Halifax and Titanic

The story of Titanic’s tragic sinking on April 15, 1912, has been told countless times in films and books, inscribing it into popular culture as perhaps the best-known disaster of all time.

When Titanic went down off the coast of Newfoundland, the city of Halifax, Nova Scotia, was the base from which recovery operations were mounted.

Eventually, 337 bodies were recovered, the majority of them by ships dispatched from Halifax. Of this total, 128 were buried at sea and 209 were delivered to Halifax—150 of those buried in three Halifax cemeteries. They remain there to this day, the largest number of Titanic graves in the world, cared for in perpetuity by the city and visited by thousands of people each year.

On the one-hundredth anniversary of Titanic’s sinking, author John Boileau examines the relationship between the city and the unprecedented tragedy. This illustrated history includes over 100 historical photographs of the people and places involved in Halifax’s sombre recovery effort.