Local diver drafts the definitive account of the SS Atlantic tragedy

When it comes to a local 19th century shipwreck, Bob Chaulk wants to rewrite history.

“If you know anything about the (SS) Atlantic, you’re probably going to have to do a lot of relearning,” says the Halifax author about his newest book. “Because a lot of what you know is not true.”

With the just-released book Atlantic’s Last Stop, Chaulk spent 10 years researching and documenting Nova Scotia’s most catastrophic shipwreck and the world’s worst transatlantic passenger liner disaster until the Titanic struck an iceberg and sank in 1912.

While that more famous nautical disaster took some 1,500 lives, the SS Atlantic’s tragic fate should not be overlooked. In fact, according to Chaulk, its story certainly deserves as much attention as the Titanic.

“Nobody talks about it because nobody knows about it,” says Chaulk, who is also the historian for the SS Atlantic Heritage Park in Terence Bay. “The Atlantic was just one of a whole group of wrecks for me at (one) time but now that I know more — far and away, it’s the one I know most about.”

On April 1, 1873, nearly a thousand passengers were travelling to New York on SS Atlantic when the crew of the passenger liner diverted course to refuel in Halifax. Unfamiliar with Nova Scotia waters, the crew underestimated the tidal currents and veered off-course, running aground off the coast near Lower Prospect and killing some 550 people.

“The captain was asleep, the ship was under the command of a 26-year-old, it was the middle of the night (and) none of them had ever been to Halifax before,” explains Chaulk, noting that although 420 people lived through the tragedy, none of the survivors were women and only one was a child. 

Since most of the crew survived the ordeal, when the mainstream media reported on the story, the optics of the tragedy presented the male survivors as deserters who took to the lifeboats forsaking the lives of the women and children.

“That is utterly untrue. There was a lot of heroism on all sides to try and save people but it just happened so darned fast that before anybody knew anything, just about 500 people were dead,” adds Chaulk.

Atlantic’s Last Stop certainly isn’t the first account of the tragedy. In fact, it’s not even the first book written by Chaulk about the shipwreck.

In 2009, Chaulk co-authored SS Atlantic: The White Star Line’s First Disaster at Sea with Greg Cochkanoff, an award-winning overview of the event.

With Atlantic’s Last Stop, Chaulk has a compiled a more complete and detailed account, examining everything from the origin of the SS Atlantic to investigating how the elite White Star Line passenger ship could travel 12 miles off course in good weather and crash on rock. In addition, Chaulk also aims to correct decades of misinformation about the tragic disaster.

“I have a whole chapter in there called Myths, Lies and Other Untruths trying to make some sense for the reader,” notes Chaulk, adding he talked directly to many descendents of survivors and rescuers, and combed through original documents to get to the real narrative instead of relying solely on newspaper archives.

“The first story you hear is what you believe,” says Chaulk, adding rushed newspaper reporting can often be skewed and misleading. “Then when you hear something else, you say,  ‘well, that’s not true’ (but) that’s only because it’s not what you learned first. In fact, once you come to that realization, it changes the way you think.”

An avid 30-year scuba diver who has explored the sunken SS Atlantic more than 50 times, Chaulk says he hopes Atlantic’s Last Stop enlightens many readers to one of the province’s most overlooked and perhaps most misunderstood disasters on record.

More than that, he hopes that his book will remain the definitive account of the tragedy for many years to come.

“It was a dramatic rescue that has been completely lost from the historic record,” says Chaulk. “I feel that this is a comprehensive account of the Atlantic’s story because it’s a very complex story, very multi-layered and there are a lot of stories within the story and all that has now been written down.”

For more information on Atlantic’s Last Stop, visit the book's website.