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One block south of the east end of George Street stands the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic , 1675 Lower Water St (May-Oct Mon & Wed-Sat 9.30am-5.30pm, Tues 9.30am-8pm, Sun 11am-5.30pm; Nov-April Tues 9.30am-8pm, Wed-Sat 9.30am-5pm, Sun 1-5pm; $6), which houses a fascinating exhibition covering all aspects of Nova Scotian seafaring from colonial times to the present day. By the entrance, there's a reconstruction of a nineteenth-century chandlery, stocked with everything from chains, ropes, couplings and barrels of tar through to ships' biscuits and bully beef. Other displays include a collection of small boats and cutaway scale models illustrating the changing technology of shipbuilding, a feature on the history of the schooner Bluenose and a number of gaudy ships' figureheads: look out for the turbaned Turk once attached to the British barque Saladin . In 1844, the Saladin 's crew mutinied in mid-Atlantic, killed the captain and ran the boat aground near Halifax, where they were subsequently tried and hanged. There's also a feature on the Halifax Explosion, illustrated by a first-rate video, One Moment in Time , and don't miss the section on the Titanic , which sank east of Halifax in 1912. Several pieces of fancy woodwork found floating in the ocean after the sinking have ended up in the museum, a pathetic epitaph to the liner's grand Edwardian fittings. Docked outside the museum are an early twentieth-century steamship, the CSS Acadia , and a World War II corvette, HMCS Sackville . The first is part of the museum, the second is a (free) attraction in its own right; both can only be boarded in the summer. The much-vaunted Historic Properties comprise an area of refurbished wharves, warehouses and merchants' quarters situated below Upper Water Street, 400m north of the Maritime Museum - and just beyond the Dartmouth and Woodside ferry terminal. The ensemble has a certain urbane charm - all bars, boutiques and bistros - and the narrow lanes and alleys still maintain the shape of the waterfront during the days of sail, but there's not much to see unless the schooner Bluenose II is moored here, as it often is during the summer. The original Bluenose , whose picture is on the 10c coin, was famed throughout Canada as the fastest vessel of its kind in the 1920s, although she ended her days ingloriously as a freighter, foundering off Haiti in 1946. The replica has spent several years as a floating standard-bearer, representing Nova Scotia at events such as the Montreal Expo, but it's now on its last sea legs and its future is uncertain. Pressure groups are campaigning to have it berthed permanently here at Halifax or at its home port of Lunenburg.
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