Cordite Cove 2020 cut

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Play, download and edit the free video Cordite Cove 2020 cut.

During a winter storm in 1942, the steamship Clare Lilley ran aground while awaiting a pilot to assist in entering Halifax Harbour. The ship was fully loaded carrying steel tube, aircraft tires, a deck-load of machinery and vehicles and over one thousand tons of munitions including small grains of smokeless propellant called cordite. Most of the valuable cargo, including the machinery and vehicles, was salvaged immediately but most of the munitions were left to sink in the hold of the ship. On the sea floor, the ship eventually broke in half exposing this dangerous cargo to the tides and currents. In the mid 1960’s, Navy divers recovered over 600 bombs from the site but to this day, millions of pieces of cordite still litter the seafloor.

Cordite Cove itself is very small with steep rock cliffs on three sides and the Atlantic Ocean bare to the horizon on the other. The beach is covered with course pebbly sand. The forest leading to the cliffs is scraggly and thick with brush and fallen trees and cutting a path is difficult. Though the cliffs are steep, a natural pathway leads down to the beach. You must time your passage through the lowest section of this pathway with the rolling swells coming in off the Atlantic or you could get swept in. The location is not marked.

As a young teenager I used to collect cordite on the beach at Cordite Cove. Digging through the sand you could collect a hundred pieces in thirty minutes if you were quick and focused with the work. My friends and I would burn the cordite to feel its heat and watch its white-hot glow. We would melt action figures with the pellets, stick them in the entranceways to anthills and load them in film canisters making bombs that never worked. Mostly, we would make ‘cordite rockets’ by tightly twisting a piece of cordite into a small square of tin foil like a bonbon. We would lay this tin foil packet on top of another piece of cordite and light the whole mess with a match. Pressure would build inside the foil and the rocket would shoot through the air burning in a flash.

Some years ago, I visited Cordite Cove with two of my oldest friends. I recorded the two and myself as we searched for cordite. Though we all participate in the hunt, it is Colin’s focus that is the most intense and of the greatest interest. He shares his technique with Donald who quickly loses interest and gives up to skip rocks over the waves and talk about cars and sailboats. I too mostly give up, focusing instead on Colin’s commentary, the camera and the beauty and of the place. Little pings are heard as Colin drops piece after piece of cordite into the glass jar and big sweeping sounds comes as he uses his feet to push the top layer of pebbles away to reveal the cordite below.

I see the project not as a document of cordite cove, the place and its history, but something that chronicles the shared history of a group of boys: boyhood, pranks, pyromania, love and dirt considers the space between the comfort of nostalgia and the uneasiness of finding one’s own way.

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