Cruise Lines

I had no idea that Halifax, the last port on my New England and Canada voyage with Princess Cruises, had such a tragic history.

I knew the city was linked to the Titanic, although not the detail, but I had never heard of the terrible Halifax Explosion, which occurred five years later.

The Titanic went down 750km east of Halifax, which sent three ships out to help with the recovery of passengers. In the end, they came back with bodies.

Paul, who works for tour company Ambassatours and has spent a long time researching the story of the Titanic, said of the 2,228 passengers on the ship, just 705 managed to get into lifeboats, leaving 1,520 to perish. They found 328 bodies and 209 were brought to Halifax.

He took me to Fairview Lawn where 121 people were buried and explained the different headstones. White Star Line, which owned Titanic, paid for a stone with a name and number if known, but no mention that the person had died on the Titanic as they didn't want to draw attention to the fact their ship had sunk.

Relatives who paid for the stones were not sympathetic. They made sure to put that the loved one died on the Titanic.

This one, for J Dawson, is believed to have been the inspiration for the name of Leonardo DiCaprio's character in the film - Jack Dawson. Paul says when the film first came out this was the most photographed headstone in the cemetery. His research shows J Dawson was one of the lowliest crew the ship.

They have a very good exhibition about the Titanic in the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, which is close to where Caribbean Princess was docked so easy for cruise passengers to visit, and also about the Halifax Explosion, which Paul said was the worst manmade explosion in history other than the dropping of the atom bombs in Japan.

It happened in December 6 1917. In a nutshell, a French ammunition ship, Mont Blanc, was sailing into the harbour, and struck by a Norwegian vessel, Imo, on its way out but on the wrong side of the waterway.

The French crew, expecting the ship to blow immediately, escaped on the lifeboats, leaving the ship, now ablaze, drifting in the harbour. Twenty minutes it came to rest at a pier in the industrial heart of the city and exploded.

Some 2,000 people were killed, another 9,000 were injured and 1,600 homes were destroyed. As this picture shows, parts of the city were levelled.

On the Harbour Hopper tour of Halifax - it's like a Duck tour except you travel in a Lark V amphibious vehicle that was used the Vietnam War instead of one from World War Two - Gina, our guide, pointed to one of the clocks on the City Hall, which always stands at 09.05, marking the time of the explosion.

She also introduced us to Theodore Tugboat, who starred in a children's TV series in the 1980s (a bit like Thomas the Tank Engine I guess) and now does fun harbour tours for families, and pointed out a statue of Winston Churchill.

"He once said, 'Halifax is more than a shed at the end of a wharf', and we were so pleased we built him a statue,' she told us.

I don't know if it's true, but it made me smile!