Raincoast Chronicles 18

by White, Howard

• ISBN13: 9781550171716
• ISBN10: 1550171712
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 1998-01-01
• Publisher: Harbour

Summary

Where land meets sea, strange things happen, and most of them end up as stories. Like new driftlogs on a gravel beach, nine of the best are gathered here in issue number eighteen of the bestselling Raincoast Chronicles series. From a study of log barging on the BC coast to a controversial essay on who really shelled the Cape Estevan lighthouse in 1942, this latest compilation delivers an interesting and compelling portrait of BC's maritime history. Meet Al Trice, Don Sorte and Mack Thomson - three eccentric scuba divers who can't or won't recognize an impossible task when they see one - who succeed in building one of the world's first commercial mini-subs with no capital and even less experience in the back of a mushroom warehouse; Claus Botel, who arrived with his family at their preemption on the remote northern end of Vancouver Island from Germany in 1913, with no idea of the incredible hardships that lay ahead; gyppo logger "Svendson" who artfully dodges a cadaverous tax collector in 1919; Hal Dahlie, who at sixteen decided to take a summer job at the coast's most isolated light station with an old keeper who was more than a little strange; and fisherman Hank McBride who recalls the 1930s and '40s at Namu where romances blossomed, booze flowed and fighting was an integral part of life during the golden days of the mid-coast canneries. Edited by publisher and writer Howard White, with stories by Tom Henry, Vickie Jensen, David Conn, Michael Skog, Dick Hammond and many others, Raincoast Chronicles Eighteen continues the series' twenty-five-year legacy of entertaining and delighting readers everywhere with its eclectic variety of west coast lore.

Author Biography

Howard White was born in 1945 in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He was raised in a series of camps and settlements on the BC coast and never got over it. He is still to be found stuck barnacle-like to the shore at Pender Harbour, BC. He started Raincoast Chronicles and Harbour Publishing in the early 1970s and his own books include A Hard Man to Beat (bio), The Men There Were Then (poems), Spilsbury's Coast (bio), The Accidental Airline (bio), Patrick and the Backhoe (childrens'), Writing in the Rain (anthology) and The Sunshine Coast (travel). He was awarded the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History in 1989. In 2000, he completed a ten-year project, The Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He has been awarded the Order of BC, the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award and a Honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree from the University of Victoria. In 2007, White was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has twice been runner-up in the Whisky Slough Putty Man Triathlon.

Table of Contents

Introduction

Table of Contents provided by Publisher. All Rights Reserved.

Excerpts

A part from the odd rusting anchor on display in Vancouver and the lantern from the old Trial Island lighthouse in Victoria's Bastion Square, British Columbia is oddly devoid of maritime monuments for a province with one of the world's great coastlines. British Columbians can't be accused of wearing their marine heritage on their sleeves, but just the same, it's there interleaving the pages of our lives. When Claus Botel brought his family from Germany to northern Vancouver Island in 1913, their homesteading tale turned into a story of sea adventure when their small boat shipwrecked them on Cape Cook. Botel's granddaughter Ruth Botel tells the whole story starting on page 46. Even a story of a determined tax collector pursuing an artless dodger turns into a boating story when it takes place on the coast and the scofflaw is a coastal gyppo. The taxman can only track him down by chartering Hal Hammond's gas boat out of Pender Harbour, as Hammond's son Dick recounts in "Svendson and the Taxman" (Page 19.) With so much of our commerce dangling or floating over water, it should not perhaps be so surprising that BC would emerge as a leader in certain technologies like the self-dumping log barge, whose origins David Conn traces in "Booting the Big Ones Home" Nor, given the typical west coast disregard for authority, should it be surprising that in 1963, when three hungry Vancouver scuba divers were told their idea of building the first commercial salvage sub was beyond the capability of all but the world's largest hi-tech manufacturing corporations, they went ahead and tried to do it on a shoestring. What is a little surprising, as Tom Henry describes in "Pisces Ascending" (page 7) is that Al Trice, Don Sorte and Mack Thomson should succeed so brilliantly, establishing BC as a world leader in submersible technology. One way to get the saltwater boiling in west coasters' blood is to threaten the coast's much beloved lighthouses, as several automation-minded politicians have found to their sorrow. So it shouldn't be surprising that the one event of World War Two still being hotly debated on the west coast is the alleged Japanese shelling of Estevan Point lighthouse. In his book Keepers of the Light (Harbour Publishing 1985), lighthouse historian Don Graham contended that the shelling was a hoax perpetrated by the Canadian government to rally support for conscription. In this issue, Lasqueti Island writer Douglas Hamilton returns fire. Few people carry around with them a stronger sense of the role the sea plays in our lives than commercial fishermen. Hank McBride went to work in the fishing fleet in 1937 when he was fourteen and still does relief duty as skipper on some of the coast's larger draggers and packers. He loves to tell stories, and the stories he tells bear witness to a free and unfettered sea-going lifestyle that has now all but vanished from the coast, as Michael Skog recounts on page 68. Here on the BC coast, nobody thinks to make a big noise about the sea and its influence on our lives. But when we stop to think, its all around us. SVENDSON AND THE TAX MAN by Dick Hammond Father was working on his boat at the dock in Pender Harbour. This wasn't at all unusual. The owner of an old wooden boat can, if he wishes, spend most of his spare time at this, and Father was fussy about maintenance. The year, probably 1919. Perhaps 1920. The Cassiar had docked and was loading freight and passengers. Immersed in his repair job, Father paid little attention, until there came the hard sound of leather soles, on wood. He looked around to see a stranger approach and stop. A cadaverous man, middleaged, neatly dressed in dark suit and darker tie, a raincoat folded over his left arm. He wore severelooking rimless glasses and peered through them at the young man rather as if he were examining a bug that was new to him. "Are you Mr. Ha