For more than 200 years, pilot boats had guided ships of all kinds through Halifax Harbour and to the relative safety of Bedford Basin. There had been one major incident, the Halifax Explosion of Dec 6, 1917, but no other significant accidents. Then on March 28, 1940, barely into the years of the Second World War, the pilot boat Hebridean, with its crew of 14, many of them pilot navigators from nearby Herring Cove, crossed the path of the freighter SS Esmond. The far larger vessel hit them broadside.

When the chaos was over, nine men were dead, six of them harbour pilots, all of them from the Hebridean, and all of them related by marriage or birth. Officials never recovered their bodies, or the wreck itself, from the icy waters.

It wasn’t as huge and dramatic an event as the sinking of Titanic in 1912 or the Halifax Explosion in 1917, but to the small coastal communities outside of Halifax, the grief and repercussions ran deep. Scarcely had the affected families begun to grieve when the government announced an inquiry.

The commission of three men, led by Justice William Carroll, determined that the acting captain of the Hebridean, James Renner, crossed in front of the Esmond and caused the deaths, including his own. They ignored the fact that the Esmond should have been at a standstill while a pilot was brought aboard to guide the vessel into the harbour, and released their findings within two weeks of the collision. The same air of secrecy that had followed the collision, citing wartime secrecy, now came down over the commission’s findings.

People mourned their lost family members, fought for compensation against an apparently unfeeling government, and life went on. Then in 2021, retired television reporter Rick Grant learned of the story. Like any good journalist, Grant smelled a larger story, and ultimately published a Saltscapes magazine article on the collision, which led to the release of his book Broadside: Halifax’s wartime pilot boat disaster (Formac Publishing).

Grant spent 40 years as a reporter and was respected as one who got his facts right and wasn’t afraid to dig where others might not. His resulting book is a taut, gripping, and well-written accounting of the disaster.