The Halifax naval yard was protected first by its own blockhouse, redoubts, and walls and later by a much wider network of army forts and batteries. The scale of those defences shows the base's importance to British operations on the North American station. Many original eighteenth- and nineteenth-century buildings were destroyed in the Halifax Explosion of 1917, leaving historians dependent on plans, paintings, and photographs. A few residences, the dockyard clock, and the later maritime museum preserve fragments of a site whose original scale can no longer be read directly from the surviving landscape.
Notable Point · 29:01-30:57
The Halifax Explosion limits what survives of the old dockyard
Halifax's fortifications reveal the dockyard's importance, while the 1917 explosion explains why much of its physical evidence is gone.