As we steamed past the lighthouses and the hidden guns on the headlands guarding the entrance, I was reminded of all that this harbour has meant to America. The city was founded by Lord Cornwallis in 1749 at the suggestion of Boston merchants who complained that the French were using these waters as a base for their sea raiders. Less than thirty years later it provided a haven for Lord Howe when he was driven out of Boston by our soldiers of the Revolution, and became the headquarters for the British operations against the struggling colonies. In the war of 1812, the American warship _Chesapeake_ was brought here after her defeat by the British frigate _Shannon_. During our Civil War Halifax served as a base for blockade runners, and the fortunes of some of its wealthy citizens of to-day were founded on the profits of this dangerous trade. No one dreamed then that within two generations England and America would be fighting side by side in a World War, that thousands of United States soldiers would sail from Halifax for the battlefields of Europe, or that an American admiral, commanding a fleet of destroyers, would establish his headquarters here. Yet that is what happened in 1917–18. All that now remains of the former duels on the sea is the annual sailing race between the fastest schooners of the Gloucester and the Nova Scotia fishing fleets. Halifax is built on a hillside that rises steeply from the water-front to a height of two hundred and sixty feet above the harbour. The city extends about halfway up the hill, and reaches around on both sides of it. The top is a bare, grassy mound, surmounted by an ancient citadel. Stand with me on the edge of the old moat, and look down upon Halifax and its harbour. Far to our left is the anchorage where occurred one of the greatest explosions the world ever knew. Just as the city was eating breakfast on the morning of December 6, 1917, a French munitions ship, loaded with benzol and TNT, collided with another vessel leaving the harbour, and her cargo of explosives blew up in a mighty blast. Nearly two thousand people were killed, six thousand were injured, and eleven thousand were made homeless. Hardly a pane of glass was left in a window, and acres of houses were levelled to the ground. A deck gun was found three miles from the water, and the anchor of one of the vessels lies in the woods six miles away, where it was thrown by the explosion. A street-car conductor was blown through a second-story window, and a sailor hurled from his ship far up the hillside. Since then much of the devastated area has been rebuilt along approved town-planning lines, but the scars of the disaster are still visible. For a long time after the explosion, the local institution for the blind was filled to capacity, and one saw on the streets many persons wearing patches over one eye.