginger. I was still looking at this and two fellas came out and grabbed me and pulled me under the fo’c’sle head.

And down she came. Boy, it came down. I just got in there in time.

Well, there came a tidal wave after that. Right after that. There was three tidal waves. We were tied next to the wharf and we had four or five ships tied alongside of us. And when she’d go down she just snapped the lines. So the bosun went down to the bosun’s locker and passed up ropes, and we put a couple of men out on the jetty and then passed the ropes around, tried to hold her in there. I guess I’m the only one of us, around here anyway, that seen Halifax Harbour when it was dry. It was nothing but a little stream down around there.

Oh, the town. [the tidal wave] broke all the glass. It just went down one street and up the other. Everything was vacated. You could go into the banks or the jewellry stores. There was nobody. Everybody left. And then when the order came to abandon the dockyard some of us didn’t want to leave. We didn’t want to leave the ship... . We couldn’t see there was any danger. But the captain said to get out, to go.

So we had to abandon. We... got up past the city: I suppose that was about a couple of miles. Everything was wide open, with nobody around. We got up to Citadel Hill there and we met with some Newfoundlanders, naval men. But they were the only people we saw. The 6th of December

1917.

Janie Penny

I came home from the war. Then I bought this Dr. MacSwain’s place. Farmed up until ’36, and then this Red Angus MacLeod. .. had this place here. There was 13 born in this house and he was one of them. His sister,

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