Why is it that some people rise to the challenge of a crisis, taking on roles of leadership, while others either panic or retreat into their shells?One of the first modern scholars to think seriously about these matters was an Anglican priest by the name of Samuel Prince. Prince happened to be in the town of Halifax, Nova Scotia, on the morning of December 6, 1917 when a French munitions freighter called the Mont Blanc caught fire and exploded. Such was the power of the blast that a fragment of the anchor was thrown more than six kilometres; a gun barrel landed in a lake five and a half kilometres away. In the minutes that followed, the town was subjected to a battery of traumas almost biblical in their scope: the explosion flattened the town, blinding some one thousand people in an instant—many of the town’s residents had been at their office windows, staring with fascination at the ship burning in the harbour.A tidal wave followed the explosion, then a fire swept through the town.
