Nova Scotia, Canada

Halifax is a city on the western shore of a deep inlet approached directly from the North Atlantic, after rounding Chebucto Head on the Halifax side or Hartlen Point on the Dartmouth side. A ship then enters one of the finest harbours in the world. It is a terminal port of call for shipping for all of the year, and during the closed St. Lawrence winter season, an ice free winter port for many Transatlantic cargo lines. The port of Halifax in Nova Scotia also has an important naval base and dockyard, a commercial shipyard, and has several claims to fame, including the birthplace of Samuel Cunard (1787-1865), founder of Cunard Line. Samuel Cunard began a steamboat service from Halifax to Dartmouth in 1836, and the Cunard Line paddle steamer Britannia began the first mail service between Liverpool and North America four years later. A massive explosion in 1917 equivalent to the power of an atomic bomb after a collision in the harbour destroyed most of these facilities and killed two thousand people, and the harbour was also the sailing point of most of the vital convoys in two World Wars to brave the U boat ‘wolf packs’ of the Battle of the Atlantic and sustain the war in Europe against Nazi Germany.

The port with its excellent natural harbour is used today by some 1,500 breakbulk, bulk, ro-ro, container ships and tankers, creating around 11,800 jobs locally and an estimated economic impact of CAN$1.6 billion. One quarter of a million cruise passengers in 140 cruise ships of the leading cruise lines in the world arrive annually to visit the many tourist facilities, and spend an estimated $104.3 million in the Halifax area. In the last five years, $250 million of investment in the port from the private sector has been made, of which the Halifax Port Authority (HPA) has invested over $100 million. There are over a dozen major terminals in the port for the container, timber, grain, gypsum, and crude oil and oil rig repair and service industries, of which nine are owned by the HPA. The port handled 8.6 million tonnes of cargo during 2013, with the bulk cargo total being the largest, followed by container traffic, crude oil, breakbulk and ro-ro and project cargoes.

History Of Halifax (NS)

The indigenous Mi’kmaq North American native people lived in the area for thousands of years before the first Europeans arrived. The French explorer Samuel de Champlain visited the harbour in 1605, but the town was not founded until a century later when it became a small French fishing port. In 1749, Colonel Edward Cornwallis, an Englishman, founded Halifax at what is today Barrington Street, which runs from the Downtown district to the North End district. The destruction of the French fortress at Louisbourg in 1760 increased British dominance of Nova Scotia and made Halifax its most important city. Cornwallis named the small town after the Second Earl of Halifax, President of the Board of Trade and Plantations.

The first naval dockyard in Halifax opened in 1758, and the port became one of the most fortified of Royal Naval bases outside Britain until the Canadian Government took over the Royal Navy base in 1906. The fortress at the top of Citadel Hill, the highest point of the town, lies up Duke Street and George Street, and today is the most visited national historic site in Canada. The fortress is star shaped and is the fourth such construction on the site, construction of the first began in 1749. Visitors have free admission with guided tours around the beautiful grounds of the site when the galleries of the museum are closed.

Two universities were founded in Halifax in the early 1800s, and with the invasion by British forces in 1812 of several parts of the United States of America, Halifax became an important British supply base with a vigorous black market trade. In 1818, Halifax became a ‘free port’ and allowed foreign ships to move cargo in and out of the port. The Halifax Citadel Clock Tower began keeping time for the town on 20th October 1803, with the clock mechanism constructed by respected Royal Clockmakers based in London. This three storey white painted building was erected on the eastern side of Citadel Hill facing Brunswick Street, with four faces displaying Roman numerals, and the ‘4’ shown as Roman numeral ‘IIII’ not as ‘IV’. The clock is near the top of an octagon shaped tower on top of a ground floor base of classic Palladian proportions. It was built to give all workers in the Dockyard and in the town the time of the day by simply glancing up the hill. The ground floor has been used in the past as a guard room and a residence for the clock caretaker, but the last caretaker ceased his work in 1965, with the clock mechanism today wound twice weekly by Citadel Hill National Historic Site employees. By the mid 1850s, Halifax had become an important seaport and military town, thronged with British soldiers and seamen of all nationalities visiting the local hostelries.

In 1872, the Intercolonial Railway connected Halifax to the rest of North America, and eight years later the Intercontinental Railway opened the Deep Water Ocean Terminus, a dock with berths for a dozen ships simultaneously. In 1874, the Royal Navy survey ship Challenger called in at Halifax on her return voyage after spending two years collecting seabed and other samples of marine creatures in the Antarctic. She had in her laboratory some five thousand items of seabed creatures in 563 large cases, 2,860 glass jars and 176 metal tins, all preserved in spirit for further scientific research when she reached home. The grain elevator and part of the Deep Water Ocean Terminals were destroyed by fire in 1895. Imperial Oil opened its first berth at Dartmouth in 1898 for the import of oil.

Titanic Disaster Aftermath

On 14th April 1912, three ships, including the cable repair ship Mackay-Bennett, sailed from Halifax at full speed in response to the distress call from the liner Titanic, which had hit an iceberg on its maiden voyage. The tragedy cost 1,512 lives with most of the bodies that were retrieved brought back to Halifax for burial. Mackay-Bennett was chartered from the Commercial Cable Company, her task being to thoroughly search the area where Titanic had sunk, and whenever possible, to recover the bodies of passengers and crew. The cable tanks and holds were filled with many tonnes of ice, and embalming fluid, tools and supplies, as well as more than one hundred coffins. She sailed from her Upper Water Street berth at Halifax at 1235 hours on Wednesday 17th April under Capt. F.H. Lardner, and her all volunteer crew were paid double for the grim and sad voyage.

Accurate positions of floating wreckage and bodies were passed on by radio from the German liners Bremen and Rhein until she reached the area late on Saturday 20th April. On the following day, 51 bodies were recovered, the process of identification being helped by recording hair colour, height, approximate weight and age, scars, markings or birth marks, money on the body, jewellery, clothing, addresses on letters and passports, ticket passage number, key rings and tags, and photographs and personal belongings. On Monday 22nd April, 27 bodies were recovered including Colonel John Astor, and several more bodies the following day, of which fifteen were committed to the sea as they were badly disfigured, bruised and beyond identification. More bodies were recovered during the next two days, and on Wednesday 24th April, the Allan liner Alsatian was met at sea in order to transfer canvas and burlap in a small boat to help with the wrapping of over eighty bodies.

On Thursday 25th April, 87 bodies were recovered, searched, tagged and wrapped and embalmed onboard Mackay-Bennett. The following day, the cableship Minia, owned by the Anglo-American Telegraph Co. Ltd., arrived on the scene from Halifax. The two ships continued their grim task and recovered fourteen more bodies, which were placed onboard the departing Mackay-Bennett for Halifax. Minia had recovered a further fourteen bodies by Tuesday 30th April, the search being ended and she too sailed for Halifax.

Mackay-Bennett did not dock at her usual berth at Halifax, but instead around one mile further up the harbour towards The Narrows and Bedford Basin, at Coaling Wharf 4 of the Royal Canadian Naval Dockyard. A canvas covered gangway was put in place with privacy given by the very big wall surrounding the dockyard. A large and solemn guard of honour in full naval dress uniform was lined up on the quayside, drawn from the ships at the base or under repair in the dockyard. The bodies on the foredeck and in the holds were unloaded amid the slow tolling of the church bells of the city, with all flags at half mast. The bodies were transferred to the Mayflower Ice Rink, where formal identification of all but forty bodies was made. A total of 209 bodies were brought into Halifax by Mackay-Bennett and Minia, some were forwarded to New York and others to places where relatives had instructed their loved ones to be buried. Some 121 souls were buried in the Fairview Lawn Cemetery, nineteen in the Mount Olivet Catholic Cemetery, and ten in the Baron de Hirsch Jewish Cemetery, of which forty graves remain unidentified today.

Pier 21 Immigration

Pier 21 at Halifax was to Canada what Ellis Island was to the United States of America, with well over one million immigrants entering Canada at this pier between 1928 and 1971. The pier was completed in 1917 but transit sheds for the handling of passengers from ocean liners were not completed until 1928. Today, the pier is the Canadian Museum of Immigration, with videos shown daily in the museum of present day Canadian descendants giving the sometimes tragic reasons why their forebears made the long Transatlantic voyages to a new life in a new country. Some settled in Halifax, with its bracing sea breezes, good quality of life, and today a number of universities and colleges that ensure the population remains young and vigorous. Summer evenings in downtown Halifax on its historic waterfront with its lively music, bars and festivals, and full employment in the tall skyscrapers behind the piers of Canadian banks and industries, are testimony to the fact that Halifax is a lovely place to live.

The more wealthy immigrants settled, in particular, in the North End district of Halifax, which has existed since 1750, with larger and grander houses than elsewhere in the city that have ensured its popularity. The Maritime Command Museum at North End charts the history of the Royal Navy base in Halifax. The admirals and senior naval officers threw grand and lavish parties at this former Admiralty House, which was destroyed in the huge harbour explosion and then rebuilt. The museum is worth a visit today for its Georgian architecture, and valuable ships’ bells, silverware, and British naval artefacts of all kinds and descriptions.

Huge Explosion In Halifax Harbour

The port of Halifax consists of a twenty mile long Outer Harbour with a width of over a mile, the Narrows and the Bedford Basin, all on a North West to South East axis. The port was never attacked by any naval force, but it fell victim on 6th December 1917 to a huge explosion of a French munitions ship named Mont Blanc carrying TNT and highly flammable benzol after a collision with the Norwegian vessel Imo, which was in ballast, operating for the Belgian Relief Organisation. The ensuing fireball and mushroom cloud killed over 2,000 people in Halifax with 9,000 injured and the entire Richmond and North End district was flattened. It was the largest man-made explosion in the pre-atomic bomb era, as Mont Blanc was carrying 2,300 tons of wet and dry picric acid, 225 tons of TNT, 61 tons of gun cotton and 35 tons of benzol in heavy barrels carried as deck cargo. The collision was caused by navigation errors, as in 1917 ships entered the port on the east channel and sailed down the west channel close to the Halifax waterfront.

Imo was sailing from the Bedford Basin and was forced to steer into the incoming east channel by an American steamer and a tug towing a long string of barges. Thus, she was in the wrong channel when she met the incoming Mont Blanc steering up the east channel in The Narrows.

The two ships collided head on with a fire immediately raging in the 35 tons of benzol on the fo’c’stle of Mont Blanc. The resulting explosion at 0904 hours was the equivalent to an explosion of 2.9 kilotons of TNT. The giant fireball and mushroom cloud reached over a mile and a quarter into the air, with Mont Blanc vapourised and Imo eventually running aground on the Dartmouth side.

Some 9,000 people were injured, two thirds of these seriously, and up to 25,000 people were left homeless or with inadequate shelter. Some six hundred people suffered serious eye injuries that left them blinded for life. I wrote a fuller account of this terrible disaster for the March 2012 issue of this magazine.

Port of Halifax at the End Of World War I

Despite the disaster, the Port of Halifax was the biggest and most important naval base in Canada in both World War I and World War II. At the end of the war in 1918 after repairs had been made to the badly damaged naval base and dockyard due to the explosion, the Commander in overall charge of the Royal Canadian Naval Base was Commander John T. Shenton, and the Commander in Charge of the Royal Canadian Naval Dockyard was Commander Arthur F.L. Attwood. The repair yard of Halifax Shipyards Ltd. at this time had a graving dock of length 550 feet, breadth at entrance of 89.3 feet, and depth over the sill of 30.0 feet, as well as four patent slipways ranging in length from 180 feet to 270 feet with a lifting power of up to 3,000 tonnes, and there were four alongside berths for repairs afloat.

The Dartmouth Refinery of Imperial Oil of Canada was commissioned in 1918 on the other side of the harbour from Halifax to supply the oil fuel needs of the many oil fired ships that were in service or coming into service. Some 88 oil tanks were built along with a ‘cracking’ plant on the original site of Fort Clarence, one of the 18th century forts protecting the harbour against attack. Crude oil tankers arrived during the inter-war years to the 990 acre site to give a throughput of 89,000 barrels per day of crude oil into the many useful refined products for the eastern seaboard of Canada, with some distributed to New York. The most important period of the refinery was during World War II, as all of the ships sailing from the protected Bedford Basin on ‘HX’ convoys to the United Kingdom were bunkered at the refinery, which was just upstream of the protective harbour boom to keep all U-boats outside of the natural harbour. It is fair to say that without the Dartmouth Refinery there would have been a severe crisis in the number of ships able to sail and break the U-boat stranglehold on supplying Britain with food and war munitions during most of the war.

The Dartmouth Refinery suffered damage from an electrical storm on 21st July 2011, which temporarily shut down the refinery until repairs and scheduled maintenance brought it back into service for another two years. However, Imperial Oil decided to close the refinery at the end of 2013 and convert it into a marine storage terminal. The lack of supply that this produced affected the wholesale price of gasoline in New York for some time afterwards. The sale of marine bunker fuel and diesel oil was phased out in the Port of Halifax to commercial shipping lines, and the production of asphalt, butane and propane ended. The refinery employed two hundred workers, and was one of three refineries supplying heating oil and gasoline to the Atlantic provinces of Canada, the others being at St. John in New Brunswick and Come by Chance in Newfoundland. The refinery exported much of its production to the United States of America, and the fallout from the closure of the refinery affected other producers of gasoline and fuel oil, but particularly Exxon, the Imperial Oil parent company.

World War II ‘HX’ Convoys

The very large inner harbour known as the Bedford Basin was the point where ships of the many ‘HX’ convoys for the United Kingdom waited to receive their sailing orders, giving Masters of ships their positions in the many columns of the convoy and enable them to be ready for the crossing and whatever lay ahead. There were six hundred convoys from North America to the United Kingdom, of which 377 carried the ‘HX’ for Halifax convoy notation. En route, they absorbed the BHX convoys from Bermuda, and later in the war, some ‘HX’ convoys began at New York after the United States of America entered the war.

The ‘HX’ designation perpetuated a similar series of convoys that ran during World War I during 1917 and 1918. At the start of World War II, the first ‘HX’ convoy, HX1, sailed thirteen days after the outbreak with eighteen merchant ships, escorted by the Royal Canadian Navy destroyers St. Laurent and Saguenay to a North Atlantic rendezvous with a Royal Navy escort force including the heavy cruisers Berwick and York. The faster HXF1 convoy sailed a day later escorted by an Armed Merchant Cruiser, and included cargo-liners, cargo ships, tankers, banana boats, and passenger ships with speeds of between ten and thirteen knots. Slower tramps, small general cargo ships, and Canadian ‘laker’ steamers crossing the Atlantic to serve as colliers, made up the slower ‘SC’ convoys sailing from Sydney (Cape Breton) with speeds of eight knots or less.

The faster ‘HX’ convoys made them less vulnerable to U-boat attack than the slow convoys, but they still suffered badly with five ‘HX’ convoys losing more than six ships. The more usual close escort for the bigger ‘HX’ convoys later in the war was a single destroyer escort commander with seven or eight ‘Flower’ class corvettes supplemented by sloops and armed trawlers. Commander Walker, based in Liverpool, was the ace U-boat ‘killer’, and had a force of two sloops or ‘River’ class frigates and seven corvettes that took the battle to the enemy as U-boat ‘hunter killers’, not just as a close escort. The ‘air gap’ in mid Atlantic was the crucial battle area where no air cover was provided until April 1943 when special escort carriers accompanied all convoys. All 377 ‘HX’ convoys cannot be described here, but ten of the more important ones were:-

• HX5A and HX5B battled their way across but lost three ships off Ireland as the convoy neared safety in Liverpool in October 1939.
• HX79 was attacked by a U-boat wolf pack in October 1940, with a dozen ships lost, and together with a bigger total from SC7 that sailed on the same day made the worst shipping losses of the entire Allied North Atlantic campaign.
• HX84 of 37 ships was attacked on 5th November 1940 by the German heavy cruiser Admiral Scheer, her long range guns quickly sank five ships while standing off the convoy. The bravery of Capt. Fogarty Fegen R.N. of the armed merchant cruiser Jervis Bay of the Aberdeen and Commonwealth Line in taking his ship from the centre columns of the convoy to confront the six 11 inch guns of the pocket battleship with her six inch guns was of the highest calibre. Jervis Bay bought 22 minutes of precious time by her selfless sacrifice, time for most of the rest of the convoy to scatter under heavy smokescreens. A total of Jervis Bay and six ships were sunk and two other ships were damaged, but recalls of two following convoys from Halifax created confusion until HX89 sailed on 17th November 1940. All ‘HX’ convoys were then given battleship escort.
• HX106 sailed at the beginning of February 1941 from Halifax, and the presence of the escorting battleship Ramillies deterred an attack by the German battleships Scharnhorst and Gneisenau, which appeared on the horizon on 8th February.
• HX112 of 41 ships was attacked by a U-boat wolf pack in March 1941, with five ships lost in one night, but the wolf pack lost two of their ‘aces’ in Otto Kretschmer and Joachim Schepke. Kretschmer in U99 was blown to the surface by a single depth charge pattern and survived to become a prisoner of war for the rest of the war, while Schepke in U100 was killed against his own periscope when the bows of the destroyer Vanoc rammed his boat with much force, radar contact having established his position in the darkness.
• HX156 sailed in October 1941 from Halifax but was notable when the American destroyer escort Reuben James became the first American warship to be sunk during World War II.
• HX212 sailed with 130 ships and suffered the heaviest loss of any ‘HX’ convoy in 1942.
• HX228 was one of the convoys that marked the heaviest losses of the war with 97 merchant ships lost in the first twenty days of the month in March 1943. However, two months later and with air cover now provided by escort carriers it was a different story and the turning point of the Battle of the North Atlantic, with more U-boats sunk than merchant ships. HX229 was following HX228 and converged with SC122, to bring about the largest battle of the North Atlantic campaign, with heavy losses to the U-boats and the knowledge that they could no longer win the Battle of the North Atlantic.
• HX300 was the largest ‘HX’ convoy of the war with 166 ships arranged in nineteen parallel columns covering a sea area nine miles wide and four miles long, with all merchant ships safely reaching a British port. Ships had sailed from New York, Halifax (NS), Sydney (Cape Breton), St. John’s (Newfoundland) and Labrador in July 1944 to carry supplies to reinforce the troops and tanks fighting in Normandy.

The ‘HX’ convoys assembled outside of the anti-submarine net stretched across Halifax harbour to McNabs Island, and were protected by six batteries bristling with 9.2 inch guns with a range of 15,000 yards and six inch guns with a range of 11,000 yards. The York Redoubt, originally constructed in 1793, was the command centre for the local harbour defences at Ferguson’s Cove in World War II, and included the 9.2 inch and six inch guns, a defensive minefield, and a new large calibre gun below the fort to cover the opening and closing of the anti-submarine net. The Redoubt was linked to the Sandwich Point Battery with twin 9.2 inch guns and twin six guns, and to the Connaught Battery and other batteries on the Halifax and Dartmouth sides of the outer harbour.

The last ‘Flower’ class corvette left afloat from the Battle of the North Atlantic is tied up on the Halifax waterfront in a beautiful reconditioned state as the Royal Canadian Naval Memorial Trust vessel Sackville (K181). She was named after a town lying just to the north of the Bedford Basin, where the ‘HX’ convoys assembled. Capt. Alan Easton was her commander and she was very successful in convoy escort and as a U-boat killer. She has been the official Canadian Naval Memorial ship since 1985, and a video is available at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic that portrays her service during the desperate days of the Battle of the North Atlantic.

The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic also has as a floating exhibit at its dockside of the Tyne built survey ship Acadia, launched by Swan Hunter and Wigham Richardson Ltd. on 8th May 1913 and completed a few months later. She was commissioned on 16th January 1917 as HMCS Acadia and served the Royal Canadian Navy throughout two World Wars until withdrawn from service in November 1969. She served as a patrol vessel at the entrance to Halifax harbour during World War II, helping to assemble convoys at the Halifax Ocean Meeting Point off MacNabs Island, and is the oldest surviving vessel afloat that survived the devastating explosion of 1917. On the anniversary of the explosion each year, she flies the same signal hoists as she flew on the morning of the day of that terrible disaster.

A schooner dating from these early periods is also tied up nearby to corvette Sackville, this is Silva of 130 feet in length with three masts and built at Karlstad in Sweden in 1939 as a Baltic schooner carrying cargoes of timber for the first two decades of her career. She had her sailing rig removed in the early 1960s and traded as a motor barge around the coasts of Sweden until 1994. In the summer of 2001, she was towed to North America, and her restoration now allows her to undertake harbour cruises at Halifax, as well as being available for fine dining with a full drinks licence and as a host for wedding receptions.

Port of Halifax in the 1960s

During the closed winter season on the St. Lawrence, Halifax continued to be a terminus and port of call for passenger liners and transatlantic cargo lines. The port was served by two transcontinental railways to its modern and well equipped docks, and the port was also a centre for numerous industries. Exports included grain, gypsum, flour, apples, lumber, fish and general cargo, while imports included crude oil, sugar, rubber, automobiles and general cargo. The population of Halifax numbered 92,300 with the National Harbours Board at the Ocean Terminals offices employing thousands of the citizens, and operating from thirty piers at Halifax, with dimensions in feet as follows:-

In addition, across the harbour at Dartmouth there were two piers, each of 500 feet in length, the east and west piers. The Narrows was the inner limit of all of the cargo piers, with a charted depth of fifty to seventy feet available at low water in the main navigation channels. Numbered anchorages were established by the National Harbours Board and pilots used these points if ships had to wait their turn at the piers. A fleet of eight powerful, modern diesel powered tugs of up to 350 grt was available from Eastern Canada Towing Ltd. with ‘Point’ or ‘Foundation’ prefixes to their names. Powerful salvage tugs were on readiness for ocean rescue of ships in trouble in the North Atlantic. Bunkering was done from the three wharves of the Imperial Oil Company (Exxon), single wharf of the British American Oil Company, three wharves of the Irving Oil Company, as well as those of Texaco Canada Ltd. and BP Canada Ltd.

The National Harbours Board had storage in the port for 10,800 rail cars bringing cargoes in and out of the port on two rail roads, the Canadian National and Dominion Atlantic Rail Road – a subsidiary of Canadian Pacific Railways (CPR) – with services across Canada and with a rail passenger service from Halifax to Yarmouth (NS) and Digby (NS) to connect with the passenger ferry Princess Helene, and Canadian National Railways (CNR) with services to Central and Western Canada, United States and Mexico. Containers were moved by rail when Dart Container Line began the container ship revolution with operations into and out of Halifax in 1969, with the Halifax International Container Terminal officially opened in the same year to become the first common user container terminal in Canada.

Halifax Shipyards Ltd.

The Halifax Graving Dock Company was formed in 1889 by English investors with a graving dock constructed at a cost of one million dollars. In the following year on 22nd August 1890, the Chebucto Marine Railway Co. Ltd. was purchased on the other side of the harbour at Dartmouth to add more repair facilities. The graving dock was only 300 metres from the point of the massive explosion of two colliding ships in the harbour on 6th December 1917 and was badly damaged, with many yard workers killed and the dockyard tug sunk.

Ship construction began in 1919 when Montreal investors purchased the yard and renamed it as Halifax Shipyards Ltd., followed by ownership by British steel and coal conglomerates, to build four general cargo ships in 1920/2, Canadian Mariner, Canadian Explorer, Canadian Cruiser, Canadian Constructor, and the Canadian Coastguard icebreaker N. B. McLean in 1930 as well as Royal Canadian Navy destroyers, and local dredgers and tugs. The war construction and repair effort from 1940 to 1945 was considerable with four ‘Tribal’ class destroyers for the Royal Canadian Navy, and the repair of 7,200 ships damaged in the Battle of the North Atlantic.

In post war years, the yard built three coastal cargo ships of 2,388 grt for the Argentine Government in Bahia Aguirre, Bahia Buen Suceso and Bahia Thetis, four destroyers for the Royal Canadian Navy, as well as ferries for commercial owners e.g. Confederation in 1962 for Canadian National Railways (CNR) and smaller Canadian Government coastal vessels. The first of many oil rigs and drillships for the emerging Canadian oil and gas industry off the Grand Banks were constructed in the 1970s. This type of special construction continued with the completion of two new oil rigs at the Millennium, Leiv Eiriksson and Eirik Raude, that had been towed from Dalian in China and completed with equipment lifted onboard including two cranes of 75 tonnes capacity.

The yard was sold in 1994, after bankruptcy in 1985, to the Irving Group Ltd. of St. John (NB) and it then constructed a dozen Canadian coastal defence vessels known as the ‘Kingston’ class up to 1999. A dramatic decline in Canadian shipbuilding then occurred with the Irving Group closing the country’s largest shipyard at St. John (NB), and also with Davie Yards at Lauzon near Quebec mothballed, to leave the Halifax yard as the only large shipbuilding yard on the Canadian East coast. Orders were won for five anchor handling supply tugs (AHXT) for Halifax Towing Ltd. and completed as Atlantic Condor, Atlantic Eagle, Atlantic Hawk, Atlantic Kingfisher and Atlantic Osprey, the cruise ship Pearl Mist, and nine ‘Hero’ class patrol vessels for the Royal Canadian Navy and delivered by 2014/15. The yard is still very much in business as shipbuilders with an exclusive contract with the Canadian Government to build up to 23 warships over the next twenty years at a cost of CAN$35 billion, as well as eight vessels for the Arctic Patrol project of the National Shipbuilding Procurement Strategy.

The Port Of Halifax Today

The port encompasses 260 acres of Federal Canada regulated land under the management of the Halifax Port Authority (HPA), formed on 1st March 1999 as a successor to the Halifax Port Corporation (HPC). The HPC was itself the successor body to the National Harbours Board, which operated all federally owned ports in Canada. The Canada Marine Act of 11th June 1998 implemented this change, and the Port of Halifax was the first of eighteen national ports in Canada to carry out the change.

The HPA has recently invested over one hundred million Canadian dollars in a three year strategic plan to acquire more land and include more automation of the cargo operations of fully laden Post – Panamax container ships and the handling of passengers of megasized cruise ships. The first Post-Panamax container ships arrived in Halifax in 1998, and they were also the first of their size to dock anywhere in North America. The two millionth cruise passenger was welcomed to the Port of Halifax in 2009. Rail access to the Canadian National Railways (CNR) network is provided from nine terminals owned by HPA, and a further four terminals owned by private commercial companies. These are:-

• Piers 36-42 of the South End Container Terminal operated by Halterm Ltd. of length 4,060 feet with alongside depth of 45 to 53 feet, and 74.5 acres of land, 8,000 feet of double stack rail track and a throughput of 750,000 TEU per year.
• Piers 23-24 of the Ocean Terminals with the Cunard Centre adjacent to Pier 23 for the cruise industry use, which is a conversion in 2006 from a cargo shed into 53,000 square feet of cruise and event facilities. The two berths have multi user space e.g. open working of steel, project cargo and heavy lift cargo.
• Piers A (berths 25-28) of total length 2,500 feet and A1 (berths 30-34) of total length 2,500 feet of the Ocean Terminals with deep water alongside, excellent rail and truck access, and open and covered areas for the storage of forestry products, breakbulk cargo, heavy lifts and steel.Pier 29 was redeveloped in 1987 into a common user terminal with ro-ro ramps.
• Piers 19-22 of the Halifax Seaport with the Cruise Ship Pavilion and the Pier 21 Immigration Museum, Nova Scotia University, and the HPA headquarters office building. Cruise ship berths total over 2,500 feet at four berths.
• Halifax Grain Elevator leased and operated by Halifax Grain Elevator Ltd.
• Piers 9, 9A, 9B, and 9C of the Richmond Terminals of total length 3,750 feet, a breakbulk operation with 90,000 square feet of open space and 60,000 square feet of warehouse space handling breakbulk, ro-ro and heavy lift project cargo.
• Pier 9D of the Richmond Offshore Terminal, a multi-user supply base for oil rigs in the offshore oil and gas industries located off the Grand Banks area.
• Fairview Cove Container Terminal at the south end of the Bedford Basin and currently operated by Cerescorp. It is a seventy acre terminal with 2,297 feet of berths (east and west berths) and 11,000 feet of double stack rail track, a throughput of 800,000 TEU per year and 12,000 TEU storage capacity, and was opened in 1981.
• Sheet Harbour Industrial Port, a smaller port located sixty miles to the east of Halifax, accommodating vessels up to 230 metres in length with a minimum alongside depth of ten metres and easy access to the Trans Canada Highway but without CNR rail access. The port handles breakbulk imports and exports, special project cargo, and has pipelaying support facilities for the oil industry.
• National Gypsum Wharf owned and operated by the National Gypsum Corporation. to serve the Wrights Cove gypsum terminal at the south end of the Bedford Basin.
• Woodside Atlantic Wharf for vessel lay-up and repair and servicing of oil rigs.
• Dartmouth Marine Terminal of Imperial Oil, the Canadian subsidiary of Exxon.
• The Canadian National Railways (CNR) Autoport on the Dartmouth side of the harbour, handling over 100,000 vehicles per year.

The Angus L. Macdonald Suspension Bridge was opened on 2nd April 1955 to allow access from Halifax to Dartmouth across The Narrows, and was named after a Nova Scotia Prime Minister who died in 1954. The bridge carriageway was redecked in 2015 with ‘Red Zone’ and ‘Green Zone’ navigation traffic lanes for shipping during big lifts from barges beneath the bridge.

This carriage has traffic congestion problems, with wider trucks banned and redirected to the newer MacKay Suspension Bridge opened on 10th July 1970 to the north west with a carriage length of 3,900 feet and four traffic lanes and a speed limit of 43 mph.

Halifax Cruise Port

One quarter of a million cruise passengers disembark at four piers during the six months of the Port of Halifax cruise season from the end of April to the end of October.

Some 135 cruise ships called during 2016, with 140 expected during 2017, and often four big cruise ships are in port on the same day.

The cruise lines calling number twenty five and their vessels arrive from ports all over the world, to sample the many attractions of Halifax.

These include Holland America Line, Fred. Olsen Cruise Line, Regent Seven Seas Cruises, Oceania Cruises, Pearl Seas Cruises, Norwegian Cruise Line (NCL), Royal Caribbean International (RCI), Princess Cruises, Carnival Cruise Line, Cunard Line, One Ocean Expeditions, Cruise and Maritime Voyages (CMV), Aida Cruises, Tui Cruises, Celebrity Cruises, Seabourn Cruise Line, Silverseas Cruises, Hapag Lloyd, P. & O. Cruises, Disney Cruise Line, Crystal Cruises, Viking Cruises, Noble Caledonia, Phoenix Reisen of Germany, and the smaller cruise ships of the Great Lakes Cruise Company. Carnival Cruise Line run short cruises from New York to New England and Nova Scotia calling at Boston (Mass.), Portland (Maine), St. John (NB) and Halifax (NS).

Postscript

On 19th September 2016, the Port of Halifax received an award for being in the top five of all North American cruise ports, with the cruise industry now worth an estimated $104.3 million in economic benefit to the local economy. The year of 2016 has also seen the arrivals of all five new fourth generation ACL ro-con vessels-Atlantic Star, Atlantic Sail, Atlantic Sea, Atlantic Sky and Atlantic Sun, with Atlantic Star the first to arrive on the morning of 6th January 2016. They measure 100,430 grt and are able to carry 3,800 TEU of containers and 1,307 cars in their 28,900 square feet of ro-ro space. Their ro-ro ramps are wider than the third generation ACL vessels, and at 7.4 metres high, the new ships have higher and wider ro-ro decks, enabling much easier loading and discharging of vehicles. Vessel smoke emission per TEU capacity has fallen dramatically by 65%. ACL has called at Halifax since 1969, and the start of this new fourth generation service bodes well for the future of the Port of Halifax.

The advantage of an ice free port for all of the year makes Halifax the main industrial and commercial centre of Nova Scotia. The port is an important exporter of fish, agricultural products and timber from the hinterlands of the province with two major railways linked to the port. Two suspension bridges, and several ferries to the Woodside terminal at Dartmouth and to McNabs Island, the latter a fifty hectare island in the middle of the outer harbour and two miles south of its own terminal on the Halifax waterfront, make this a very picturesque port. Halifax Metro Transit runs a passenger ferry from the foot of George Street in Halifax to Alderney Drive at Dartmouth and is the oldest salt water passenger service in North America, which began back in 1752.

The resilience of Haligonians in rebuilding their shattered port and city exactly a century ago after a devastating explosion continues today with Halifax having elegant parks and heritage buildings. It is also the foremost centre in Canada for higher education, and students can choose from seven universities and many colleges. The Port of Halifax is growing in strength every year and in ability to serve the international markets.