Titanic: For many victims, their final resting place is in Halifax, Canada

Halifax, Canada — A cold wind ripped through Fairview Lawn Cemetery. Then came the frigid rain. In a minute, I was thinking, the headstones will be shivering.

"Now," said Blair Beed, my guide, "imagine how it would have been in those lifeboats. Surrounded by ice."

He was talking about the Titanic, of course. Although this Halifax cemetery lies about 750 miles northwest of the waters where that celebrated ship went down April 15, 1912, it was the seamen of Halifax who retrieved more than 300 of the dead, along with a grim harvest of flotsam. In the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic downtown, you can see the lost gloves of a doomed millionaire and the lost shoes of a tiny child. Fairview Lawn Cemetery is home to 121 Titanic victims, more than you'll find anywhere else above sea level.

This city (population: about 390,000) gets plenty of attention in Canada for its role as a port, a provincial capital and a college town, with no fewer than five universities, whose students rarely see a week without rain. The local pro basketball team is called "The Rainmen."

Halifax is about 45 minutes' drive from Peggy's Cove, where one of Canada's most picturesque lighthouses towers over a glacier-scraped granite shore, and about 60 minutes from Lunenberg, one of Canada's most picturesque fishing villages. Halifax's star-shaped hilltop citadel, where forts have stood since the 18th century, draws legions of summertime tourists. The Canadian Museum of Immigration stands on the city's Pier 21.

But never mind that. I came for Titanica.

My first stop was the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, waterfront repository of the man's gloves and the baby shoes—preserved despite orders to thwart souvenir-hunters and burn victims' clothing.

Even in this centennial year, the Titanic occupies only part of the museum's exhibition space, because Halifax's maritime history is a long story. (Samuel Cunard, the shipping magnate and founder of Cunard Line, was born here.) But the museum's upstairs Titanic display offers plenty, including a Titanic deck chair (plucked from the water, given to a local clergyman and used in his backyard for decades) and a cribbage board and rolling pin (both carved from Titanic wreckage following the longstanding custom of recycling wreck wood). Tying them together, of course, is a detailed accounting of the ship, the officers, crew and passengers, the iceberg, the sinking and the local angle. » Titanic: For many victims, their final resting place is in Halifax, Canada