Sailing into paradise

An “Old Salt” Guides Us Through B.C.’s Glorious Sunshine Coast

The Sunshine Coast: From Gibsons to Powell River (Third Edition)
by Howard White, photography by Dean van’t Schip  

Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2024
$36.95 (hard cover)  /  9781990776809

Reviewed by Ron Verzuh

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Howard White, the founder of Harbour Publishing and author of Raincoast Chronicles, is well qualified to write this updated edition of his popular guide to B.C.’s Sunshine Coast. He has lived there since childhood in the 1950s and has travelled to every nook and cranny of the jagged coastline, visiting all the unique communities along the way.

You could say that he’s one of the Old Salts he writes about so admiringly in this travel guide to a quirky corner of the province that is home to innovative entrepreneurs, millionaires, ne’er-do-wells, the odd murderer, numerous artists, and writers of all kinds.

The slightly oversized volume presents us with a menu of such characters and also accommodates an impressive collection of colourful photographs shot by a team of skilled photographers with Dean van’t Schip, a native of Gibsons, leading the pack with some of the most stunning images of this paradisical place. A favourite of mine is ‘Sunset at Sergeant Bay.’

The photographs entrance the readers while urging them to dive into the text and White, a creative author who knows what will grab the reader’s attention, is happy to oblige. The book easily passes as a popular history with short biographies of the early pioneers and vignettes that illustrate their failures and successes.

Mac Macdonald, “the globe-trotting American playboy,” is perhaps White’s most memorable figure. He entertained Hollywood greats like Ronald Coleman, William Powell, and Mack Sennett on his estate at Princess Louisa Inlet. White also recalls Mac having “a legendary appetite for free grub.” 

Amidst short sagas about a hotel here or a logging start-up there, he injects snippets of his own biography, including stories of his early children working with his father. Here he speaks of his arrival and his “own deep insecurities about leaving the known world behind – but laid over this is the memory of adventure, the unexpected thrill of sailing off in the brave ship Marpak I.”

The coast has a full history of characters and White has catalogued many of them from artists to explorers all finding some way to survive in this coastal playground. With this book he earns his own place among them. He proves himself a veteran coaster with every quick-turning page, including a momentary lapse of sanity when he participated in an annual polar bear dip. His cast includes world champion boxer Jack Dempsey, who in his youth worked as a green chokerman at the Myrtle Point logging camp near Powell River. He is joined by other famous people of the past such as actor John Barrymore and industrialist Andrew Carnegie.

White also has an eye for literary history and provides reference to notable local authors such as the late L.R. “Bunny” Wright, whose mystery The Suspect is set in Sechelt. Erle Stanley Gardner of Perry Mason fame also makes an appearance as does Muriel “Capi” Blanchet’s “1950s yachting classic” The Curve of Time.

Local poets also earn a space with verse about the land and sea. “The sea is not selective,” goes one stanza. “It does not play favourites.” Another talks of the coast migrants. “They come starry-eyed from the city/ to walk with nature.” Here is Peter Trower on Port Mellon, the coast’s first successful logging town: “Like one family we lived . . . in that kingdom of friendly destiny.”

The characters also include Bergliot Solberg, a.k.a. “The Cougar Lady,” a crack shot with a rifle, and Maximiliane von Upani Southwell. She helped Elizabeth Smart through a pregnancy and assisted her while she created one of Canada’s celebrated novels, By Grand Central Station I Sat Down and Wept.

White also makes a special place for a discussion of the region’s First Peoples. He describes the  arrival of European explorers in the 1700s and explains that “the Sunshine Coast had been shared since the last ice age by three different indigenous groups, the Squamish (Howe Sound), the shishalh (Sechelt Peninsula), and the Tla’amin (Powell River).”

He also offers his reflections on the destruction wrought by the oncoming settler population, adding his thoughts on the loss of an “exceptional people.” He provides a history of the Sechelt First Nation which was led by “a collective of male and female leaders.”

He doesn’t avoid a criticism of the role of the church in marginalizing the once-powerful nation of some 80 villages. “With their own medicine men exposed as powerless against the white man’s diseases, their leadership in shambles and the great family groups reduced to a few bewildered survivors, their appeal to the church may have been less a reasoned choice than an act of desperation.”    

A staggering number of place names are peppered throughout adding to the mystique of the coast and sort of becoming part of the cast – Skookumchuck Rapids, Desolation Sound, Prince of Wales Reach and Princess Louisa Inlet to name only a few. Quiz question: What is White’s favourite place on the coast? No, it’s not Madeira Park, home of his publishing house.

White speculates on the quest to unite all of them into one “centralized infrastructure,” but suggests that it is likely to remain a “municipality of conjecture.” He adds, “I’m just as happy. I believe our distinctive communities are a precious resource, and the longer the Sunshine Coast can avoid mushing together into one big faceless Surrey North, the better.” 

Of course, no book at the coast would be complete without at least one reference to the beloved CBC-TV program The Beachcombers with actor Bruno Gerussi commanding the good ship Persephone. White admits that when asked where to set the show he recommended Egmont, not Gibsons where the show ran for 19 years as “the most successful television drama every produced in Canada.”

Last but hardly least, the book offers plenty of glimpses of the local restaurant scene and the odd culinary hint that appeals to the region’s “loafers and muckers.” White modestly numbers himself among them. Soused herring and wild blackberry pie anyone? How ’bout a Grand Pacific Oyster beach bake? It’s all part of life on the gorgeous and still mysterious Sunshine Coast.

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Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. He has recently reviewed books by Eileen Delehanty Pearkes, Vince R. Ditrich, Aaron Williams, Michel Drouin, Hetxw’ms Gyetxw (Brett D. Huson), Haley Healey, and Keith G. Powell for The British Columbia Review.

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-25: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction and poetry)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an online book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, Maria Tippett, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

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