7. The In-between Time

The old coastal order was changing quickly when the British warships Sulphur and Starling, on reconnaissance to see if the Russians had arrived at Nootka Sound, came to anchor in Friendly Cove on October 3, 1837—“the very interesting point of Cook and Vancouver’s operations,” noted Captain Edward Belcher, in command of the Sulphur. The weather was cloudy, unpropitious for astronomical observations to check positions and chronometers. There was no sign of the Russians. The Indigenous people gathered around the ships in their canoes, as was customary, and Belcher took note of a quiet fellow, dignified in behaviour, who turned out to be none other than Maquinna—or Maquilla, as Belcher spelled it.

This couldn’t be the legendary Maquinna, but what was the genealogy here? Age about fifty, five feet eight inches in height, his shoulders square in proportion, and limbs muscular, this Maquinna was light skinned. Belcher wrote: “His superiority consists of a dignified, unobtrusive mildness of manner and deportment.” This was altogether impressive. He was husband of the descendant of the Maquinna of Vancouver’s time and recounting. Belcher reasoned that Captain Vancouver’s Maquinna had left his daughter his successor, and this man had probably assumed the name with his wife. After this preliminary explanation, Belcher was told directly by Maquinna—and of significance for us—that Wickaninnish now stood first in repute on the West Coast, and that he, Maquinna, was next, and Nookamis third. The physical features of the chiefly family may be followed in Belcher’s voyage and in a related account.¹⁷⁸

The mariners made observations of Nootka, noting its decay, the remnants of Spanish occupation, and various posts perhaps used for shipbuilding or repair. History had passed the place by. A clear sky allowed for an observation, and next day, October 9, the vessels sailed for San Francisco. No visit was made to Clayoquot, but Wickaninnish’s premier position had been acclaimed by a fellow high-ranking chief.

Suffice it to say that in the years when Cook met the celebrated Maquinna and Meares met the equally celebrated and rising Wickaninnish, the estimated population of the Nuu-chah-nulth was ten thousand, and the total number of villages on Vancouver Island’s west coast was twenty-five, of various sizes.¹⁷⁹ Within a century this had changed dramatically. The 1850s and 1860s mark turbulent and uncertain decades in the annals of Clayoquot Sound. They are characterized by changing economic circumstances, internecine wars, Indigenous population dispersals and declines at least partly owing to Native wars (but also to spirituous liquors and disease), and the coming of an entirely new force and influence—the intervention of British concepts about “Aboriginal affairs,” or what was called “the future of the Indian” or “the Indian problem.” Clayoquot Sound was no place for colonial settlement, for there was little land for crop cultivation or animal husbandry. Even so, British authority and law were beginning to extend their influence here, by peace if possible, by force if necessary.

Clayoquot Sound remained a backwater to business enterprise; all the same, its coastal waters and interior coastal passages needed to be surveyed as an encouragement to coastal shipping and a measure to prevent ships running aground. This was Admiralty policy for the world. In this connection the surveying of these waters by ships and men of the Royal Navy forms a central chapter in the Sound’s history. We will look more closely at this in the following pages, and we will be introduced to the first general comments by colonial authorities and naval officers about the decline of Native numbers and the social disruptions faced. There were minor episodes of piracy, murder and retributive justice. The story of these decades is not a pleasant one, marked as it is by some rather frank truths of that age, and it is salutary to remind ourselves that some of the most militant persons of the nineteenth century—officers of the Royal Navy—were among the most humanitarian in their thoughts about the “future of the Indian race.” Our central figure is Captain George Henry Richards, RN. We examine in this chapter, as well, the rapid political and constitutional changes that enveloped the British territories of the Pacific cordillera, its inlets and islands—and the changes that came over the controls of the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC), that remarkable empire within an empire.¹⁸⁰ The HBC, it may be said at the outset, had no interest in Clayoquot Sound except to keep rival traders out. There is, in all, a crowded background here: the study of history reveals many entanglements.

As can be appreciated, at mid-century the economy of Clayoquot Sound stood in decline. In contrast to earlier days, when Clayoquot Sound had been a locus of a vast Native trade system, the disappearance of the sea otter had brought many consequences to the area, disrupting old shipping patterns and the customary exchange of commodities. No longer did mariners in search of sea otter pelts seek out the Native suppliers. Those ships of olden days that had been trading in muskets and ammunition came no more. Even so, in transitional years a petty trade in pelts may have had incidental interest in Clayoquot Sound and Meares Island.¹⁸¹ It seems likely that trails would have been used to freight furs across to the east coast of Vancouver Island, to Fort Rupert and Fort Nanaimo; there furs could be bartered for goods and supplies needed out on the coast. Fort Rupert had connections near and far that made that post (and later Alert Bay) significant in commercial activity. Casual visits by steamers from Victoria also kept up an occasional commerce on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The channels of commerce ran much more strongly on the island’s east coast, notably where ship construction and supply, provisioning, and coal mining were the engines of a growing economy, one with tentacles to Alaskan ports and the canneries, missions and trade stations near the mouths of inlets or rivers.

In these depressed circumstances, sea otter chiefs such as Wickaninnish and his subordinates no longer enjoyed the buoyant income that their exports of fur skins had given them in the days of Meares, Kendrick and Gray. Nor did the trade goods arrive as before in the holds of the ships that called there; this, too, affected the middleman roles of the chiefs. The armaments import trade dried up just as the sea otter trade neared extinction. Wealth was now differently acquired and differently distributed. An occasional schooner might arrive in search of whale, seal and, especially, dogfish oil (used as a lubricant in the logging industry). It is recorded that in the late 1850s the master of one such vessel, working villages of the West Coast, set up a store or depot beside a village in Clayoquot Sound. He was a useful interpreter for visitors, knowledgeable as he was in the language of the Nuu-chah-nulth.¹⁸² What was sold and what was bought is not known; perhaps liquor was part of the exchange for furs and oil. We can only speculate.¹⁸³

All indications point to the conclusion that this was, as this chapter is entitled, an “in-between time.” It was also perhaps a period of “salutary neglect” for the Indigenous Peoples of Clayoquot Sound, as it was for others at Nootka Sound, Kyuquot Sound and elsewhere along the western flank of Vancouver Island. These locales were left well enough alone, for a time of cultural enrichment perhaps, and one of inter-tribal competition and social strengthening. No ethnological expeditions were mounted here by such organizations as the American Museum of Natural History, which went to the Queen Charlotte Islands. The channels of anthropological inquiry ran elsewhere on the coast. Old paradigms of settler dominance and Native victimization, so commonly expressed these days, have no standing here. There was no agricultural land to grab, no gold yet found and no port of strategic value to take possession of and hold on a permanent basis.

By contrast, Barkley Sound was a hive of activity. The industrial age arrived here early. In April 1860, Gilbert Malcolm Sproat and Edward Stamp, representing shipowners Anderson & Co., who founded the Orient Line, purchased land at the present Port Alberni, at the head of the deep inlet penetrating almost to the eastern side of the island. The intention was to export spars and masts for ocean-going ships, to erect a sawmill and to establish a fishing settlement. (First boards were cut and shipments made to Callao, Peru. By 1863, when the business was momentarily halted by the Civil War in the United States, 1,000,000 board feet had been shipped.) When in August 1860 Sproat and Stamp had arrived in the armed vessels Woodpecker and Meg Merrilies with a force of about fifty men, they told the local chief that they had purchased the surrounding land from Queen Victoria. The chief replied that this could not be, for it belonged to him and his people, but they would sell it for £20 worth of goods. Sproat consented on condition that the people and possessions be moved the next day. This did not eventuate. The Tseshaht (or as Sproat spells it, Sheshat) donned their war paint and gathered their arms. The intruders fired cannon, and the frightened inhabitants dispersed.

Then followed a sharp exchange of opinion, the sort of thing that is at the raw edge of imperial processes. I repeat it here, as imagined by a local writer over 100 years later:

"

Sproat came ashore: “Chiefs of the Sheshats,” said he, “Are you well; are your women in health; are your children hearty; do your people get plenty of fish and fruits?”

“Yes,” replied an elder, “our families are well, our people have plenty of food; but how long will this last we know not. We see your ships and hear things that make our hearts grow faint. They say that more King-George-men will soon be here and will take our land, our firewood, our fishing grounds, and that we shall be placed on a little spot and shall have to do everything according to the fancies of the King-George-men.”

“Do you believe all this?” asked Sproat.

“We want your information,” said an old man.

“Then,” he answered, “It is true that more King-George-men are coming: they will soon be here: but your land will be bought at a fair price.”

“We do not wish to sell our land or our water; let your friends stay in their own country.”

Sproat rejoined, “My great chief, the high chief of the King-George-men, seeing that you do not work your land, orders that you shall sell it. It is of no use to you. The trees you do not need; you will fish and hunt as you do now, and collect firewood, planks for your houses, and cedar for your canoes. The white man will give you work and buy your fish and oil.”

“Ah, but we don’t care to do as the white men wish.”

“Whether or not,” said Sproat, “the white men will come. All your people know that they are your superiors; they make the things which you value. You cannot make muskets, blankets, or flour. The white men will teach you printing and [to] be like themselves.”

“We do not want the white man. He steals what we have. We wish to live as we are.”¹⁸⁴

"

Sproat was trained in the civil service and was a gifted and versatile businessman, also a scholar and explorer. On the west coast of Vancouver Island, he was magistrate, translator, anthropologist and government agent. His Scenes and Studies of Savage Life, published in London by the distinguished house Smith Elder, is our first narrative and ethnology of the west coast of Vancouver Island. Sproat, like many of his age, was interested in marketing the frontier and wrote British Columbia: Information for Emigrants (1873). He studied England’s rural poor. British India’s opium trade to China also attracted his attention, as did Sir Walter Scott’s poetry. This polymath wrote many books, but none of such staying power as his book on the Nuu-chah-nulth. And we look back on it with fascination and curiosity, recognizing as we do that it is a form of cross-cultural analysis. Sproat knew the new world that was about to beset the Nuu-chah-nulth, and he was not shy in stating his views about what he saw as inevitable.

I was struck in reading, or rereading, his book by how he describes a certain defeatist attitude that developed among the Indigenous people. This showed itself to him a couple of years after the settlers had arrived at Barkley Sound. The Indigenous peoples’ curiosity had ceased to exist. There was also a morbid acceptance. “They had ample sustenance and shelter for the support of life, yet the people decayed.”¹⁸⁵ He notes the discouragement of the Natives. He does not talk about suicides among those displaced or removed from their sites of occupation and labour, but that can be imagined. It is a sad and moving tale, and unique in that most anthropologists do not discuss matters they cannot measure or take down in their notes.

Although in the 1850s the Clayoquot and Ahousaht remained largely undisturbed by the outside world, inter-tribal rivalry persisted in Clayoquot Sound, and on the west coast more generally, and raiding and internecine warfare continued, reaching a climax in 1855. Wars, mercilessly waged in northern Nootka territory in the mid-1850s, were fought chiefly for spoils, prestige or revenge. The desire for retaliation and the hope of gain worked together.¹⁸⁶ Anthropological authority attests that here on the Northwest Coast, where kinship was of great importance, competition for productive places of marine resources—salmon streams particularly—was keen. Competition in accumulating wealth and prestige was accordingly strong, and disputes were common between kin groups. Feuds were long-standing. Surprise attacks taken on moonless nights, just before dawn, were led by war chiefs chosen as most adept at organizing such. “Among the Nootka, however, these economy-motivated raids of extermination took place between speakers of the same language,” wrote anthropologist Harold E. Driver. “Here, there was true political organization, at least in the historic period, so that the larger encounters of this nature involving its people may be labeled ‘war.’”¹⁸⁷ In fact, 1855 marks the last “Indian war” on the West Coast.

On this subject we can turn with profit to the admirable work by Eugene Arima and Alan Hoover, The Whaling People of the West Coast of Vancouver Island and Cape Flattery.¹⁸⁸ In contrast, Vincent Koppert, anthropologist and author of Contributions to Clayoquot Ethnology, published 1930, missed a glorious chance to record oral evidence about this seminal event in West Coast history. He was content to say, in a mere two pages, that these were hand-to-hand encounters using stones, clubs of stone or bone, and daggers, as well as spears and war knives (“never left out of sight,” he says). Elk-hide armour gave protection. Warriors readied themselves for war at any time, and acts of bravery were part of the preparation, also songs and prayers taught by a warrior’s father.¹⁸⁹

The subject of war in Indigenous societies has been extensively studied. Battles rage among anthropologists as to various phenomena such as warfare, feuding, armed conflict or armed combat. “Warfare exists if the conflict is organized and socially sanctioned, and the killing is not regarded as murder,” wrote Margaret Mead. She posits that war must be organized, for there must be willingness and intent to kill and readiness to die, and so the process is not murder.¹⁹⁰ In regards to the matter of oral testimony: we wish we had more. Edward Sapir and Morris Swadesh provide indicative evidence in Native Accounts of Nootka Ethnography, printing testimony of episodes in Native orthography and English translation.¹⁹¹ We learn a great deal from these. It was the possession of resources and the defence of these resources against encroachment by rival nations that was the key, as far as I am able to determine from evidence dating from 1916, entitled “War Among Ahouset Bands.” This accords completely with established views of the Mowachaht and Muchalaht, at and near Nootka Sound, that it was not rank and station that was sought but places for resource extraction and life-giving sustenance.¹⁹² Revenge was an undoubted factor, too, but possession of property the essential requirement. The war described extensively by Arima and Hoover virtually annihilated the Otsosat, and placed the Ahousaht in the ascendant.¹⁹³

The reader is best served by Ahousaht Elder Peter S. Webster’s extensive commentary on this important martial episode. He says the war lasted fifteen years. Both sides fought each other using guns and ammunition. He says those who murdered the crew of a lost sailing ship supplied these weapons. The war began with provocation. The Ahousaht decided to go to war against the Oo-tsus-aht (Webster’s spelling), who owned eighteen fish-producing rivers in Clayoquot Sound. The Ahousaht demanded little girls be given to each member of their war party. To this there was agreement but not fully. There were further provocations, killings and mutilations. In the end the Oo-tsus-aht lost the war and lost lands, including Flores Island, where the Ahousaht and Kelsemaht lived in the time of which Webster tells. The Oo-tsus-aht moved from Clayoquot to take up residence on the coast of Washington and Oregon. “Following this event,” wrote Webster, “peace returned at last to Clayoquot Sound.”¹⁹⁴

In nearby Barkley Sound, too, Indigenous warfare was a component of life in the 1850s, for there was fought what is called the Long War in Barkley Sound, lasting several years (about 1850–1860).¹⁹⁵ Then it stopped completely. No rival nations came to possess Meares Island or to take away the resources of the Ahousaht, Kelsemaht and Clayoquot.

The Clayoquot were involved in this last war, but only indirectly. It brought to the fore their powerful war chief Sitakanim (or Seta Kanim). Stirring contemporary accounts by two visitors to Clayoquot Sound pay him splendid tribute.¹⁹⁶ In the early 1860s he remained, without question, the supreme warrior chief, having benefited from the late wars against the Ahousaht and their allies. He was grand in outdoor settings, his natural arena, and as Gilbert Malcolm Sproat put it, as if by comparison, “We Englishmen converse well indoors across green tables, but out of doors the savage beats us in public speaking beyond compare.”¹⁹⁷ Sitakanim differed from Wickaninnish in that he appeared to outsiders as both villainous and treacherous. One of the testimonials in his possession, which (not knowing its damning contents) he produced for yachtsman Barrett-Lennard, stated that if necessary he “would murder his own father for a groat [a small coin of little value].”¹⁹⁸ That may be the case or it may be a fabrication. Sitakanim wanted to peruse the yachtsman’s credentials, and he was much impressed by a Masonic jewelled emblem brought up from below in the vessel.

The end to the blood feuds and the internecine wars is conspicuous by its suddenness and does not seem to have been accompanied by Indigenous regrets, save for guarded suspicions about inveterate enemies. All the same, the old order was changing, and the power of Wickaninnish’s successors was changing with the times. A web of administrative legalese was possessing Meares Island and, indeed, all of Vancouver Island. In fact, the old order had changed very quietly and quite unexpectedly, even before a boundary was agreed to separate British from US lands west of the Rocky Mountains along the forty-ninth parallel, leaving Vancouver Island in British sovereign possession. The boundary treaty of 1846 is the watershed date for Meares Island: it announced British sovereignty, foreshadowed colonial administration from Victoria and hinted at a distant future in which Canada would control “Indian affairs” under the Indian Act.

Since 1821, the Hudson’s Bay Company had held the exclusive privilege of trading with the Indigenous peoples of the territories west of the Rocky Mountains. These territories were not annexed to Rupert’s Land, though the Company would have liked that. No, the Colonial Office, which oversaw this empire within an empire, wanted the colonizing power of the firm to be limited to Vancouver Island and its dependencies. A licence from government was required to trade in HBC territories, and that kept rivals away.¹⁹⁹ This great monopoly was backed by the power of the British parliament.

In 1846, the possession of Meares Island and Clayoquot Sound (and all of Vancouver Island and its dependencies) passed to the management of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The Colony of Vancouver Island was established by royal charter of grant under direction of the British Colonial Office in 1849,²⁰⁰ and on March 11, 1850 the governor, Richard Blanshard, fresh from London and unconnected with the HBC, proclaimed the colonial government at Fort Victoria. The Crown retained title to the Island and its dependencies; the Company held the charter of development, for seven shillings a year. A fair bargain! The British government had no intention of spending a penny on the Island’s development, save for naval protection, so the Hudson’s Bay Company remained all-powerful in its commercial, legal and political activities. The HBC’s monopoly gave it exclusive rights of trade with Indigenous peoples on the Island and its dependencies, as well as in New Caledonia—that is, the mainland British sovereign territory, as acknowledged by the Oregon Treaty of 1846. Lands and forests came under Company control, and such Indian reserves as were established by treaty or other arrangement were taken out of the domain, Native places of occupation being left largely undisturbed. Notably, the Colonial Office made sure that Indigenous peoples were not denied their traditional economies of fishing (including whaling) and hunting. Peace for the purpose of profit was the intention, and we will return to this later. The Company established posts at Forts Victoria, Langley, Nanaimo, Rupert (Beaver Harbour) and Simpson, but there was no need for a post on the west coast of Vancouver Island, a backwater.

All the same, this octopus-like monopoly worked itself out in specific ways, shaping the character of the imperial frontier in these parts. For instance, Governor James Douglas, Blanshard’s successor and a powerful Company man, controlled the registry of colonial shipping at Victoria and was capable of intervening in any colonial trade. Thus, when one Robert Swanston proposed to sail his trading vessel William Allen to Clayoquot and other harbours of the Island “for the purpose of collecting native produce,” Douglas refused to grant the necessary permit. Douglas’s explanation was that there was no settlement at Clayoquot or the other places.²⁰¹ (Swanston may have intended to peddle booze.) Truth is, Douglas wanted to keep American and other foreign traders out of British waters.

The Company held firm on its monopoly of trading with the Indigenous peoples of the Island. Governor Douglas wanted no foreign poachers. The monopoly had been licensed by London in order to save Indigenous peoples from the dreadful coerciveness of the American western frontier. This was a powerful factor in the making of imperial policy for Vancouver Island.²⁰² At the same time, it was an anachronism in current British political economic thinking. The coming of free trade theory and practice in British imperial management had its influence even at far-distant Vancouver Island: the Hudson’s Bay Company monopoly disappeared by London’s intervention, effective 1859. Meantime, the gold rush on the Fraser River brought a new mainland colony into existence in 1858. The two colonies were merged in 1864 as the united colony of British Columbia. It, too, went through a transition, and the Province of British Columbia emerged in 1871, with representative government and as a part of the Dominion of Canada. These changes hardly influenced the course of Meares Island history, save for the fact that “Indian Affairs” became the purview of the Dominion of Canada. We will refer to this later, and it is essential to understand the transitions we are identifying.

Governor Blanshard’s role in the shaping of this frontier must not be ignored. His first action as governor was designed to control the importation and sale of spirituous liquors. To him the reason was clear, as his proclamation says: “The free and unrestricted traffic in spirituous liquors has caused and does still cause great damage and inconvenience to the Inhabitants of Her Majesty’s Colony of Vancouver’s Island, by debauching and corrupting the population, both native and Immigrant.”²⁰³ Various penalties were imposed. Smuggling had to be checked. Public health needed to be improved. But in later years the Colony took no substantial measures to check the illicit liquor trade, a trade in spirits many of which had poisonous characteristics. In Blanshard’s day there was no high density of Indigenous population near Fort Victoria. However, as the 1850s wore on, Native numbers increased in and near Victoria. Numerous local press organs, some hysterical, made much of this, giving rise to “settler anxiety.”²⁰⁴ Governor Douglas was advised to take action, but it was not until the 1862 smallpox epidemic that various groups were escorted home to their native villages to prevent an even greater public health catastrophe in the colonial capital. How many Clayoquot people were involved is not known. Some authorities believe the 1830s to have been a more devastating time for Native depopulation from smallpox, and 1855 may have been more significant at Clayoquot than 1862.²⁰⁵ Syphilis was extensive in Victoria, an additional contribution to the decline in Native numbers through sterility. Factors related to spirituous liquor, venereal diseases and the outflow of persons from Native communities must have taken a terrible toll on population numbers in their villages, to say nothing of dark and depressing psychological impacts. It is impossible to calculate the number of homicides, the cases of family violence, the maiming and the injuries suffered in consequence of these causes.

The number of Indigenous peoples in Clayoquot Sound and British Columbia in the mid-1800s is devilishly hard to pin down, though many estimates were made in the mid- to late-nineteenth century. Some estimates are wild. We recall that some of the maritime fur traders and Spanish explorers of the late 1700s had estimated in the thousands in regards to some of the Clayoquot villages. No such figures can be found for the mid-nineteenth century. In fact, the 1849 estimates sent to the Colonial Office in London do not mention any west coast Native numbers, though this may have been because the coast, to repeat, was a backwater to commerce, settlement and colonial administration. But make no mistake, population numbers here had declined: the last internecine war, that of 1855, accounts for some of this; so did diseases. Smallpox affected many and must have influenced the Ahousaht and Clayoquot, though Kwakwaka’wakw, Tsimshian and Haida suffered more in the 1862 pandemic. In addition, Indigenous people moved to places where wages could be earned—Nanaimo, Alert Bay, Alberni and Victoria—and some headed for American territory. In 1864 the west coast of Vancouver Island was described by the Admiralty surveyors as thinly populated, with the highest estimate of Indigenous peoples not exceeding 4,000, divided into a number of very small nations.²⁰⁶ There is a danger in overestimating the numbers of “Indians of Canada,” and the Dominion of Canada statistics for 1911 report a total of 25,149 in British Columbia. This was a larger number than that determined by the province’s official estimate of 21,591, compiled in 1911 by Dr. C.F. Newcombe, of the British Columbia Museum. Newcombe’s figure for the Nootkan (that is, the Nuu-chah-nulth) peoples is 2,055. As to the decline in the population of the First Nations of British Columbia, R.E. Gosnell reports in the 1911 edition of his Year Book of British Columbia that when British Columbia entered the Canadian federation in 1871, there were approximately 35,000. When he compared this historical information to that of the 1911 estimation, as given above, the decrease over those forty years was indeed large.²⁰⁷

We recall that census figures are, at best, wild guesses. The European population of Vancouver Island and mainland British Columbia was a transient one. Population figures for colonial Vancouver Island, found in its colonial records, state there were, in 1855, 774 whites. By 1871 there were 36,247 whites.²⁰⁸ Our best estimate for the late nineteenth century comes from observer Vincent Koppert, the anthropologist, who learned from reliable sources that in 1881 there were 324 Clayoquot and 140 Kelsemaht, and that in 1929 there were 177 Clayoquot and 66 Kelsemaht.²⁰⁹ Indeed, the numbers had gone down, but the important point (not least in regards to Meares Island, where continuity of occupancy had to be demonstrated) was they had not disappeared. What is equally significant, they had not abandoned their place of occupancy at the time the British colonial government was established. This is a critical point: Meares Island had not been abandoned by Indigenous peoples.

We can imagine that the 1850s and 1860s were unusual times for the Clayoquot Sound peoples, for commercial connections with the outside world were uncertain, and internecine rivalries prevailed. All was in flux. Merchant ships in quest of sea otter pelts came no longer. A few vessels arrived in search of seals or whales. There must have been petty traders, too—small-tonnage coasters, most of them from home port Victoria, the colonial capital, looking for furs, oil or Native curiosities. It was not until 1860 that a strong outsider presence was felt, and this was not specifically at Clayoquot but at the head of the Alberni Canal, where, as explained above, a stout party of timber fellers arrived. They set up the first commercial timber operation on the west coast of Vancouver Island. The vessels therefore came and went there rather than Clayoquot Sound.

The long arm of colonial justice stretched out to embrace Clayoquot Sound. As the fatal Tonquin case had testified, this was a treacherous coast for shipping, and as in the days of Wickaninnish, mariners needed to be on their guard. Once the Indigenous peoples began to rob and kill persons travelling to the coast, the officials in Victoria, backed by the power of London, made sure they felt the influence of British law and authority.²¹⁰ British gunboats made their appearance on this shore after 1858, when the maritime frontier was “sealed” and the Pax Britannica established and enforced.²¹¹ The process was gradual.

In 1852 the HBC ship Eagle was lost and plundered at Clayoquot. Governor Douglas, regretting the “bad conduct” of the Indigenous people on this occasion, and having no force at his disposal to respond or to prevent such acts in the future, could only report the event to the Colonial Office with the hope it would bring some imperial intervention. There were other such cases, and captains of trading vessels raised a general alarm.²¹² As one skipper declared, the coast from Clayoquot Sound to the Island’s northwestern tip appeared absolutely unsafe for traders. He warned that the Natives arrogantly boasted that they cared nothing for British gunboats, for Governor Douglas or, for that matter, anyone else.²¹³

The American brig Swiss Boy, carrying lumber from Puget Sound with destination San Francisco, was beached for repairs in Barkley Sound in 1859, and was plundered by the Huu-ay-aht and Tseshaht. Captain J.C. Prevost of HMSSatellite, a steam sloop, answered the governor’s urgent appeal to investigate and used soft diplomacy to convince the local Indigenous people that their acts must not be repeated; to this, they agreed. The Huu-ay-aht, he wrote, seemed well disposed to British influence. Persons Prevost identified as responsible for the plundering of the Swiss Boy were taken to Victoria for trial, but for lack of evidence were not convicted. They were released, much to the fury of the traders. Prevost was told that the Huu-ay-aht believed that any property that came to their shores—including a disabled ship—was their property and a rightful subject for plunder. That may have been the case. But an attack against British or other European persons was another matter, and the governor would not stand aside in such cases. Nor could the governor countenance any piracy. It was Captain Prevost’s view that the colonial government should appoint an Indian agent for the Island’s west coast from Port San Juan to Cape Scott, where in his estimation, five thousand “souls” lived under “no control or restraint.”²¹⁴ Taking up this recommendation, William Banfield was appointed magistrate and Indian agent. He was there until October 20, 1862, when a Huu-ay-aht chief, Klatsmick, murdered him.²¹⁵

The colony had no money for marine policing, and no gunboat. The work fell on the Royal Navy. Admiral Joseph Denman, commander of the Pacific station from 1864 to 1866, recommended regular policing by steam-powered vessels; he also recommended that, for this particular service, officers familiar with local tribal ways and language would be advantageous. “The aggressions on the coast of Vancouver Island and British Columbia against British traders by the Indians has by degrees increased to a formidable account by long continued impunity,” he advised the Admiralty, “and though the severe examples I have felt myself to make in Clayoquot Sound will probably for a long time prevent their recurrence, yet it is most desirable that such cases of murder and piracy should be prosecuted, and the painful necessity of such examples avoided.” Gunboats and even more powerful gun vessels were deployed from the base at Esquimalt, near Victoria, to patrol the west coast. These were challenging waters even for a steam vessel—the gunboats proved to be under-powered where the heavy seas were so common.

Prevost’s initial belief that the local peoples would accept British influence gave way to stronger views and demands for protection from traders and from the governor. The navy came under pressure to exact justice at the cannon’s mouth. Such was the case in 1864 when the sloop Kingfisher, trading in seal oil, was pillaged and burned, and the crew members murdered, at Matilda Creek in Clayoquot Sound (the northern end). The lamentable story of the navy’s hunt for the pirates and murderers and the destruction of their property and their trial has been told in detail in my Gunboat Frontier.²¹⁶ The navy carried out reprisals with dedication and determination, but those hunted down put up a serious resistance. Nine villages and sixty-four canoes were destroyed, and at least fifteen Indigenous peoples killed. “The success of this attack,” Rear Admiral Joseph Denman reported to the Admiralty in London, “conducted after the fashion of their own tactics, has produced profound discouragement, Chapchah [regarded as the Indigenous leader] being in hiding and pursued by his own people, who had abandoned all ideas of resistance and look on him as responsible for all the evils.” Governor Arthur Kennedy, Douglas’s successor, was satisfied. He thanked the navy for its work and confidently maintained that the measure would promote the colony’s security and check the “piratical and bloodthirsty attitudes of the Coast Indians, which have been left too long unpunished.” The Ahousaht, implicated in the Kingfisher matter, did not accept their guilt; rather, they held the belief that they had survived the ordeal. That was their point of view, and is justified in their logic.

But the problems continued: at Estevan Point, north of Clayoquot Sound, the barque John Bright, laden with lumber, went aground in a southwest gale in February 1869. Of the twenty-two people on board the vessel, none survived. A report reached Victoria, via a passing trading schooner, that the Hesquiaht had plundered the ship and ten survivors of the wreck had reached shore and been shot, their bodies hacked to pieces and mutilated. The gun vessel Sparrowhawk was sent from Esquimalt to investigate, a magistrate on board. Two arrests were made, a trial held in Victoria, and the accused, found guilty, were hanged on a scaffold erected at Hesquiat, despite a coroner’s report that the mutilations could not definitively be attributed to human intervention but could well have been caused by the bodies being battered on the rocks by rough seas.²¹⁷ The morality of this episode caused a stir at the time, mainly in London, where humanitarian views were strong at the Admiralty and in the Cabinet of W.E. Gladstone, the prime minister.

To make navigation safer on the west coast of Vancouver Island and elsewhere, the Royal Navy commenced a systematic survey of these complicated, rock-strewn waters. The task was daunting. This heroic but little-known work began in the mid-1840s, when Lieutenant James Wood had surveyed the Strait of Juan de Fuca, resulting in the first authorized Admiralty charts and, later, advice to mariners known as sailing directions. The entrance to and anchorages in Esquimalt were laid down on the charts. The Fraser River gold rush of 1858 induced the Admiralty in London to undertake a systematic hydrographic survey of British Columbia waters, especially the lower Fraser River. Survey results encouraged commerce. This was the reason that Clayoquot Sound was surveyed over the course of a few years in the early 1860s, and it forms part of this chapter’s story, not only because of advantages given to safe navigation, but also because the surveyors sometimes gave new names to islands, water passages and dominant mountains, changing names that had been given by the Indigenous peoples.

On July 21, 1861, the throbbing pulsations of the big paddlewheel steamer Hecate, commanded by Captain George Henry Richards, could be heard near the southeast entrance to Clayoquot Sound.²¹⁸ This man-of-war had been sent from England to carry on surveys in locations where tidal flows and currents proved her predecessor, Plumper, inadequate. Richards, rather small in stature, was an energetic fellow with a reputation noted for bravery in battle. He was a careful observer and zealous in carrying out his responsibilities. A man of humanitarian views, he was blessed with a lively sense of humour that endeared him to all under his command. Desertions were non-existent from his ship, though in other ships “on station” they were substantial, the lure of the gold fields being irresistible. Richards was a proven man of science and an Arctic explorer.²¹⁹

When approaching the passage to Port Cox, the expected place of moorage, a whaleboat previously detached on the survey was seen coming out to the ship, its mission to warn Richards not to enter by that way, for at low water there was only fifteen feet. This was a significant detail gratefully received, for earlier a Native canoe had come off from the shore to advise that there was certainly a passage for the ship, “and if I had taken their word I should have run on shore,” Richards noted ruefully in his private journal.²²⁰ The Hecate drew thirteen feet (four metres); thus, no chances could be taken in shallow waters. Master John Gowlland, in the whaleboat, transferred to the steamer and piloted the Hecate north via the outer coast to the entrance the Spanish in Quimper’s day had called Point Raphael, but which was by this time known by the Indigenous name Manhousat. Gowlland remarked that the Ahousaht were “very civil and bring great quantities of Salmon to trade: there are three or four kinds at present being traded.”²²¹

The work of the surveyors was arduous and fundamental. Part of their business was to make exact scientific observations of latitudes, longitudes, heights and distances on which every chart had to be founded; they had to determine the channels and the passages, and note the hazards to navigation. The weather was overcast and sometimes rainy, so astronomical observations were delayed awaiting clear weather. Even so, once at anchor within the Sound, the officers directed that parties be detached from the vessel to run base lines for purposes of triangulation. The survey was carried out largely by Masters Gowlland and George Browning, the latter an excellent draftsman. Boat crews took soundings, noting reefs and shoals, sand banks and kelp beds, and channels and shallows, and all the time the midshipmen and clerks entered data in Admiralty notebooks. It was a demanding business, especially during heavy rains. The boat work was tedious and tiring. On July 25, Richards went to the northwest entrance to Clayoquot Sound, measured a base and thus got the means of putting on paper the considerable work already done by the detached parties.

It now being time to shift to the southernmost entrance, Richards, accompanied by the ship’s surgeon, Dr. Charles Wood, in the pinnace, headed for Port Cox. He wryly notes that he sailed right through the land shown in the “old chart”—that is, George Vancouver’s chart (Vancouver had never been there). He arrived at his destination at noon on July 29, 1861. They set up camp on the west side of Tofino Arm, where they found the mosquitoes very troublesome.

Soon the First Nations made their appearance. “The tribe about a mile below us are shifting their village close to us,” wrote Richards in his journal, “I suppose for their own convenience. Instead of going to and fro twice a day the[y] spend the greater part of their time lying alongside the ship—trading berries for biscuit and whatever they caught—and as our men are fools enough to pay higher prices than the things are worth, it is worth their while to stick to us. In shifting a village, they place the large cedar boards which form the sides of their huts across 2 canoes, forming a platform of them. On these boards they stow all their boxes and household goods and so shift very easily.”²²² Once again the utility of local timber was displayed by Native use.

Already, on June 27, Gowlland had sent a surveying crew to mark out and measure a base line of 2,600 feet on the beach at Opitsat. From thence a triangulation was commenced toward the east. He estimated that the Natives of Opitsat numbered 700, which may be taken as a good guess, and he was impressed by the Natives’ close ties of kinship. The Opitsat, he noted, were “very civil and obliging but cautious,” fearing that the British intended to spread disease among them as, they stated, had once been done by the Americans at Cape Flattery. They also feared that the survey markers that were put up contained evil spirits. Young Wickaninnish, about age nineteen, interceded and aided in reducing the Opitsats’ fears that the British were trespassing or intending harm. The survey was completed in August, by which time the British had got to know the summer village, E-cha-chist, and other locales.²²³

Clayoquot Sound, Richards concluded, differed from the other embayments on Vancouver Island in that all the lower or outer parts of it were shoal and sandy instead of deep and muddy, as found elsewhere; this constituted an important observation in regards to matters of safe anchorage, shoal and sandy being far less reliable for holding an anchor. Richards’ summary of navigational challenges of Clayoquot Sound appeared in the first edition of The Vancouver Island Pilot, published in 1864. In future, mariners using this Pilot could reliably be guided to a safe approach and entrance to Clayoquot Sound and its inner reaches. It is not that the Indigenous peoples did not know all the reefs and shoals; it is that larger vessels, or those with such draft as the entrances would allow, could now come into such places as Port Cox or Hesquiat, farther to the north. Empirical observation and scientific reckoning had now come to possess the Sound. And, as noted above, Richards gave the name of Meares to Meares Island. Gowlland and Browning were honoured in other locales. One more detail: the information Richards and the ship’s company gathered was shared with Dr. Charles Forbes, a naval surgeon and a person knowledgeable in engineering matters. He won the £50 prize for his essay, published by the colonial government, Vancouver Island: Its Resources and Capabilities as a Colony (Victoria, 1861) in which he gave this notice of the mineral potential he saw there: “The narrow arms more resemble the neighbouring sounds except in geological feature. A gneisso-granite rock (metamorphic) forms the axis of elevation, associated with which are hornblende and coarse grained quartzose rocks, intruded traps and quartz veins, indicating a region, most probably rich in mineral wealth.”²²⁴

All the possessions for science that were required had been secured. The Hecate’s officers and men concluded their survey on August 15. That morning the veteran paddlewheeler passed out of Clayoquot Sound and shaped a course for Barkley Sound. The vessel reached Esquimalt before taking in coal and provisions for the voyage to San Francisco for repairs at Mare Island.

Richards and the officers and men of the Hecate left a rich legacy: for the first time a reliable description of Clayoquot Sound would be available from the Admiralty’s Hydrographic Office in an engraved chart and also a published pilot. A new dawn had arrived. Possession of these aids to navigation to mariners, especially newcomers to these treacherous waters, reduced chances of disasters to shipping but by no means eliminated them: this coast was and continues to be a graveyard of ships. But the fruits of the survey reduced risk. The Richards legacy is therefore of incalculable value: when he wound up his efforts, 357 charts were published showing locations big and small on the Northwest Coast, especially British Columbia waters, and his Pilot, or Sailing Directions, became the guide to limiting tragedies at sea. All the gleanings from hydrographical science were of vital importance in demonstrating the continuance of Indigenous occupations at Clayoquot Sound. Empire had not swept these peoples aside or removed or crushed them.

By the 1860s, independent sailors, unconnected with government or commerce, began to make their appearance at Clayoquot. Such persons are vagabonds of the sea, seeking adventure—and even today they can be found venturing in remote waters. As for the west coast of Vancouver Island, perhaps the most unusual adventurer was yachtsman Lieutenant Charles Edward Barrett-Lennard, late of the British 5th Dragoon Guards, and a veteran of the Crimean War, who shipped his cutter yacht Templar on the settlement vessel Athelstan to the Vancouver Island colony.²²⁵ At Esquimalt naval base he had the assistance of naval personnel, in their spare time, to refit the Templar in readiness for cruising local waters and, later, a circumnavigation of Vancouver Island.²²⁶ Barrett-Lennard’s Travels in British Columbia, with the Narrative of a Yacht Voyage round Vancouver Island, published in London in 1862, tells much of the story, and a fascinating one it is. We can see him now at the wheel, dressed in the brass-buttoned jacket of the Royal Thames Yacht Club and an old cavalry cap with its gold band, the blue ensign of the Royal Thames at the peak, coasting south from Resolution Cove, Nootka, his most recent port of call. “I always passed in this nondescript costume for a man-of-war Tyee, or officer,” he says cheerily.²²⁷

In all likelihood, Barrett-Lennard had been at Clayoquot at least once before—that is, before his circumnavigation. He told a correspondent that he thought a good trade could be entered into at Clayoquot Sound.²²⁸ In any event, Barrett-Lennard did not meet Richards, but he knew Gowlland and others; indeed, he and his crew enjoyed many an agreeable encounter with the British navy at Clayoquot. We retrace our steps to early 1861, when the decked cutter Shark arrived at Clayoquot from nearby surveying duties. The main surveying vessel, the Hecate, was then in Barkley Sound. On coming into what is now Templar Channel, the naval men spied the Templar riding at anchor. Nearby they found its crew encamped on the sandy spit of what is now called Stubbs Island. Barrett-Lennard was not present at the time, but his associate Captain Napoleon Fitz Stubbs, late of the North Gloucestershire Regiment and also a Crimean War veteran, was there in charge.²²⁹ One can only imagine the convivial exchanges between the vessel crews out there on what Europeans regarded as the margins of the known world.

“Clayoquot is a very extensive Sound, having several arms or inlets communicating with the interior,” wrote Barrett-Lennard. “The anchorage is generally good, but the water is much shallower and the shores lower than at Nootka. The growth of timber is less dense, and there is some good open land in its vicinity.” Thus did he point to the commercial prospects of the place. He continued: “The summer village of the Clayoquots is situated near the sea, the entrance to the cove on which it stands being surrounded with rocks and exposed to the most dangerous winds from the sea; in fact, offering no shelter to any vessel seeking refuge there.” He knew this from a previous coasting passage when storm surge made such an entry impossible; indeed, it is a tight entrance in difficult weather. But, he remarked, farther up the Sound “plenty of places may be found in which a vessel can lie safely at anchor. We were much struck with the immense size of some of the beams of timber used in the construction of several of the huts in this village, those of the chiefs being here, as elsewhere, the largest.” He marvelled at how the Indigenous peoples managed to raise a beam perhaps one hundred feet in length to a height of ten or twelve feet from the ground. “The sight of these buildings produced much the same effect of wonder on my mind as did the first visit to Stonehenge. I may mention that many of these erections are evidently of great antiquity.”²³⁰ After the cruise, Barrett-Lennard sold the Templar to a Victoria concern. Some years later she dragged anchor in Foul Bay, Victoria, and became a total wreck.

Had Clayoquot in the 1850s been a promising centre of economic enterprise, an active port or a place for coal mining, Governor Douglas, who was also head of operations for the HBC on Vancouver Island, would have had a treaty signed with the local chiefs, as he did at Victoria, Sooke, Nanaimo and Fort Rupert. But it was not to be. In fact, no planned colonial settlement was imagined in this densely forested place. Furthermore, navigation for deep-water shipping was better elsewhere—at Alberni Canal, for example. No developments by the Company or the government were planned. Accordingly, Clayoquot remained outside of treaty arrangements. Any of the humanitarian intentions that had been inserted into the charter of the colony, to be carried out by the HBC, were now a dead letter. When former governor Richard Blanshard testified before the Select Committee of the House of Commons on the Affairs of the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1857, he was asked if the Company’s policy was to improve the Natives off the face of the land, as in the United States. “Exactly so,” he replied. By virtue of the fact that colonization of Vancouver Island was slow and ineffectual, the Committee wanted to know if Blanshard thought “the Indians are no obstacle to the colonization?” They were no obstacle, he replied, adding that those Natives living around Fort Victoria were very useful. At and near Fort Rupert, he said, they were “a very fierce and warlike set.”²³¹ The Company, as a matter of policy, intervened little in Indigenous culture, apart from economic matters. I agree with authority Philip Drucker when he writes, “It offered them the trade goods they steadily demanded in return for their furs, and made little attempt to modify their culture in other respects.”²³²

Although the tendency of this chapter has been to describe Clayoquot Sound, as of the mid-1860s, as a backwater to commercial development, and a location in which the Indigenous population was perhaps in an unsettled state, we have to remember a central fact of British Columbia history: this was the last part of the temperate zone of the world that was essentially unoccupied for European settlement and industrial development. It awaited the steamship and the steam engine, the gas engine and outboard motor, the float plane and the age of coal as a heating and transportation influence. Clayoquot Sound could not remain isolated from global changes, and it had already been influenced by outside forces in so many ways. Herman Merivale, a former principal undersecretary at the Colonial Office, made this clear when he wrote in 1860 of British Columbia:

"

Its climate has proved much better, and in particular much drier, than hitherto supposed; its soil not generally attractive, but very various. Whatever use Britain may ultimately make of her portion of North-Western America, it is a region of no small interest to observers of our times, as affording the last open field for European emigration. The remainder of the extra-tropical world is now filled up. No other site is left for the foundation of future empires. Its occupiers will be the latest adventurers in that vast work of European colonization which began scarcely four centuries ago. The duty left for future time will be only to fill up the outlines already traced in days of more romantic adventure.²³³

"

Merivale was, by this time, an Oxford professor of political economy, and he knew all about the British Empire, including India. It is fascinating to think of those various British persons who were to come to Clayoquot Sound in later days—and many a curious individual did so—to establish outposts of the British Empire on their own individual terms, some of them reclusive and many of them human oddities who could not stand, or could not survive, ordinary life in town or country. Vancouver Island seems, from early settlement days, to have been a place of unusual characters, like the kind that enliven the pages of Jack Hodgins’ latter-day book Spit Delaney’s Island. Professor Merivale understood that some of the most adventurous and romantic human agents of empire would set up their bastions on Vancouver Island.

This book does not trace the history of these people, but I can mention a few by name, with a brief outline of their lives. For example, the Dane Frederick Christian Thornberg, a merchant sailor, took charge of Clayoquot Station in 1874, buying furs, seals and dogfish oil, the main trade. His recollections, fortunately, survive, an important literary possession. He thought the Nootka Indians, as he called them, very suspicious: “The Nootka and Hesquiat Indians had said that we white men (only 3) had put small pox in bottles with water and pouret [sic] some water in to theire [sic] rivers and drinking water so that all the Indians would die and then we the white men would have all the Land on the West Coast.”²³⁴

Far different from raw-boned Thornberg, who settled into married life, was Frederick Gerald Tibbs. This well-moneyed fellow—perhaps a remittance man from London, “sent to the colonies” to find his way—was a loner not by choice but because of a terrible affliction. He had big holes on the left side of his face caused by a riding accident or other misadventure, the details of which no one has been able to track down. Disfigured as well as short of stature, he was understandably self-conscious. A poet with a public-school education, and the complete gentleman in every way, though lonely because of his affliction, Tibbs arrived at Long Beach in 1910 or 1911; he may have worked at the new fish hatchery. He removed to his self-styled “Dream Isle”—now Arnet Island—where he built a three-storey wooden castle with rose trellises in the clearing made by his own hands. Here was a man-made possession of solitude. Atop the only remaining 100-foot spruce he built a viewing platform, where he could play gramophone records to his heart’s content. When war came in 1914, this son of Empire made plans to enlist, and he went overseas and joined a regiment. Returning to Dream Isle he was never able to marry. He died a cruel death entangled in the weeds off a beach at Clayoquot, having gone in his skiff Agnes to tend a coal light buoy put there as a navigational aid. Somehow he lost, or became separated from, the skiff in the tide and breeze. Eventually he reached shore, exhausted, and there he died, aged 35. The date was July 5, 1921. Tibbs has been portrayed as a freak and a wild man, a loner; in fact, he is a figure who invites our compassion and understanding, a man doing his civic duty and paying the price. As to his death, one informant of the time, Winnie Dixson, says that he called to get some Native women to bring a rescuing canoe, but they did not know his language (or he theirs). Dixson’s view is that they should have gone and told the policeman, who would have effected a rescue.²³⁵ He is buried in the old Morpheus Island cemetery.

Others arrived from England. Dorothy Abraham accepted the invitation of her future husband Ted Abraham to live on Vargas Island, where he had 160 acres. She tells her tale in Lone Cone, a classic of life in Clayoquot Sound. Another unique settler, “Cougar Annie,” Ada Annie Rae-Arthur, arrived in 1915 with her family at Boat Basin, in Hesquiat Harbour. These and other lives make for engaging reading, for they were strong persons living frontier lives. Bob Bossin tells their tales in Settling Clayoquot, one of those extraordinarily significant issues of Sound Heritage, published by the Aural History Division of the BC Provincial Archives in the 1970s and 1980s.

Prominent in the commercial affairs of Clayoquot at the end of the nineteenth century was the arrival of Walter Dawley and Thomas Stockham. They set up a store on Stockham Island, near Opitsat on Meares Island. This store was the centre of their business empire and a regular port of call for supply steamers. They also had stores at Nootka and Ahousat, where Frederick Christian Thornberg was storekeeper. Taken all together, the three stores were a tidy and profitable network. Stockham Island boasted a hotel, the first in Clayoquot Sound, built 1898. As to the population of Clayoquot Sound, it has been estimated that at the turn of the century about 800 Indigenous persons and probably fewer than a hundred white people lived there, largely in scattered locations. Beaches, inlets and islets were new places of domicile. The largest Native villages were Opitsat, Kelsemat, Ahousat and Hesquiat.²³⁶ All were drawn together by water—by canoes, outboard motorboats, rowboats and coastal steamers. It was a floating world. And it was a place of rain.

The epoch covered by this chapter witnessed the arrival of the camera. Several noted pioneer photographers, including Charles Gentile (in Clayoquot around 1864), Frederick Dally (1866) and Hannah and Richard Maynard (1874, 1879), captured early scenes and persons, as well as rapidly changing styles of clothing—blankets, cottons and hats are new items, indications of an evolving material culture. Many other photographers came later, including C.F. Newcombe, Leonard Frank and Edward Curtis; they found much of interest on the west coast. Photos of great canoes are featured, and whales on beaches. Not all photographs can be credited to an individual photographer. For instance, in John Sendey’s 1977 book The Nootkan Indian, published by Alberni Valley Museum, we find a marvellous photo of a crowd coming ashore at Opitsat in 1915. In this remarkable image, guests for a feast or potlatch are being carried ashore in their canoe. Two men with tambourine drums accompany the group ashore.²³⁷ Another photo in the book, of Ahousat circa 1910, shows how modern housing had replaced traditional structures. Glass windows have been introduced. Carved house posts, and there are several, were photographed before subsequent sale or removal to private collections or distant museums. A third photo, from 1910, shows Opitsat village, with three carved house posts, and also a great canoe. One pole depicts two human figures holding wooden coppers, above which is a mask with rays; another shows an encircling snake with its head projecting sideways from the pole. From these and other photographs and etchings connected by Sendey, we can see that the traditional arts and crafts, and the traditional ways of hunting and celebrating, were emblematic of a way of life still vigorously being lived in the first two decades of the twentieth century. Those photographers captured a rich culture in their lenses, not a dying society but one going through progressive adaptations for the future. The fascinating point is how quickly this society changed, how quickly it made accommodations for survival, a subject of celebration for all humanity.

Before closing this chapter, and this segment of the book, the historian needs to draw some conclusions and make some observations. These represent his views and are not to be found elsewhere. Government had asserted its presence at Clayoquot Sound only in a general way. In a more specific way, however, change was in the wind. The navy’s survey of Clayoquot Sound stands at the gate of history: the ancient giving way to the modern, the Aboriginal world view to that of Western science. There may be other demarcations, but the above demonstrate the tendency of the age. Statistics came to possess the lands and seas. Nautical surveys were harbingers of commerce. And those same charts allowed the navy to police the coast at the behest of colonial and later Canadian government. A new age of law and authority had arrived.

Forces of the external world were pressing in on Clayoquot Sound and other embayments of Vancouver Island. Steam navigation and marine engineering of the age produced the kind of powerful, seaworthy vessels required to service the remote communities and businesses of the west coast and other remote shores of northern British Columbia and Alaska. Steam-driven vessels brought an age of reliability of performance that was hitherto only in the world of fantasy. Thus, we find in our annals of coastal affairs a gradual increase in the size and power of steamships. First in the coastal work was the lovely Maude, a 175-ton iron passenger and freight steamer, built at San Juan Island in 1872. Then came more powerful, larger carriers. Of signal importance is the 165-foot, Stockton-built Tees. Propeller-driven and capable of 10½ knots, with cabin accommodation for 75 persons, she was state of the art for the year of her arrival, 1893. Her ear-shattering steam siren, the first ever heard in remote British Columbia locations, proclaimed a new age—and caused a great deal of consternation until the locals got used to it. For a time the Klondike gold rush took her away to northern waters for that fortune-seeking trade. In 1911 the railway reached Alberni from Wellington via McBride’s Junction, an extension of the Esquimalt & Nanaimo Railway.²³⁸ Alberni prospered as a seaport, shipping masts and spars, as well as cut lumber. Another form of western civilization—the Canadian variant—reached Pacific tidewater as tourism by ship arrived, and also new potential for agricultural, mining and fishing interests.

Other vessels served the west coast, among them, and taking pride of place in succession, were the well-built Princess Maquinna, which replaced the Tees in 1913 and steamed thirty-nine years on the demanding west coast run for which she had been designed, and the handy Princess Norah on summertime duties beginning in 1929.²³⁹

This was the golden age of west coast Vancouver Island shipping, reducing the isolation of coastal communities and providing essential services and links to the outside world. Richard Atleo, Chief Umeek of the Ahousaht, recalls his people going out in small boats from the village to meet and then board the Princess Maquinna to sail to the cannery at Nootka where they worked. They didn’t have cultural eyes for such things as English bone china, he said: “We were more aware of spiritual connotations—a different way of looking at the world.”²⁴⁰ All this was to end. The Princess of Alberni was the last, and was not a paying proposition, for freight and passenger traffic sagged terribly. When she was withdrawn and sold in July 1958, the historic west coast service came to an end.

However, it was the Princess Maquinna that looms largest in memory, and when she was withdrawn from operation, partly because of boiler problems, the locals considered the imagined end of service to be a betrayal of a trust. “But the truth was that trucks and aeroplanes had made such inroads on traffic that the Princess had long since ceased to pay her way,” according to Norman R. Hacking and W. Kaye Lamb, historians of the west coast service.²⁴¹ The history of transportation is the moulding factor in the history of our province. The coastal steamers were the link with the rest of the world: “The boat was the only way you found out about the outside world,” recalled Chief Earl Maquinna George, hereditary chief of the Ahousaht.²⁴²

No account of west coast Vancouver Island history can be written without some reference to this storm-tossed and dangerous shore’s reputation as the graveyard of ships. “The southwest coast of Vancouver Island,” writes Clayton Evans, former superintendent of maritime search and rescue for the Canadian Coast Guard in Victoria, “was a notorious lee shore lying on the northern side of the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, gateway to the Pacific Northwest.”²⁴³ Evans notes that the area was a sailing master’s worst nightmare on account of prevailing storms and currents that combine to bring ships ashore. The late nineteenth century, which witnessed a rapid increase in shipping, also saw many wrecks on this coast. The federal government in Ottawa was slow to act, even though the Canadian Lifesaving Service was an integral part of the Department of Marine and Fisheries. Although lifesaving stations were set up at various Canadian sites, the west coast was ill served until another great shipping disaster occurred.

In 1906 the American passenger steamer Valencia, northbound from San Francisco for Seattle and Victoria, ran aground in thick fog off Pachena Point, breaking up and taking 126 persons to their deaths. “Aside from two lighthouses in the area and the rickety telegraph wire that connected them,” Evans writes with dismay, “there were no lifesaving facilities on the outer Pacific coast to assist the Valencia.” Boards of inquiry recommendations led to establishing lifeboat stations at Bamfield, Clayoquot, Clo-oose and Ucluelet. The old telegraph trail was enhanced to become the Dominion Lifesaving Trail, completed in 1912. Now a popular but challenging hiking trail, it was chopped through dense forests, crossing ravines and circumventing other obstacles. A lifeboat station was built at Bamfield, where there was an existing establishment to serve the trans-Pacific submarine telegraph, “the All-Red Route,” which linked the British Empire. Based at the Bamfield station was a powerful “lifesaving steamer,” a 36-foot Electric Launch Company (ELCO) motor lifeboat.²⁴⁴ A lighthouse was erected at Pachena Point, and opposite, on the American shore, a new lifeboat station was established at Neah Bay, thus providing some coverage to the entrance of the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Canadian government had been shocked into action.

In 1950–1951 the Canadian government purchased another lifeboat for Bamfield, one for Tofino and a third for Clarks Harbour, Nova Scotia. Other vessels were supplied in later years, and it is clear from the historical record that Canada and the United States had common ideas regarding the types of lifeboats and surfboats best suited for rescue work along respective Pacific and Atlantic coastlines. History, too, demonstrated the common need for rugged, serviceable, and mechanically reliable craft that can go out, perform a rescue and return to safety.

A little-known factor in the sweep of change for all of Clayoquot Sound was air power, and once again external forces made an impact on its isolated communities and villages. In the run-up to the Second World War, military strategists planning for a war against Imperial Japan saw in the area between Tofino and Ucluelet great possibilities for a base of operations. These would embrace reconnaissance—the finding of enemy submarines and surface ships—and “seek and strike.” In 1936 Ucluelet was selected as a place for “flying boats”; soon after hostilities began, a bomber squadron was deployed there. RCAF Station Tofino came into existence, and at one time a thousand personnel were based there. Details of construction cannot detain us here save to say that this was the biggest infusion of capital and manpower to that point in time, with remarkable influence on the landscape and the local population. One other impact of the war was the removal of several hundred Japanese residents, who had started arriving in the area in the 1920s. After Japan’s attack on Pearl Harbor, their fishboats were impounded and moved to Steveston. In January 1942, all Japanese in Canada were declared to be “enemy aliens”; those on Vancouver Island’s west coast were rounded up, taken to Victoria on the Princess Maquinna and relocated to distant, interior parts of Canada.²⁴⁵