The Mackay-Bennett left Halifax on April 17, two days after the sinking, carrying coffins, ice, embalming fluid, and a clergyman. She reached the wreckage on April 20 and found the dead floating in their cork-and-canvas life jackets - mostly the third-class and crew, since most first-class women and children had reached lifeboats. The ship recovered 306 bodies. Out of grim necessity, the crew embalmed and coffined those they believed identifiable and the wealthier dead, and committed 116 unidentified bodies to the sea. Minia followed, then Montmagny, then Algerine. By the time the work ended in late June, 328 dead had been brought aboard. Most went ashore at Halifax. The recovery crews never described the work in detail; the few who wrote about it later wrote about it briefly.

Halifax sorted its dead by religion, as was the custom. Fairview Lawn Cemetery, in the city's north end, received 121 of the Titanic dead - the largest concentration anywhere on earth. Mount Olivet Cemetery, Catholic, received 19. Baron de Hirsch Cemetery, Jewish, received 10. At Fairview Lawn the graves curve gently in three long rows of plain dark granite. Local lore says the arc was meant to suggest a ship's bow; the cemetery records say it was the shape of the available plot. Either way, the effect is enormous. Each stone gives a date - April 15, 1912 - and either a name, or, more often, simply a number. Number 227. Number 4. Number 328. The numbers correspond to the order in which the bodies were pulled from the sea.

For ninety-five years, one stone read simply, 'Erected to the memory of an unknown child whose remains were recovered after the disaster to the Titanic.' Body number 4 was a small boy, about a year old, pulled from the water by Mackay-Bennett's crew, who paid for his headstone themselves. In 2002, mitochondrial DNA analysis suggested he was a Finnish infant named Eino Panula. Further testing, with better samples and methods, corrected that identification in 2007: he was Sidney Leslie Goodwin, a 19-month-old from Wiltshire, England. His parents Frederick and Augusta, and his five brothers and sisters, also died. All eight Goodwins were aboard, traveling in third class to a new life in Niagara Falls. Visitors today leave teddy bears and small toys at his grave; the cemetery quietly removes them and finds them homes.

Near the back of the Titanic plot at Fairview Lawn, headstone 227 reads: J. DAWSON. The grave belongs to Joseph Dawson, a 23-year-old Irishman from Dublin who shoveled coal in Titanic's boiler rooms - one of the unseen men whose work pushed the ship across the Atlantic. After James Cameron's 1997 film, in which a fictional steerage passenger named Jack Dawson dies in the freezing water, the grave became a pilgrimage site. Cameron has said he chose the name independently. Visitors leave roses and ticket stubs all the same. Bandleader Wallace Hartley, whose musicians famously kept playing as the ship went down, is not here - his body was identified and shipped home to Yorkshire. But several of his bandmates lie at Fairview Lawn, including violinist John Law Hume, age 21. They were buried in their tuxedos.

Fairview Lawn Cemetery is at 3720 Windsor Street, Halifax, in the city's north end; the Titanic plot is marked and easily found from the entrance, with a free interpretive guide available from the city. Mount Olivet is on Mumford Road. Baron de Hirsch is on Connaught Avenue near the Halifax Common. All three are open to the public from dawn to dusk; visitors are asked to leave photographs and small mementos rather than larger objects. The Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, on the downtown waterfront, holds the world's largest collection of Titanic wooden artifacts, including a deck chair and a piece of the staircase. Halifax Stanfield International Airport (CYHZ) is 22 miles north.