Earlier this year, Harbour Publishing reached out to me with this message:

Happy New Year!  Are you interested in a review copy of The Best Loved Boat: The Princess Maquinna by Ian Kennedy?

Built in 1913, the Canadian Pacific Railway’s ship Princess Maquinna steamed along the rugged west coast of Vancouver Island in summer and winter, calm weather and storms, for over forty years, and has become one of the most beloved boats in BC’s maritime history. The book has been on the BC Bestseller List since publication!

I said, yes, and by the time I finally interviewed Ian at his Comox Valley home mid-March 2024, the book was still sitting at number one on the bestseller list. Not surprisingly, Ian has had a fair share of media attention. (See links below to other interviews.) I don’t want to repeat what’s already out there. And you probably don’t need my recommendation to figure that all these sales mean the book is worth buying. (It is!)

Instead, I decided to ask Ian about the research process for the book. This is not just for my own selfish interest as a writer: there is something fascinating, whoever you are, about pulling away the veil of a well-researched book, to see its inner workings.

I sat across from Ian while his living room’s towering bookshelves loomed over us. His casual reading material—various history tomes—stared down at me as I attempted to ask some coherent questions.

Dave: Why did you want to tell the story of Maquinna?

Ian: Well, it grew out of this book here. [The book Ian picks up off his coffee table is Tofino and Clayoquot Sound: A History.] My coauthor and I wrote this. She and I did a whale of a lot of research in that book. And one of the things we covered was boats. And one of the boats, the main boat, was the Princess Maquinna. And so, we had a fair bit of material on Maquinna. And after that book came out in 2014, I thought I could do a Maquinna story.

It seemed like an interesting story because here was this ship that went from Victoria to Quatsino three times a month, 1500-kilometer round trip, and stopped at all these communities along the way.

I was asked on a CBC interview one time, “why is this boat so important?” I said, “Well, any boat that goes up and down the graveyard of the Pacific for 39 years and doesn’t come to grief, it says something about the crew, and it says something about the boat.”

Dave: From that initial kernel, what did the process look like to grow your research?

Ian: A lot of hours in the archives in Victoria, finding articles or anything that was ever written about it. They’re very good down there. I hired a researcher. I couldn’t be there all the time. You work out the costs to stay down there, to drive down, to spend the day and eat, that sort of thing. You’re better off sometimes to hire one of the researchers who knows where to go and get this stuff. Boom, they go get it, photocopy it.

Dave: Where else to the research take you?

Ian: There are a lot of books. Bob Turner wrote a lot of books about the princess boats. Another one by Kaye Lamb, which is on the princess boats as well. Then I interviewed a lot of people who had been on it. They were still alive at the beginning of the process. A few good quotes out of people always helps enliven the thing.

Dave: Any memorable interviews in your research?

Ian: Yeah, I was never able to be on the boat. It was 1952 when it went off the schedule. So, I relied on other people to tell me about it. There was a guy out in Tofino named Bob Wingen who had built boats himself. His father and he built fish boats. They were very famous. And he told me yarns about the Maquinna because people who lived in Tofino were always on that boat. They were up and down, up and down the coast because there was no road out there in those days.

And another guy named Ron MacLeod was very good. He had been born and raised in Tofino and he was a good writer. He actually had written memoirs and was pretty good to give me all that stuff. We used them in that book [Tofino and Clayoquot] and the bits about the Maquinna I used them in the Maquinna book.

Dave: Following the Maquinna’s journey gave you a chance to dive into these stories up and down the coast. Where did the idea to make the book follow a journey come from?

Ian: Well, when I was in the middle of doing the research, I was trying to think about how I was going to hold all this together. The boat was on the water for 40 years. How do you connect the events that happened over 40 years?

I have a very good friend who’s an author who lives here in the Valley, and he’s written a lot—he’s a novel writer. I had coffee with him, and I said, how am I going to hold this thing together?

He said, well, what you do is create a family and have them arrive in say, Tofino or Ucluelet or Quatsino and set up themselves up. The dad goes to the First World War and the son goes to the second. And the Maquinna would tie it together.

I thought, thanks very much for the insight. But then I came home, and I thought, that’s what novelists do. That’s not what I do. That’s moving into a different genre, which I’m not really familiar with, so that didn’t work.

But I thought, 1913 was its first run. So, ten years later and the kinks had run out. It had a good captain, Captain Gillam at the time, a very famous man on the coast. I thought, okay, I’ll make it 1924 and start from Victoria and stop on all these little places.

Places like Port Renfrew. Then you have to look up the history of Port Renfrew. What the hell was everybody doing there? Then Clo-oose had a very interesting history that I didn’t know much about.

One problem was that I wanted to do the gold rush in Zeballos, but that didn’t happen until the 1930s. So suddenly I had to put a paragraph in there saying, look, we’re going to take a reroute here. We’re not going to follow the path she would have taken in 1924. We’re going to pretend it’s 1930 and we’re going to go up to Zeballos.

As you look up these places like Holberg, for example, you say what the heck is in Holberg? If you read enough about it, you eventually link up there was a Danish gardener who lived up there and had a very famous garden.

You’d be surprised about some of these little communities. The Coal Harbor one was interesting because there was a guy there that was reputed to be the leader of the Quantrill Raiders in the American Civil War, which was a great story. But then I have to say that that’s the local story. It’s not true because he’s actually buried in Louisville, Kentucky. There was an article about it in the Times Colonist.

When you’re writing, you can work your way around these things to make sure you get it in because it makes a good story. People want to hear things that are interesting. Good stories like that, you don’t want to leave them out.

Dave: Thanks, Ian!

Other interviews:

The BC Review

The BC Review Interview Series

Times Colonist

CBC

I spoke with Barry Gough about his new book the morning after finishing the 300-or-so-page hardcover. While the book spans only a blink of Vancouver Island history, it leaves you with much to dwell on while you panic to think of questions to ask its author.

My challenge for our interview rested on which questions to pull from a roster of potential angles: Blanshard’s not-so-humble origins; the unfortunate circumstances of his short, three-year governorship; the impact he left on the Island besides a Victoria street name (spoiler: not much of one, it turns out); or whether he was one of these old-timey white dudes we’d sooner forget anyways.

I didn’t ask an in-depth question. Instead, I zoomed out and asked Gough why he chose to write about the now largely forgotten figure. The conversation led down a path to something still topical in Victoria today—real estate. (And guess what, the prospects of home ownership were just as depressing for the average person then too.)

For anyone interested in early settler Vancouver Island history, this book is indispensable. You can purchase at your locally owned bookstore or at the publisher’s website here. (I don’t get paid for recommending books, just sleep better at night.)

Enjoy!

Dave: Why did you choose to write a book about Blanshard?

Barry: Blanshard was always a ghostly figure, haunting the margins of Vancouver Island's early history. And I've always thought that so much can be told by secondary figures or even tertiary figures that dance around the edges of any great story.

It's all very well for students of history to continue to write another biography of James Douglas or in the history of the American West to do another book on Lewis and Clark, just as an example. But sometimes these secondary figures are more exciting to write about because they're new and they can also tell us something about the primary characters. And I think the revelatory aspect of this book is it shows how clearly James Douglas was into the Hudson Bay Company project at the expense of the colonization.

And I've demonstrated beyond a shadow of doubt the duplicity of the Hudson's Bay Company in accepting the Charter of Grant, which was designed to populate Vancouver Island with British colonists. But James Douglas’s policies and that of his bosses, more particularly George Simpson, The Little Emperor, and his boss, Sir John Pelly, who was the head of the corporation in London, were to look after stockholders’ interests. And those stockholders’ interests were to keep selling furs and engage in the mercantile trades here—selling lumber, selling fish, selling wheat, engaging in the primary trades that the Hudson’s Bay Company had developed so much.

Now the Hudson’s Bay Company was under change at this time, as I explain. They were, first of all, of course, defending their fur realm of the north, which was New Caledonia on the mainland. But they were also engaging in this diversification of their trade. They were getting into shipping, they were getting into selling wheat to the Russians, trading and exchanging gold to California, servicing whaling ships that needed provisions, etc. So, this is a marvelous company in terms of its adaptability, but the least of their interests, as I've disclosed, was colonization and settling of Britons here.

So that's a very good first question to start with. Why Blanshard? Well, he's the secondary figure. We can see the unfolding world through his eyes. We can see all the difficulties of the times. We get an indication of how the Americans were closing the border, seizing British ships, fining British traders, and upsetting attempts to take timber from the American side of the border. And from his point of view, we see the developments that occur at Fort Rupert [miners’ strikes and the Nahwitti War.] We see that Douglas may not have chosen the best place for the mercantile activities to develop on Vancouver Island.

Dave: At Fort Victoria?

Barry: Yes, at Fort Victoria in Camosun Harbor. Blanshard would have preferred Esquimalt, which is a far better harbour. We also see how, because the Hudson’s Bay Company dominates all the metropolitan land of Victoria, which is now the city of Victoria, James Douglas steers all the private, independent settlers to the margins.

He steers them to Sooke, where the Captain Grant sets up. He steers them to Metchosin, where James Cooper and Thomas Blinkhorn have properties. And, as one of my readers so astutely pointed out, you can see now how these settlements in and around Victoria are not at the center of gravity, so to speak. Esquimalt, Metchosin, Sooke, these are the places where the other minor communities have developed, and they are a direct result of the policies of Douglas to steer away the independent settlers and meanwhile to develop the lands in and around Fort Victoria.

Victoria becomes the first retirement center of the old Hudson’s Bay Company traders. John Tod comes first. William Henry McNeill settles in. Roderick Finlayson, William Fraser Tolmie, John Work. They all end up with these massive properties as of retirement, at least 100 acres, sometimes 400 acres. And when the Hudson's Bay Company relinquishes all these lands to these people and it goes through the privatization process, these are the people who are able to profit mightily from their own investments in the land.

So, I wouldn't say there's skullduggery here. I think it's the natural way of real estate law. That if you acquire a lot of land, you develop it. Then then you subdivide and sell off portions of it to your own benefit.

Dave: These guys made sure they were in the right place at the right time and able to take advantage of their situation as landowners?

Barry: Right from the beginning. That's absolutely correct. They were they were able to lay down their markers and even the certain jurisdictions went to these people. So, it's a fascinating real estate history indeed.

Dave: Thanks, Barry!

Barry Gough is one of Canada’s premier historians and biographers. His insightful research and lucid writing spanning five decades have earned him high distinction. Among his awards are the Canadian Historical Association’s Clio Prize, the Maritime Foundation’s Mountbatten Award, the Washington Historical Society’s Robert Gray Medal, the Alcala Galiano Medal and the Keith Matthews Award. In 2022, he was awarded the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing for Possessing Meares Island. He is a Fellow of the Society for the History of Discoveries. He lives in Victoria, BC.

About The Curious Passage of Richard Blanshard: Gough brings a defining era of Pacific Northwest history into focus in this biography of Richard Blanshard, the first governor of Vancouver Island—illuminating with intriguing detail the genesis and early days of Canada’s westernmost province.

Early one wintry day in March 1850, after seven weary weeks out of sight of land, a well-dressed Londoner, a bachelor aged thirty-two, stood at the ship’s rail taking in the immensity of the unfolding scene. From Her Britannic Majesty’s paddlewheel sloop-of-war Driver, steadily thumping forth on Imperial purpose, all that Richard Blanshard could make out to port, in reflected purple light upon the northern side, was a forested, rock-clad island rising to considerable height. Vancouver’s Island they called it in those far-off days. This was his destination.

Richard Blanshard was governor of the young colony for three short, unhappy years—only one and a half of which were spent in the colony itself. From the very beginning he was at odds with the vastly influential Hudson’s Bay Company, run by its Chief Factor James Douglas, who succeeded Blanshard as governor of the colony of Vancouver Island and later became the first governor of the colony of British Columbia. While James Douglas is remembered, for better or worse, as a founding father of British Columbia, Richard Blanshard’s name is now largely forgotten, despite his vitally important role in warning London of American cross-border aggressions, including a planned takeover of Haida Gwaii. However, his failures highlight the fascinating struggles of the time—the supreme influence of commerce, the disparity between expectations and reality, and the bewildering collision of European and Pacific Northwest culture.

And here’s a link to a review of Gough’s book on the British Columbia Review by someone much smarter than me.

Frances and Captain Charles Barkley navigated the Imperial Eagle into Nootka Sound in June 1787. The wife, husband, and crew sailed across the globe through storms and pirate-infested waters to procure a seemingly humble item—sea otter pelts. These fetched astronomical prices in China, and, as luck would have it, the Imperial Eagle was the first trading vessel to arrive that season. This gave them first choice of pelts and an upper hand in bargaining, but the luck did not end there.

They anchored in Yuquot (Friendly Cove). “A canoe,” writes Cathy Converse in Frances Barkley Eighteenth-century Seafarer, “came alongside paddled by a man that was clothed in a greasy sea otter skin; he was disgustingly dirty.” Dr. John Mackay was a surgeon and “he then proceeded to tell us his story, which I will relay as it was extraordinary.” Sick with scurvy on a European vessel the year previous, he requested to be left ashore to recover. In that time he’d been treated well by Maquinna, the Chief of the Mowachaht tribe. But upon breaking some protocol, he was exiled from the community and survived on his own until the Barkley’s arrived. Once aboard he divulged information to help the Barkley’s procure more furs than they could have hoped to on their own.

After loading furs the Barkleys sailed south and mapped what would become known to Europeans as Barkley Sound. Islanders will recognize the name, but the name Frances Barkley is less recognized. Upon marriage she refused to wait at home while Captain Barkley sailed the world. She and her husband circumnavigated the globe while they experienced the ebbs and flow of life.

Converse shares this amazing woman’s adventures in a short and entertaining 120-page tale. The book is split into two parts and 27 chapters plus an epilogue, introduction, conclusion, and prologue. That means some of the chapters are brief (Chapter 25 is just one page long). The structure feels like a journal, and this, I suspect, is on purpose.

The story is told in first-person perspective of Frances and reads like engaging fiction, adding to the journal-like feel. This style of creative non-fiction pulls from in-depth research (the sources list is long and, if you’ve read anything else by Converse, it’s what you’d expect) and imagination. Good creative non-fiction is about making the most of what you have. Converse’s work successfully rides the edge between non-fiction and fiction in an enthralling historical journey.

A standout scene waits near the beginning and illuminates the Converse’s ability to pull the reader into the story: Frances’s second time on a ship was a voyage around the globe. Three days out she, “met her first challenge at sea.” Captain Barkley sent Frances to her cabin and told her they were in for some “very bad weather. Very quickly the seas steepened, and the wind howled, causing the ship to groan and screech. Together with the clanking of the chain pumps, it all made for a thunderous timbre that was deafening. Our grand ship suddenly seemed so small set against the breadth and ferocity of the ocean.”

Cathy Converse is a best-selling author who has been writing for over thirty years. She has authored, co-authored, and co-edited seven books, many magazine cover stories, academic journal articles, and technical manuals. Her book, Following the Curve of Time: The Legendary M. Wylie Blanchet, was shortlisted for the BC Book Prizes’ Bill Duthie Booksellers’ Choice Award in 2009, and Against the Current received an Honourable Mention for the Lieutenant Governor’s Medal for Historical Writing. Cathy is a former chair of social sciences, a faculty member in the Department of Sociology, and a founder of the women’s studies curriculum and ancillary programs at Camosun College.

The book is a part of the Amazing Stories collection. According to the Heritage House website, the series consist of “interesting books on hundreds of different topics.” The quick tales are “about animals, gold hunters, historical figures, lawmakers, shipwrecks, true crime, Canadian history, and many other subjects” and they’re accessible writing means suitability for any adult reader but also middle-grade and school use.

Besides North America’s west coast, the book details the Barkley’s other aptly categorized amazing adventures around the globe. Though, these could be better described as misadventures. Heartbreak, and not luck, were the norm for the Barkleys. So, while the book reads like fiction, the story possesses the realities of true life. Don’t expect a happy ending.

The maps and historical drawings in the book help give context to where the couple travelled. They most important map, the one showing the Barkley’s two voyages, is dedicated its own page and read by flipping the book 90 degrees. Unless you’re equipped with a magnifying glass, you might find it difficult to decipher the other maps. My only minor criticism for the book is that these maps could have been larger to aid in the geographical understanding of the voyages.

Before leaving the west coast of North America, Captain Barkley made a crude map of Barkley Sound. The map shows a safe anchorage, a useful tidbit for any mariner. As that information was useful to the sailor so is this review to the reader. If you’re looking for safe harbour for your hard-earned booty, Cathy Converse’s Frances Barkley Eighteenth-century Seafarer is a solid choice.

Edmonton: NeWest Press, 2022
$24.95  /  9781774390511

This review was also published in the British Columbia Review

Kathryn Willcock’s rustic childhood summers spent in a remote British Columbia logging camp “with endless forests, a rugged coastline, and not much else,” provide the staple ingredients for this memoir’s humorous and candid collection of stories, even if far away from civilization.

Told partly through the perspective of an adult looking back through a child’s eyes, Up The Coast delves into a child’s life in a logging camp, compares rural living with the glamour of American yachts en route to Alaska, details loggers’ relationship with an unforgiving landscape, illustrates one family’s struggle to make ends meet, and lots more.

As Willcock provides no explicit mention of what she hopes readers will take from the book, a reader could take the small snippet in the front matter as a clue to her aspirations: “My father’s logging camp was situated on the shores of one the most spectacular fjords in the world. I loved going there for the freedom and the beauty and sitting around the kitchen table at night with my family, telling stories by the light of a kerosene lamp.” You may find, as I did, the memoir seems a place for Willcock to gather folklores — from the family and community — largely in the form of rhozzums, short humorous tales, often about local characters.

No mention of previously published work adorns her rather short profile on the publisher’s website, which may surprise you — the prose breathes with confidence. While understanding an artist can be important for gaining insight into the work, you can be content to let this memoir do the talking. And it speaks well.

To establish the setting, a short first chapter features eight-year-old Willcock flying into camp. After which, the family saga begins with her father, John Willcock, arriving decades earlier to the same fjord, the waterfall-clad Bute Inlet which thrusts 75 km into the mainland northeast of Campbell River. In 1935 the fourteen-year-old North Bay, Ontario, emigrant landed alone, carrying only a desire to get hired on in a logging camp.

Chapters Two to Four detail how John Willcock eventually started his own logging outfit, met Kathryn’s mother, and stared a family. In Chapter Five and succeeding chapters, Kathryn and her two sisters, along with the other loggers’ children, were set loose to play “in an area now considered one of the best places on earth for viewing grizzlies.”

This setting is ripe for compelling stories, and Willcock knows how to make the most of it by putting storytelling first, as opposed to exact factual account. Being exact, she says, “would have left the reader feeling as if they were listening to someone recount amusing tales about every cat they had owned.”

Each of the book’s ten chapters contain collections of stories themed around the chapter’s title, and each story within those collections varies in length from two to six pages. Not counting the initial in media res beginning, the stories arrive chronologically, and the book is best enjoyed cover to cover.

Favourite characters from previous chapters reappear throughout. Like Dave who was a drunk but a good camp cook (a rare thing), so they kept him around — even though he guzzled all the vanilla extract. And Charlie Joe who “always had tales to tell and plenty of advice to hand out. After all (he maintained) he was one hundred and eight years old and he knew a thing or two. One of his favourite stories was about the time he saw Christopher Columbus sailing through the Yucultas.”

The first three quarters of the book offers light-hearted stories full of straight-talking humour. Throughout Willcock uses jokes that surprise the reader at the end of sentences, for example: “At low tide, we ran and cartwheeled on the vast expanse of sand fanning out from the mouth of the river, built roadways and spillways, and chased each other with dead salmon.”

These funny moments may make you wonder why the book’s blurb failed to mention the humour. In fact, my only quibble with the book is not the book’s contents, but the back cover. To be fair, the book is about a lot of things, and adequately capturing the work’s essence in a cover blurb is no easy task. Still, the promise of stories that “pour off the page like warm syrup on a stack of cookhouse hotcakes” seems disconnected and toned down from the stories’ oddball spirit. Especially when they feature images that are striking and somewhat zany: banana slugs on toothbrushes, cats eating chihuahuas, and drying starfish in an oven (with pungent consequences).

The memoir’s final quarter (or less) is where the harder-hitting stories live. These stories are about murder, drownings, gangsters, and candid moments with her father, who developed deafness in his later years: “Dad became socially awkward and, frankly, an embarrassment to me and my sisters.” Here, the laughs tastefully fade away to let the reader soak in morality and some of life’s unfortunate realities.

Is this book worth the purchase? Absolutely. Yes, it’s another memoir about logging in BC, but the reader is skilfully guided with humour. The ability to write humour well is a rare skill, and if you were humming and hawing over whether you want to read this memoir or another coastal memoir, this book would be the clear choice.

Harbour Publishing
ISBN: 9781550179262
Paperback / softback
5.5 in x 8.5 in - 256 pp
Publication Date: 05/03/2022

This review was also published in the British Columbia Review.

Flip over a copy of One Inch from Disaster and you’ll see a picture of a shirtless Kelly Randall (Zeus) Ricketts glancing back at the camera, biceps flexed, wielding a nail gun. While not your typical author photo, it does much to set the tone for this rambunctious memoir set in British Columbia.

The collection of 44 stories in this 256-page paperback evolved from “The Club,” a long-standing story-telling custom between the wolfdog-owning Ricketts and his nine children who would listen to his life stories at bedtime.

The blurb on the back jacket explains how Ricketts “has tried his hand at an astonishing array of occupations, from logging to mining to wrangling horses to performing country music.” He’s a self-proclaimed “enthusiastic bear hunter” and was a boxer and boxing coach spanning four decades. These occupations and hobbies, mixed with Ricketts’s personality, provide a lively source for stories.

The shortest story is just two pages long and the average just over five, and they all stand alone — the order you read them in has no effect on understanding any of the others.

In the introduction, Ricketts says he hopes these stories “will bring you entertainment and enlightenment, and possibly even a sense of confederacy on things you too may have experienced.”

Does he succeed in providing these three aspects: entertainment, enlightenment, and confederacy? I’ll get to that. But first, I want to address Ricketts as a character, because as with most stories, the strength of the main character has the greatest influence on whether you’re going to enjoy it.

While glimpses of humility and “wry self deprecation” as promised in the book’s description pop up here and there, almost all of Rickett’s stories feature what I perceived as a heavy dose of embellishment that invariably casts him as the hero, star, or champion.

For example, after a serious logging accident in “One Load to Go” a doctor told Ricketts that the trauma he suffered “would have killed almost anyone else who had been through a similar accident” and in “Jump or Die” a coast guard told Ricketts that his “thirty-two hectares of waterfront was the most beautiful place on the whole west coast of British Columbia.”

To be sure, this braggadocio is part of his charm — he does things his own way. Modesty though? Nope. You may want to take it with a grain of salt.

Do the stories entertain? While there is a comfort in the familiarity, you’ve likely heard similar tales of adventures and mishaps before (probably over beers). That said, there are moments of deeper storytelling that this reader finds compelling like “The Flying Apple Crate” where a young Ricketts imagined flying away from his childhood problems on his homemade airplane. For the most part, however, the memoir lacks a desire to dig at deeper, universal understanding and is more about glimpsing harrowing moments without much insight or reflection.

This is especially true with the collection’s first story entitled “Cry Wolf,” a hunting story where Ricketts finds himself deep in the forest and surround by a pack of growling and yipping wolves. “Any moment,” writes Ricketts, “I expected to see the timber release the pack of demons with slashing fangs ready to rip and tear the flesh from my still-living carcass. The terror I felt, in an instant, turned to anger mixed with fear. I screamed at the unseen horde, ‘Come and get me! I’ll kill you all!’”

Any enlightenment you might glean from these pages could take both meanings of the word. The first meaning contains a sense of giving greater knowledge about a subject or situation. In this sense you will sample Ricketts’s varied and interesting occupations and hobbies in locations across the province and may gain some insight into how some folks eek out a living and spend their free time here.

The other meaning of the word contains a sense of providing spiritual knowledge or insight. As a devote Christian, Ricketts provides a small dose of this as well. For example, in the story “Miracle Baby” he writes, “I laid my hands on her little head and pleaded that our Heavenly Father would give our baby back to us, by the power of the holy priesthood and in the name of Jesus Christ.”

Would some find a sense of confederacy, that is, be in a league of common experience with him in these pages? I have fished some of the same rivers, visited some of the same places, and had comparable close calls to Ricketts (though in different decades), so I can speak for myself, anyways.

My sense varied. In stories like “Man, That’s Got to Hurt” Ricketts repeatedly put himself in the path of a stubborn wind fallen tree he was pulling off the road with a truck, and I thought “what was he thinking?” To be fair he does admit when he made mistakes: “My stubbornness has been a great help to me in overcoming some difficult challenges, but sometimes it can also be my downfall.” Other times I recognized where I’d made similar blunders or had the same self-doubts. For anyone else who has outdoor hobbies and works blue collar jobs, you may find the same.

The memoir’s macho content means the audience is decidedly male. The short, straightforward stories would appeal to the casual reader or someone with a couple of minutes to spare away from a device. Tourists or others unfamiliar with the West Coast would find it an escape into rural life in BC. Maybe it sits on the coffee table or in the bathroom at an Airbnb. This book could also be nostalgic for those who grew up in BC around the same time as Ricketts, or anyone looking for a light read.

Does this sound like you or someone you know? Great. Buy it. If you’re looking for a deeper read rife with metaphors and subtleties, you might want to look elsewhere.

This review was also published in The Canadian Journal of Native Studies.

People that knew Wilson Duff called him a genius. He had a mathematical mind and a poetic one. Consequently, his life, and by extension this biography written by Robin Fisher, reveals a mosaic of life-long learning.

Throughout Fisher’s 360-page odyssey you will glimpse depression-era Vancouver; examine air navigation and the mental strains of war; witness the evolution of anthropological studies; discover the history and theory of Northwest Coast Indigenous art; and be amazed at how Duff was a part of it all in his own, unique way.

Wilson’s daughter, Marine Duff, wanted someone to tell her father’s story in full to “replace the fiction and academic gossip” out there. Fisher agreed to take on the book because, “I simply think this is a story that needs to be told.” I agree with him here. Duff’s life (1925-1976) is full of rich intrigue in writings that influenced a generation of anthropologists, including Fisher himself.

Robin Fisher is the author of Contact and Conflict: Indian-European Relations in British Columbia, 1774-1890, one of the first BC books to provide an extensive analysis of Indigenous-settler history. The book was first published in 1977 by UBC Press and is one of the most successful academic titles in the province. That book arose from Fisher’s PhD dissertation at UBC where Duff was his supervisor. After seeing Duff’s comments on a paper, he realised Duff’s mind “was going in directions different than anyone else in the room.”

Fisher dedicated Contact and Conflict to Duff because he had such a huge influence on his thinking. Contact and Conflict covers up to the year 1890, and some have asked Fisher whether he would continue the history in a second volume. This biography, says Fisher, “might be seen to be a partial answer to that question.” However, reading Contact and Conflict is not a prerequisite to understanding Duff’s biography.

Through a concise and clear writing style, Fisher illuminates one of the great mysteries in this book: why did Wilson Duff take his own life? (One other mystery is the “Final Exam” which Fisher explains in detail, but I won’t spoil here.) We know from the beginning how his life will end, so, as a reader, I hung onto any mention of Duff’s mental state. Though that is only one aspect of this multifaceted story, it is ever lurking in the background.

The biography follows Duff’s life milestones in a neat chronological thread with chapter titles like Vancouver Boyhood, Learning Anthropology, Restoring Totem Poles that clearly tell the reader what to expect. The more obscure chapter titles like I, the Navigator and Negative Spaces offer some of the book’s most unexpected moments. The former is a glimpse at WWII Canadian bomber crews in India, where Duff lived on a base and attacked Japanese positions in Southeast Asia. As a squadron lead navigator on a Lancaster bomber, Duff was not only responsible for getting his plane over enemy territory and back, but all the planes in his squadron—he was 19 years old.

After the war, Duff enrolled at UBC where, in parallel with many students’ trajectory through university, he ended up with a degree in a completely different field than he had anticipated from the start. With his analytic and creative mind, he fell in love with the ethnographic side of anthropology.

After achieving a master’s degree in 1950, Duff became a permanent employee of the BC Provincial Museum. Though not his job title, at only 25 years old, he was effectively the provincial anthropologist. Fisher explains that over the ensuing years, Duff worked closely with various First Nations, becoming “a bridge between two cultural islands separated by a sea of ignorance.”

It’s important to note that Duff’s beliefs were often ahead of the time. Fisher says, during the mid-20th century, a time when Indigenous people “were not encouraged to speak and were seldom heard by settler society, Wilson was listening.” In the decades before this time, settler ignorance led to private collectors and museums stealing and acquiring totem poles and other artworks from First Nations across the Pacific Northwest, leaving little work remaining in communities. Duff sought permission from various First Nation communities to preserve what remained by taking it back to Victoria. Fisher says, “He took some poles down so that many could rise again.”

And this is where things get a little messy. Through today’s lens, much of Duff’s work is seen as cultural appropriation. And even back then, Duff could see how taking these artworks and putting settler meaning on them was troublesome. These subtleties in the complicated history between Indigenous Peoples and settlers are part of what makes this book so great. Through Duff, Fisher is able to show the many sides to our shared history—the good and the bad.

For his work preserving totem poles, Duff was given the Haida name gwaaygu7anhlan. The name belonged to Albert Edward Edenshaw, a Haida artist whom Duff, later in life, believed he had a close connection to.

Wilson Duff spent 15 years as the provincial anthropologist. However, all of his success and hard work came at the cost of his family life. And tensions became exacerbated when the family uprooted to move across the Salish Sea when he got a teaching gig at UBC. Students at UBC loved his teaching methods. According to Fisher, “it seems as though a whole generation of students took Wilson’s Anthropology 301.” Duff assigned readings to his students like Alan Fry’s How a People Die, a novel based on the forced relocation of the Gwa’sala-‘Nakwaxda’xw Peoples. I wrote about a ‘Nakwaxda’xw hereditary chief’s efforts to revitalize almost lost traditions here.

Fisher argues that Wilson Duff surpassed the ordinary range of human experience in his analyzing of Northwest Coast art, especially the art of his namesake, Albert Edenshaw. He seemed to transcend into a state of mind where very few could reach. However, there was a dark side, as Fisher points out, “As he was consumed by a burst of highly creative thinking about meaning in Haida art, Wilson was slipping through the formlines into negative spaces.” The end of the book features a suicide, and that is naturally disturbing, but Fisher’s cause and effect explanation to what led to it takes an unexpected turn at the end.

This book is well worth the purchase. It’s a story well told that carries us through the deep waters of Wilson Duff’s mind where we stay only on the surface yet can glimpse down and understand these waters are bottomless.

Touchwood Editions, 2020

First Edition; 272 pages; $22.00

ISBN: 197366909

Laced with tenderness and humour, Grant Buday’s Orphans of Empire weaves three mid-nineteenth century frontier stories into a gritty and desolate tale of British Columbia’s lesser-known history.

The trio of story threads span three decades beginning with Moody who eventually establishes Brighton Beach on Burrard inlet. Although the three protagonists never meet, their shuffled story threads speak to one another in proximity.

Most of the narrative takes place on the Mainland, but the city of Victoria plays enough of a starring role to include it on this site.

The Queen city is where Moody, the book’s only real-life historical main character, meets with Sir James Douglas after first arriving from England via the Panama Canal.

Moody’s intricacies—a desire to please his deceased father, and by extension Governor Douglas, mixed with an inferiority complex—parallels those of the burgeoning colony, a place on the far reaches of the world with one foot back in the fatherland and the other in BC where expectations are high, and resources limited.

The narrative of Buday’s second protagonist, Popo, is cast in first-person which forces the reader to live her oppression (as a victim of both racism and sexism) even as she perseveres against those who see her as their servant.

In contrast to Moody’s conversations, hers show us a much less elite and rarefied world. Her desire to be in charge clashes with societal expectations, providing a tension-rich narrative and leaving the modern reader to consider what has—and hasn’t—changed today.

As a love-struck eccentric and dead-body buff, the third protagonist, Fannin, faces oppression of his own, which he confronts with similar bravado and tenacity. His obsessions hurtle the story forward and will invest you in his tale of love and self-discovery.

Popo and Fannin represent the lower rungs of society while Moody is the aristocrat and British subject who believes in the Empire but endures “the now familiar ache of a deep-seated doubt” about his contemporaries’ belief that their work in the colonies would improve the lives of Indigenous Peoples.

Despite his doubts, he admits that “the momentum of Empire could not be slowed. Stand in the way and you were ground to gravel like rock under a glacier.” Buday uses Moody’s mixture of passive and pragmatic to help the reader relate to Moody without letting him off the hook for his role in colonizing the West Coast.

The characters in Orphan’s of Empire are as nuanced as this province’s history, and while the three stories do come to their own resolutions, this reader wanted more of a connection between the characters.

Without a doubt this book is worth reading, but I would encourage you not to fixate on the word “novel” on the front cover and instead approach it with the expectation that it’s three novellas connected through place and theme.

That said, Buday’s mastery of time-appropriate voice will pull you into the time period. His character and setting details will earn your trust and confidence in the depth of his research.

Buday takes all the things we love about fiction and tosses it with well-researched history to create an easily digestible way to consume these important tales. The book is a service to BC history and relevant to contemporary discussions around Canadian dinner tables today.

Softcover | Publication Date: May 18, 2021

Book Dimensions: 5.5 in. x 8.5 in.

256 Pages

Take a summer drive up Highway 28 between Campbell River and Gold River and along the brim of Buttle Lake you’ll glimpse a broad shore of sun-bleached stones and water-logged stumps.

The lake’s dam-controlled water level fluctuates nine meters throughout the year, and if you’ve ever wondered how Strathcona Provincial Park’s largest lake could ever be allowed to be flooded, Catherine Marie Gilbert’s A Journey Back to Nature A History of Strathcona Provincial Park has the answers.

Gilbert has a master’s degree in public history from UVic, and her first book featured another location-based history about the military base on Yorke Island. She has written articles for Western Mariner, BC Historical Federation Journal, BC studies, and Escape.

In eight informative chapters, Gilbert offers explanations to the recondite history of BC’s oldest provincial park, from Indigenous activity and early European exploration to industrialization that sparked a conservation movement.

Each chapter begins with quote from the Department of Lands, describing how the park appeared in 1921: “The Park abounds in all the attributes of nature in its primeval condition; giant forests; sunlit lakes bounded by bold rock shapes and overshadowed by snowy peaks and glaciers reflected in their placid, sunlit, vari-coloured waters.”

Much of the park exists today as it appeared for millennia with the exception of the Buttle Lake region. Besides the flooded shores, the park’s other noticeable scar at Myra Falls Mine, once an open pit mine but now operating underground, displays how the industrial machine penetrated a “primeval beauty.” A landscape that one early park visitor claimed would “appeal to a large number seeking healing for sick minds and jaded nerves.”

The Buttle Lake region was home to most of the conflicts between conservationists and industries seeking to further exploit the park. This area is the book’s main focus which culminates in Chapter 7, “Don’t Cut the Heart Out of Strathcona Park” where conservationists and the “Comox Valley Crazies” successfully halted further mine development.

Chapter 5, Forbidden Plateau, is a respite from conflict and a place where recreational development prompted an expansion of the park. The chapter features fascinating anecdotes from the area like how the Department of Fisheries brought 100,000 trout eggs to populate the area’s previously trout-free lakes.

As someone who grew up hiking and skiing in and around the park, I find its history fascinating, and Gilbert delivers enough details enthrall any like-minded fan of the park. While a pleasant read that flows logically, Gilbert’s narrative leads with facts, as opposed to compelling story, and readers seeking the latter may find it tedious, especially if they do not have a previous connection to the park.

The tale of Strathcona Provincial Park, however, is naturally endowed with conflict, and Gilbert’s book is an important work for understanding what a small group of environmentalists accomplished and how close we came to having a diminished park.

In this vein, the title seems a missed opportunity to show what the story is about—the hidden blemishes and a pulsing white head of industrialization hidden just out of sight. I’m drawn to a line on the first page of the introduction that I feel encapsulates this book: “…behind this picture of serenity is a less than a peaceful history.”

Early European visitors to the park saw its beauty and advocated its use “for the enjoyment of people.” And I recommend doing just that: exploring this wild area of this Island. And wherever you find yourself out there, A Journey Back to Nature would make a great reading companion to a perfect day.

Harbour Publishing
ISBN: 9781550179576
Hardback
6 in x 9 in – 256 pp
Publication Date: 13/11/2021

In a meditative, essay-style narrative, Barry Gough’s Possessing Meares Island guides the reader from the island’s murky origins to a court case of David and Goliath proportions.

The book is part memoir and part chronicle of Vancouver Island’s West Coast: “an analysis of how Meares Island came out of the mists of time, how the sea otter was hunted to the brink of extinction, how the last internecine war of 1855 changed that world, how colonial and Canadian law and regulation spread enveloping arms over Clayoquot Sound, subverting or destroying local mores, and how, at the climax of the modern age, the chainsaw and clear-cut logging threatened Meares Island.”

If this piques your interest, you won’t be disappointed—Gough’s detailed history delivers on all accounts.

While some history texts can be dry, Gough’s book finds enough story to keep the reader engaged in characters like Wickaninnish and Gough’s personal account of why he conducted the research and where that led him.

Barry Gough is one of Canada’s foremost historians and has been writing for almost four decades. He has received awards and prizes for his writing in Canada, the UK, USA, and Spain.

In the 1980s, one of his early books caught the attention of a lawyer who asked Gough to conduct research for a case which would eventually become some of the material for this book.

The court case was between the world’s biggest logging company, Macmillan Bloedel (MacBlo) who had a licence to clear cut Meares Island, and the Nuu-Chah-Nulth Tribal Council (NTC), a small West Coast First Nation, who wished to see the island left alone.

The case hinged on Aboriginal title, and Gough had to prove “Meares Island had not been abandoned by Indigenous Peoples” since the time of European contact.

Gough devotes two-thirds of the book to Part I, The Empire of Fortunes where he focuses mainly on the time around the sea otter trade. Part II, War of the Woods is where we see the court case come into focus.

As MacBlo’s flotilla of machines and falling crews motored out to Meares Island, a group led by Moses Martin canoed out to meet them and claimed the island as their garden (an important legal act), triggering what would be one of the most important cases for protection of old growth forests and “the fist combined victory against the logging industry’s political and industrial juggernaut.”

Gough’s work on the case was a key part of an injunction to stop logging the island. “And there this matter rests to this day, with roll-over or extended injunctions.”

Early in the book Barry Gough notes, “The history of Meares Island is not the history of Vancouver Island, anymore than the history of Vancouver Island is the history of British Columbia.”

That statement is true, at least until a logging road was punched through to the west coast in 1959, disrupting its isolated and unique history.

It’s a history that is hard for Gough to access because he only has half the story—the European perspective, gleaned partly from European and American ship reports from the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries.

The Indigenous perspective existed but in limited oral stories. “Of all the challenges the historian faces,” says Gough, “this is the most formidable.”

The book’s cover depicts a scene that emerges a few times in the narrative—Indigenous canoers approaching a high-masted sailing ship anchored in misty bay. After reading the book you realise the nuances in this interaction—who is standing in the canoe, why the ship has an American flag—and it brings an entirely new appreciation for the striking image.

Likewise, you will have a new appreciation for Vancouver Island’s west coast and, thanks to the work from the NTC and conservationists, an appreciation for its raw landscape, only lightly touched by human hands.

For $36.95, this hardcover is one to share with your reader friends and family. It’s one for the bookshelf, cover facing out.