When The Hurly-Burly's Done by George Kearton

Author:George Kearton [Kearton, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: RO:SF
Publisher: Sea Lion Press
Published: 2019-06-04T00:00:00+00:00

Day of Disaster – December 6th, 1917

For nearly thirty years, the 5,000-ton steamship Imo had ploughed the North and South Atlantic under several different names and flying several different flags.

She had been built by Harland and Wolff in Belfast and was launched in 1889 as the SS Runic, part of the White Star Lines fleet. She was a general cargo ship (although she did have capacity for 12 passengers) and she regularly voyaged between Oslo and North America. In 1894, she was sold to the Oslo-based Southern Pacific Whaling company and her name was changed to JMO, in tribute to the chairman of the company, Johan Martin Osmundsen. In public usage, however, her name was changed to Imo, and it was under this name that she became generally known.

The British flag she had sailed under was replaced by a Danish flag (Norway then being part of Denmark); operating by now exclusively in the Atlantic, she had evaded capture by the Russians when they invaded Norway in 1895 during the first few weeks of the Great War. She still flew that flag in 1917, as the Southern Pacific Whaling Company had managed to continue its operations from its North American base. In early December of 1917 she had arrived in Halifax, Nova Scotia, with a cargo of whale oil which she had unloaded prior to embarking for New York, where she would load food supplies ready for a rendezvous with whaling ships off Viscount Falkland’s Islands.

A long and narrow ship, the Imo was notoriously difficult to steer; this tendency was made worse when she was in ballast, with the lack of cargo weight almost lifting her twin screw propellers out of the water.

Her intended departure date from Halifax had been December 5th, but this had been put back due to delays in loading her with coal for the next stage of her voyage. It was thus at 7.30am on December 6th that her captain, Norwegian Haakon Fromm, ordered her from Bedford Basin into the Narrows, from where she could attain the open sea. It was noted by many on other ships and on the shore that the Imo was totally ignoring the 5-knot speed limit for ships in the harbour; Fromm was obviously trying to make up for lost time. She was also ignoring the port-to-port rule which governed passage through the Narrows, and the nearby presence of the SS Clara and the tugboat Stella Maris forced her to veer even more off course and directly into the path of the oncoming French freighter SS Mont Blanc which was headed for the Bedford Basin. Warning sirens were sounded by both ships, and the Mont Blanc moved nearer to the shore in an attempt to avoid collision. It was too late, however; at 8.45am the Imo ploughed into the Mont Blanc, just in front of her No.1 cargo hold. All might have been well, but the 7,000-ton Mont Blanc was loaded with explosive materials headed for the French Army including TNT, wet and dry picric acid, high-octane (and highly flammable) benzol fuel and guncotton.

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