Jump aboard: Ian Kennedy details a voyage on the Best Loved Boat
We discuss the research process for a book about a famous Westcoast ship, the Princess Maquinna
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: