In April 1865 a Mississippi steamboat built to carry 376 people set off with more than 2,100 aboard, most of them freed Union prisoners of war finally going home. When her patched boilers exploded in the dark, as many as 1,800 died — more than the Titanic. And America, numb from four years of war and the murder of its president, barely looked up.
Before dawn on 21 February 1917, a troopship carrying more than 800 Black South African labourers was rammed and sunk in the icy English Channel. As she went under, a chaplain told the doomed men to meet death as brothers — and they are said to have danced. Then their country spent seventy years pretending it never happened.
On a cold December morning in 1917, a burning munitions ship drew crowds to their windows. Then the north end of Halifax simply ceased to exist — nearly 2,000 dead in the largest man-made explosion the world had yet known.
It killed more people than the Titanic and the Lusitania combined, and you have probably never heard its name. The story of the MV Dona Paz is the deadliest peacetime disaster in maritime history, and a portrait of everything that can go wrong at once.
