Chapter 16: Heading South

Leaving the confined and relatively calm waters of Quatsino Sound, the Maquinna often faced a more challenging trip heading south to Victoria than she did on her way north—especially in winter months. Southeast storms prevail on the coast in winter, so ships heading south have to plow straight into the teeth of these gales. This makes life decidedly uncomfortable for her passengers and crew. Inspector Brodie, in his 1918 report, wrote that: “The total distance from Victoria to Port Alice is 424 [nautical] miles [785 km], and of this distance the steamer travels in the open sea about 169 [nautical] miles [313 km], which would be about 15 hours of steaming in open water.”¹⁷⁶ For those aboard the Princess Maquinna, especially those prone to seasickness, those hours could represent an eternity of suffering in tempestuous winter weather.

In his book Beyond the Outer Shores, Ucluelet-born Eric Enno Tamm uses Ed Ricketts’s published and unpublished works to describe the ecologist’s research on BC’s west coast. In it he recounts Ed and Toni Ricketts’s journey from Port Alice to Clayoquot in 1945, relating how quickly the transition from calm to storm could happen. The Maquinna stopped briefly just after leaving Port Alice, picking up two young fellows from a motorboat who were “working at liquor bottles.” After they boarded “... the Maquinna then continued through the sheltered sound. Passengers lounged around the piano. Stewards were likely entertaining other passengers with seafaring tales. Tea was being served on the CPR’s fine china. The two drunks kept swilling their whiskey. It was, at least for an hour or so, a quiet Sunday evening. Then the mood changed as the ship reached the open ocean,” writes Ricketts.

Tamm continues: “A grim feeling immediately flooded the ship, a wave of seasickness. Many passengers became ghostly white. There was little appetite for dinner. ‘Outside it got rough,’ Ricketts wrote in his diary. ‘We stood up forward as long as we could against the wind and spray, [and] then she started to take an occasional dash of water aboard.’ He and the chief engineer tried to estimate the sweep of the mast. Ricketts figured it was fifteen, while the engineer thought twenty degrees. They were rounding Cape Cook, the eastern extremity on Brooks Peninsula, one of the most ruthless spots on the coast. The Maquinna squeaked and groaned in every joint as she rounded the stormy cape.”

“A sleepless Ricketts stayed on deck,” writes Tamm. “For a while, he was alone staring at ‘wicked’ Cape Cook and the gloomy gray combers crashing over the bow. One of the drunken men who had come aboard earlier appeared ‘staggering and beastly.’ A wave flung him across the deck and nearly overboard, as the ship pitched wildly. ‘How are drunken people so saved?’ Ricketts wondered. ‘I guess he handled himself drunk better than I ever do sober.’ Rounding the cape, the ocean quieted on the leeward side of the peninsula and Ricketts slipped below deck to get some rest.”¹⁷⁷

Any travel on the west coast by boat in a winter storm in open waters usually resulted in a rough ride. Lester Arellanes recalls a trip he took on the Maquinna:

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A bunch of loggers, their wives and young unmarried men, clambered aboard (likely at Nootka Cannery): they had been drinking. In the alleged saloon on the Maquinna was about a three-quarter keyboard piano, not far from my stateroom. That piano had weathered as many storms as the Maquinna had, and it was terribly out of tune, but that gang got the piano hooked up, and they were dancing and laughing and talking. We had cast off and had turned around and were heading out of Nootka Sound; we had to go outside, until we passed Estevan Point. These guys were whooping it up and playing this little piano for all it would stand... Within five minutes after we stuck our noses outside, they were GONE. No more piano, no more laughter, no more gaiety. It was all over. The Captain later told me that we were having gusts up to 80 miles [130 km] an hour and it was blowing between 50 and 60 knots steadily outside.¹⁷⁸

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Adding to the perils of west coast travel, no matter what route being travelled, or in what direction the ship was heading, was fog. In the late summer and fall, fog plagues the west coast, to the point that locals sometimes refer to August as “Fogust.” In the days before radar, sonar and the Global Positioning System (GPS), navigating the coast demanded extraordinary skills of ships’ captains to avoid catastrophes. Advection fog, as it is called, occurs when warm air, coming from the land, condenses when it contacts colder air over the sea. It becomes so thick that visibility falls to around 65 ft (20 m). Over the years, the Maquinna’s captain, Edward Gillam, like all other seasoned steamer captains on the coast, found ways to navigate safely in the thickest fog without ever having to alter the ship’s speed or schedule.

The captains knew they could depend on the meticulous logs they kept of every journey, in both good and bad weather, noting every change of course and the exact time it took to travel each section of that course. On CPR ships three log books remained open on the bridge at all times: the log in which the bridge crew were currently making entries, the log of the previous voyage, and the one from the previous year. The bridge crew also noted exactly the speed at which the ship travelled and every hazard she encountered. This meant that when they travelled in fog they could effectively see in the dark.

These navigators also knew the routes they travelled like the backs of their hands: some even drew outlines of the nearby mountains into their log books so that at night the mountain outlines, sometimes dimly visible against the night sky, would help them pinpoint their location. “Those old timers were real ‘seamen’ because they were outside on the bridge in all weathers and understood the elements,” says David Young, long-time skipper of the Uchuck III, the freight/passenger ship that still plies the west coast out of Gold River. He also points out that when travelling at night, or in fog, all lights on the bridges of coastal steamers, save for the small light in the binnacle, remained unlit. No one smoked on the bridge, for even the light from a cigarette tip might diminish the skipper’s or helmsman’s view.

Like a blind person with a cane, the whole secret of making way in fog depended on sound. Steam engines like the Princess Maquinna’s made far less noise than modern diesel engines, giving captains a far greater ability to hear what they needed to hear. They knew exactly how to listen, with a watch in their hands. Knowing sound travels at the rate of 1,126 ft (343 m) per second or about 5.5 seconds per mile (3 seconds per km), they would sound the ship’s whistle and wait for an echo. If the blast of the ship’s whistle took 11 seconds for the echo to return from the land, they knew that whatever object the sound echoed back from would be a mile (1.6 km) away—5.5 seconds to reach shore and the same again to return. The skippers also knew the different sounds echoes made when they bounced back from the land. “They knew that a long sandy spit gives an echo with a distinct hiss, a rocky cliff gives a very clear echo, thick forest produces a muffled echo, and where there is a little island off a head [headland] you’ll get a double echo,”¹⁷⁹ commented veteran CPR captain Archibald Phelps. Margaret Horsfield, in Voices from the Sound, records what another old hand, Captain W.J. Boyce, wrote in a 1923 article about the primary requirement for navigating the fog, which is:

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“a thorough mental photograph of the coast on the course the ship is taking. As the vessel proceeds the navigator must picture the shore as it slips by. Perhaps he cannot see further than the ship’s bow with his eyes. But with his ears he is seeing everything necessary within a couple of miles. At his hand he has the steam siren.” He describes in detail how the echoes change as the land around changes, that “a two-second echo return from abaft the beam” means that the channel is open ahead and he has passed the nearest point of land; or that when the echoes become “splendidly equalized” he is right in the middle of a narrow channel. Yet echoes can also be confusing; the shores can send back unwelcome and unexpected sounds, especially in narrow inlets, where sound bounces back and forth. For coastal captains, however, nothing challenged them more than thick blinding snow, for in such conditions sound is muffled, and  the echoes can’t speak at all.¹⁸⁰

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Captain Gillam knew well the dangers of navigating in snow. In January 1911, while skippering the Tees on her way south from Ucluelet across Barkley Sound, the vessel hit Gowlland Islet at night during a heavy snowstorm. As a safety precaution, he off-loaded all of his passengers by lifeboat to the whaling station at Sechart for the night. No one suffered any injuries but the ship’s bow suffered a dent that had to be repaired when the ship returned to Victoria.

In skippering both the Tees and the Maquinna Captain Gillam gained a breadth of experience that served him well as he navigated the west coast. As “Old Timer” wrote in a 1955 article in the Western Advocate: “One foggy day after he slowly and silently nosed the Maquinna into Refuge Cove, a tricky and narrow entrance, a passenger remarked to him at dinner ‘My, we went into that place very quietly.’ The captain agreed, saying ‘I was waiting for those dogs to bark in order to get my bearings.’”¹⁸¹ A good captain knew all the sounds to expect: roosters, chickens, dogs, as well as whistle buoys, and sounds from creeks and gravel beaches. “Captain Gillam’s ability to navigate in fog was legendary, not only on the west coast but elsewhere. Once when the Maquinna travelled to Vancouver, English Bay lay enveloped in thick fog and crowded with vessels at anchor, none of them daring to move—not even the large Empress ships with local pilots on board—Gillam and the Maquinna arrived precisely on time, entirely untroubled by the fog. One of the pilots wryly said to him afterwards, ‘Did you have to do that to us?’”¹⁸²

The Maquinna’s southbound trip takes her back to some of the places she stopped at on her northern journey. On our 1924 trip she stops again at Chamiss Bay, picking up loggers going to the bright lights and beer parlours of the city where, as Ian Tyson would sing decades later in his song “Summer Wages,” “... the dreams of a season are all spilled down on the floor.”¹⁸³ Many of them will likely return to Chamiss Bay, or to other logging camps, within a week or two having blown all of their hard-earned money in the city.

As she continues south, the Maquinna stops at Cachalot, where she loads whale oil and ground bone meal for trans-shipment out of Victoria. Passengers will board at Nootka Cannery, and skid loads of canned salmon will be swung into the hold. At Ahousaht she will load shingles and cut lumber from the Gibsons’ sawmill as well as passengers heading south. Here too, in late summer and early fall, whole families of Ahousaht people will begin the first stage of their annual journey to the hops fields of Puyallup County in Washington State, where they will pick that important crop used for making beer. From Clayoquot and Tofino she will welcome passengers, and maybe those already aboard will disembark for an impromptu dance at Tofino’s community hall, particularly if a wedding is taking place. Later the honeymooners will join the ship for their first night as a married couple. At Ucluelet she will pick up more passengers as well as packages of seeds and cuttings from George Fraser’s garden being shipped to his customers far and wide. Port Alberni will see her load lumber, coal and passengers, and at Kildonan cases of salmon and barrels of pilchard oil will be lowered into the hold. Bamfield brings the possibility of another dance at the telegraph station, while the coal and lumber, loaded in Port Alberni, will be off-loaded. At Port Renfrew yet more passengers will join the ship for the short hop to Victoria. The Maquinna only stops “as required” as it steams southward, based on requests made on the journey north and standing orders for collection of cargo, while passing places that offer her “no trade.”

Going south she might carry expectant mothers heading to Victoria to have their babies, as was common on the coast in those days; or people with medical issues who need hospital treatment in Tofino, Port Alberni or Victoria. Whatever the needs of the people of the west coast, the Maquinna, her captain and crew dealt with any and all eventualities.

The Maquinna usually arrives back in Victoria in the early morning, and the crew immediately begins off-loading the cargo holds. The passengers, having cleared their cabins, descend the gangway and disperse through the terminal, heading out onto Belleville Street. The seas of the west coast lie behind them, and the tourists among them will talk about the week-long trip for the rest of their lives.

Once she is off-loaded, the crew immediately begins preparing the ship for her next week-long journey, loading food for the dining room, filling the bunkers with oil, sending the laundry to be cleaned and picking up fresh. The deck crew will begin loading the ship’s holds with a host of orders for westcoasters that will have been gathering in the CPR’s Belleville Street warehouse. Among the items will be grocery orders from the Woodward’s store in Vancouver that have been brought across the Strait of Georgia to Victoria on the CPR ships that serve those routes (occasionally, the Maquinna would make a run to Vancouver herself to pick up goods, most likely at night so as not to disturb her timetable). Items ordered from the Eaton’s catalogue will also be waiting to be loaded, as well as a host of other materials needed by logging outfits, miners, fishermen, boat builders and machinists.

Preparations will continue all day at the busy dock, and in the evening of the following day new passengers will begin arriving, keen to be aboard before the ship sails at 11 p.m. Then the Maquinna will set out on another west coast run, continuing the seemingly never-ending cycle of travel up and down the coast, providing the service essential to so many westcoasters in their isolated communities.