Showcasing Sunshine Coast stories
Raincoast Chronicle: Fifth Five
by Howard White [ed.]
Madeira Park: Harbour Publishing, 2024
$60 / 9781990776939
Reviewed by Howard Macdonald Stewart
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I’m a procrastinator and from time to time this causes me to suffer a guilty conscience. It was predictable that I’d be in a panic this week about an overdue review of “Raincoast Chronicle – Fifth Five”. That it wasn’t wrapped up weeks ago was entirely due to rank procrastination. This weighed on me, in part because I knew this might be the sort of book one would suggest as a last-minute Christmas gift. It’d have to be a gift because otherwise, who would shell out an eyewatering sixty bucks for a book? Real panic only set in after I took the thing into Courtenay yesterday, resolved to beaver away at the behemoth (700 pages!) in between my town chores. I never review a book without actually reading it, or at least spending quality time with each page, and this giant demanded more time than usual.
Arriving back at the Buckley Bay ferry terminal to finish my reading, I discovered to my horror that I’d lost the *** book. Anyone who lives on a small island and saves up many chores for infrequent visits to the big island will understand how very many places I might have lost the thing as I wandered around ‘town.’ Did this mean I’d have to shell out a small fortune to replace it? Would I let down the BCR team (or Uncle Howard) with an even later review? But, Praise the Lord, after we’d extracted every layer of groceries and laundry and wrappers and other things from our aging wheels, the BOOK crept out from under a seat. No more excuses.
In fact, it’s not really a book. As the title suggests, it’s five books glommed together. So, the price tag isn’t really unreasonable because there is a great deal more than a single book’s worth of reading, and picture-gazing, between the large, hard covers. And apart from the sheer volume of material involved, it was hardly a challenging review. Once I resolved to just do it, almost everything in the five books made for fascinating reading. This was due, in part, to the great diversity of the material therein. It’s all BC coastal lore – this is Harbour Publishing and Howard White after all. Yet each volume is very different from the other. And the many authors involved amount to a virtual who’s who of the coast’s contemporary non-fiction writers.

The first book is a monograph entitled “The Remarkable Adventures of ‘Portuguese Joe’ Silvey.” Assembled by the doyenne of today’s BC historians, Jean Barman, this is not just the story of one man’s adventures but also of much of Silvey’s extended family around the coast over several generations. Leaving the Azores for a life of adventure on the sea in the mid-19th century, Portuguese Joe Silvey jumped ship from a whaler visiting this coast circa 1860. He would marry into a couple of different coast Salish speaking families and live a few places around the Strait of Georgia, where his descendants still do. He started in Point Roberts but for many years the family’s centre of gravity was tiny Reid Island, between Galiano and Valdes islands. Like so many in those days, fishing was their mainstay but they logged too. It makes an intriguing study for many reasons, not the least because of the mixed-race personality of the families spawned by Silvey and his partners Klahltinaht (from Musqueum) and Kwahama Kwatleematt (from Sechelt). Over time, different branches of the family embraced the Indigenous and Portuguese sides of their identity in different ways, though all had to navigate the intensely racist bent of mainstream settler society during most of their years on the coast. Best to wrap up with Barman’s own summary: “Portuguese Joe Silvey was a determined, resourceful, hard-working man who left an important trace on British Columbia. He was one of the earliest entrepreneurs in today’s Vancouver. He contributed in diverse and significant ways to the development of the province’s fishing industry. He understood the importance of community to family survival in difficult times, and he laid the foundation for a largely self-sustaining way of life.”

The second book is a collection of twenty stories about shipwrecks, people who’ve suffered from them, and others who have studied them, up and down the coast of BC from Haida Gwaii to Wreck Beach. This volume is a little harder to read than the rest. Not because it isn’t well written – it is – but because of the subject matter. Author Rick James has done exhaustive research on marine tragedies going back as far as the 1860s and his descriptions thereof make compelling reading. The problem is that we keep going down with the ship, again and again. Once the reader is reconciled to that inevitable, recurring, sinking feeling, the stories are enjoyable fonts of information. We learn not only of the ill-fated ships and how they went down but of what was happening around them at the time. In fact, these stories about the lives and vocations of these ships give us rich insights into the ever-changing coastal scene around them, from colonial resettlement to frenetic resource extraction and export, world wars to heavy industry. Some of the more disconcerting passages reveal how shoddily built were some of the doomed vessels, how short on judgement some of their navigators. But these are the exception, there are far more stories of sound and well-crafted ships (including some stunningly beautiful ones from the age of sail that lasted a long while around the coast) and skilled, courageous sailors. So why all the shipwrecks? Because the ships and their crews were facing some of the most hazardous navigation in the world – wild, wild weather (on the outside coast) and treacherous minefields of natural hazards on all sides. James’s stories amply remind us of this.

The next book is once again dramatically different from the ones around it. If offers nine stories about “Givers, Guardians, Helpers and Volunteers”. Its editor David R. Conn points out in his introduction that, while the settler economy of coastal British Columbia was dominated by big, bold resource industries, we have also developed a rich “human infrastructure.” These are the people who – for pay or as volunteers – have taken care of the needs of other people, one way or another: from health professionals to transport workers, sport fishing guides to conservation volunteers. This is way more interesting than it might sound. I won’t list all nine but take my word for it, it’s an eclectic collection and once again manages to capture vital dimensions of coastal culture in intriguing ways. One essay, “Singing ‘the Song of the Redeemed” by Stephen Ullstrom, describes the sixty years of operation of Victoria’s ‘Chinese Rescue Home,” founded in 1886 to protect exploited, vulnerable, and victimised young Chinese and Japanese women who have been brought across the Pacific for a life of drudgery and worse. Constance Kretz tells the life story of Painter’s Lodge, a fabled destination for well heeled fisherman from far and wide come to catch the giant Tyee salmon off Campbell River. Kenneth Swartz recounts the early history of BC Helicopter Rescue. If you’ve ever watched the stunning Knowledge Network series featuring the helicopter-borne heroics of North Shore Search and Rescue teams, then you’ll have an inkling of the breakthrough that this service represented when it was introduced in the aftermath of the Second World War. An inherently risky technology, it has saved the lives of many trapped in high-risk situations. And so on. Nine modern histories about service-oriented people and the diverse, valuable services they have brought to this coast.

The fourth book is the largest, offering thirty stories and six poems in almost 200 pages. These include writing from a wide cast of well-known coastal writers and historians, people like Stephen Hume, Grant Lawrence, Anne Cameron, Jeanette Taylor, Paula Wild, Jim Spilsbury, and Harbour’s own Howard White. Each piece has been extracted from a book published by Harbour between 1974 and 2014 and virtually every one is a compelling read. There’s something for everyone, from serious scholars of the coast to those who are just looking for a good read. Mike McCardell’s delightful sketch of Emily Carr is the only fiction prose in the collection. Editor Peter Robson had his work cut out for him, choosing which pieces to include from among the hundreds of books Harbour published over those four decades. The result of Robson’s judicious choices is a rich collection of writing about extraordinary characters, places, communities, animals, adventures, and dangers. Characters like Tofino’s Fred Tibbs, who builds himself a hundred-foot spruce tower on the edge of the world ocean then climbs to the top of it every day to serenade the little town across the water with his trumpet. Or places like the doomed lighthouse built forty miles northwest of Cape Scott and six hundred feet in the air, where it was so windy that every building threatened to blow away and so foggy that the lighthouse couldn’t see approaching ships, nor the ships the lighthouse. Or pods of dozens of blue whales dancing on the water on their tails. Or a dump truck lugging a load of dead farm salmon along the twisting road between Pender Harbour and Sechelt, striving and failing to keep the putrid, liquefying cargo from slopping over the driver, the road, and passersby? Something for everyone indeed.


The last book of the five is another change up. Unlike the previous three, Judith Williams’ “Cougar Companions” is tightly focused, taking us back in the direction of the first book. But instead of exploring a single historic figure like Joe Silvey and his extended family spread around the coast, Williams writes of a single fjord, Bute Inlet on the mainland just beyond the north end of the Strait of Georgia. Much of the reader’s time around this inlet is spent with the extraordinary Schnarr family. The father August was a local legend, trapping and logging up and down that very long channel – the second longest fjord on the northeast Pacific shore – and the many rivers and streams that spill into it. By the late 1930s however, Schnarr had been upstaged by his photogenic daughters who, for a while, became a little like Ontario’s Dionne quintuplets in those years. There were only three Schnarr daughters and they were of different ages. But they were a great story because, unlike the Dionne girls, they had their own pet cougars. Raised from infancy the big cats made gentle, affectionate pets. Visitors to the girls’ various isolated homes around Bute Inlet didn’t always find it easy to relax around their domesticated mountain lions though. Williams tells us much more too, about this historic corridor which was once the locus of one of coastal BC’s bloodiest confrontation between Indigenous people and settlers (due to the inlet’s proposed vocation as a railway route from the interior to the Pacific shore). Many other bits of Bute Inlet lore are shared, most with some connection to August Schnarr. A lot have to do with animals and fish being shot, trapped, or caught. Given the time and location, and the way Schnarr made his living, this is to be expected. But it can make for strange juxtaposition of images: extraordinary photos of the girls with their beloved felines alongside pictures of hunted cougars strung up or skinned. All the vignettes are remarkably well illustrated, in part because of Schnarr senior’s devotion and skill as a photographer.
All in all then, this collection of five books is amply worth the time and money it asks from readers. If I have a quibble, it’s not with the writing or illustrations – both are good throughout. But why can Harbour, after all these years (fifty now I think) still not manage to consistently put proper scales and Northings on all their maps? Is this something only geographers worry about?
*

Howard Macdonald Stewart is an historical geographer and semi-retired international consultant whose work has taken him to more than seventy countries since the 1970s. His memoir of a youthful bicycle trip down the Danube with war hero and debonair cyclist Cornelius Burke, Bumbling down the Danube,was published in The British Columbia Review in 2016, and his memoir, The Year of the Bicycle: 1973, followed in 2020. He is also the author of the award-winning Views of the Salish Sea: One Hundred and Fifty Years of Change around the Strait of Georgia (Harbour, 2017), as well as a popular Remembrance Day reflection, Why the red poppies matter. He has lived on Denman Island, off and on, for more than thirty years. He is now writing an insider’s view of his four decades on the road that followed his perambulations of 1973, notionally titled Around the World on Someone Else’s Dime: Confessions of an International Worker. [Editor’s note: Howard Macdonald Stewart has recently reviewed books by Nancy Marguerite Anderson, Gina Leola Woolsey, Dave Steen, Amanda Swinimer, Jim Kerr, and John Boyko for The British Columbia Review.]
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The British Columbia Review
Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie
Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line 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, 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.
“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster