A dark moment in Nova Scotia’s storied maritime history has been brought vividly to life thanks to YouTube creator Tom Lynskey.
His Part-Time Explorer channel on YouTube has featured 10 Nova Scotia video documentaries in the last year that have millions of total views.
A native of New Jersey, Lynskey has ties to Nova Scotia and now owns a home in Yarmouth.
One of his latest documentaries delves into the wreck of the SS Hungarian, an 1860 disaster off Nova Scotia’s Cape Sable Island that claimed the lives of all of the estimated 205 people aboard.
His interest in the wreck was piqued when he was scouring eBay for items related to Nova Scotia shipwrecks and came across an etching from a magazine depicting the ship crashing in the waves.
“I ended up spending a lot of time in Yarmouth lately, and that’s only about an hour away from the wreck site,” he said.
“The Yarmouth County Museum has artifacts from it, as do several other museums down in Shelburne, and I just wanted to pursue it from there. It had never really been covered in a full documentary and I think it deserved to be.”
Lynskey said it took him about six months to complete the project, though he had it in mind for two or three years.
A rendering of the SS Hungarian by HFX Studios. (Tom Lynskey/HFX Studios)
The SS Hungarian met its fate in the early hours of Feb. 20, 1860, during a fierce storm.
Unlike the SS Atlantic, one of Lynskey’s previous subjects, which ran aground off Prospect, N.S., in 1873 with some survivors, the Hungarian’s wreck was located more than two kilometres offshore in the open Atlantic, making rescue impossible.
Witnesses on land could only watch helplessly as the ship’s lights disappeared into the waves. Despite their efforts to light bonfires and guide potential survivors, no one made it ashore.
Lynskey uses a mix of on-site footage and realistic animation to bring the story to life.
Lynskey on-site at Cape Sable Island in 2024. (Tom Lynskey/YouTube: PartTimeExplorer)
He said he relied on local historians, archival records, museum artifacts and local historian Chris Swim to reconstruct the tragedy.
“Being a ship that wrecked 165 years ago, with no survivors, there’s very little that we actually do know for sure,” he said.
“With the documentary, we basically open up with what we know and we see the wreck happen from the perspective of the people on shore … all the eyewitness accounts. This is what we know for sure.”
The rest of the story, he noted, had to be extrapolated from evidence that was pieced together to create a “best guess” scenario.
But he said everything depicted in the documentary is grounded in research.
Lisette Gaudet is the archivist at the Yarmouth County Museum and Archives. (Lisette Gaudet)
Lisette Gaudet, archivist for the Yarmouth County Museum and Archives, said she and her staff assisted Lynskey with his research, as they did on one of his previous projects about the sinking of the circus ship SS Fleurus in 1963.
“It’s such a pleasure working with him,” Gaudet said.
“He’s very passionate about what he does and so it’s a pleasure being able to help him and work with him on these projects that he’s doing and his videos are amazing.”
Gaudet said they were able to provide him with documents and photographs and make him aware of items in their museum collection related to the wreck.
She said the museum and archives has an extensive collection, most of it from the 1800s to present day. But it also has material from the 1700s and even earlier.
“Yarmouth in the early 1900s was a major shipping port and of course the marine industry, the fishing industry has always been very important here,” Gaudet said.
“We have a lot of information that does revolve around marine life and marine export, import, shipping, all of that stuff.”
Lynskey’s work on the video led him to release another focusing on the wreck of the SS Indian, a sister ship to the Hungarian.
The earlier disaster, just two months before the loss of the Hungarian, sparked widespread criticism of Nova Scotians for looting, prompting the government to act swiftly during the Hungarian tragedy.
According to Lynskey, he’s always had excellent co-operation in Nova Scotia from local museums and archives and people who are eager to tell their story.
He hopes videos like the story of the SS Hungarian will bring more attention to the province and its rich maritime history.
“It’s a way to take a local community which might have a couple thousand visitors a year and get their story out there to millions of people around the world,” he said.
“Just this morning I saw comments on it saying that this video has finally made up their mind for them to go and visit Nova Scotia and check out these sites.”
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