History’s personalities and mysteries

Who Shot Estevan Light? and other tales from the Salish Sea and beyond
by Douglas Hamilton

Qualicum Beach: Caitlin Press, 2025
$26 / 9781773861531

Reviewed by Tom Koppel

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In June 1942, Radio Tokyo boasted about a great naval attack on Canada and the USA.  Major military installations in both countries, it was reported, had been shelled and destroyed by submarines.  The targets were the Estevan Point lighthouse on Vancouver Island and a US Army fort at the mouth of the Columbia River in Oregon.  If true, these would mark significant victories in a war that was going very badly for Japan’s adversaries.  But was the report accurate?

Journalist Douglas Hamilton sets out to clear the record on this, and diverse other events, in his collection of 23 concise, well-researched magazine articles on BC history: Who Shot Estevan Light? and other tales from the Salish Sea and beyond.  He ruminates with playful, dark humour, moral outrage, and careful attention to detail on the many mysteries and quirky personalities that make BC history so fascinating.  In these pages we meet smugglers, rumrunners, and largely forgotten explorers, and learn of disastrous voyages, horrendous outbreaks of disease, and early maritime maps that reflected political motives more than geographic precision. 

The attack on Estevan Light was obscured by the typical fog of war.  Roughly seventeen powerful shells were fired from close offshore, although some witnesses reported as many as twenty-five.  Other vessels were alleged to have taken part in the shelling, but most reports identified the attacker as a large submarine, presumably Japanese.  Damage was light, and there were no injuries, although civilians at the lighthouse were evacuated.  As Hamilton notes: “Fears of a landing party or demolition squads proved groundless; the intruders vanished as silently as they had arrived.”  But it had been the “first enemy attack on Canadian soil since the War of 1812.”  Then, in 1985, a book by lightkeeper Donald Graham made waves. Graham “argued convincingly that the attack had nothing to do with a Japanese submarine” but was “a covert operation undertaken by the [Canadian] federal government (perhaps in collusion with the United States] to unite Canada firmly behind the war effort.”  Canadian or American warships [Graham claimed] fired those shells harmlessly to “scare the bejesus out of Canadians, and in particular, to wake up those reluctant Quebecois and other ‘lukewarm patriots’ to the very real dangers of the deepening war.”

Hamilton enjoys debunking this “conspiracy theory,” which he calls “as silly as it sounds. For many westerners it was just too hard to believe that the Japanese had the intelligence and technical ability to launch this attack.  How wrong they were.”  He examines the Japanese naval capabilities, which were impressive, with up to nine submarines assigned to attack West Coast shipping and shore targets, mainly in the US, as far south as Santa Barbara.  The subs were very large, were armed with powerful long-range guns as well as torpedoes, and they carried tiny collapsible seaplanes that were launched by catapult and could bomb, strafe, or simply conduct surveillance.  Given those armaments, it is remarkable how little success the Japanese effort had, and the subs were soon withdrawn to focus on Allied shipping elsewhere in the Pacific.  “The shelling of the lighthouse was a very minor sideshow in the widening war.” 

Another false claim that Hamilton takes pleasure in debunking is the legend of Henry Wagner, the “Flying Dutchman,” a smuggler with a “fast twin-engine motorboat” that could outrun any police boat.  Wagner was based on Lasqueti Island, which was Hamilton’s home for most of his adult life.  One of Wagner’s crimes led to a shootout with police.  A constable died and Wagner was convicted and hanged for murder in 1913.  Decades later The Shoulder Strap, “the chief propaganda organ of the BC Provincial Police” ran a story claiming that Wagner “had been chief of the infamous [Butch] Cassidy Gang,” a tale that “took on a life of its own and is accepted as fact today.”  At least, that is, until Hamilton delved into the matter, concluding that there is not “a shred of evidence that Henry Wagner was in any way ever associated with Butch Cassidy and the Wyoming Hole-in-the-Wall Gang.”  Why, then, concoct such a story?  “By the 1930s the BC Provincial Police realized that the greatest threat to its existence came not from crime but from its archrival, the federal Royal Canadian Mounted Police.”  The BC Police magazine touted “the force’s many genuine accomplishments,” including capturing Wagner.  “How tempting and easy it must have been to stretch the truth for a good story,” even if it was “a gross fabrication.”

Seeking to give an admirable French explorer his due, Hamilton tells us about Count La Perouse, whose “mapping of the Pacific Northwest can only be compared to the explorations of Captain Cook.  The fact that he was French and didn’t make it back to civilization meant that his story was almost unknown.”  Hamilton lauds him for involving “the best minds and most up-to-date equipment available,” and because he made “no attempt to impose French authority or the Christian religion on Indigenous Peoples.  They were to be respected and treated fairly at all times.”  Unfortunately, at Lituya Bay, Alaska, his longboats encountered powerful tidal currents, were dragged into “savage breakers” and overturned.  21 men died.  After a few weeks off BC and California, La Perouse headed west and mapped the Japanese and Siberian coasts before having a bloody encounter with the natives of Samoa.  In 1788, his ships passed their reports along to British officers at Botany Bay, Australia.  Earlier documentation had been sent overland to Paris from Russia.  This was very fortunate, because, after leaving Australia, his expedition vanished.  It was probably driven ashore and wrecked at Vanikoro, an island 1400 miles northeast of Australia, where a few survivors lived into the 1820s.

The on-board fire and subsequent sinking of the steamship HMS Grappler in 1892 is another maritime catastrophe that Hamilton examines, one in which “everything that could go wrong did so with a vengeance….It’s a miracle that anyone survived.”  The former Royal Navy gunboat, loaded with supplies and over 100 Chinese cannery workers, lost its steering and ran amok, totally out of control, in Seymour Narrows.  “The true number [of dead] is unknown,” however, because “there was no official passenger list and many bodies were never recovered.”

The “Calamitous Cruise of the Clio” was also a disaster, but of a different kind and especially for the Indigenous People of a large village, Ku-hulz, near Fort Rupert on northern Vancouver Island.  A landing party from the Royal Navy gunboat went ashore to arrest three men accused of a local murder, but villagers armed with muskets fired over the heads of the Brits.  The Clio responded by bombarding the village with 110-pound explosive shells.  An Indian Agent pleaded for the surrender of the murderers.  When this was refused, British marines set fire to the village, destroying it completely, along with most winter provisions.  100 canoes survived on the beach, but the Brits hacked them to pieces.  “In this way Imperial colonialism was imposed on Indigenous People in British Columbia and elsewhere.”

Even more terrible than military assault was the impact of disease on the First Nations, who probably numbered some 100,000 before the arrival of Europeans.  The worst epidemic in historic times was an outbreak of smallpox in 1862. “It had long been known that among populations never exposed to smallpox, the mortality rate was high, sometimes over 90 percent.”  Lives could be saved by avoiding contact through evacuation to remote areas and quarantine.  An early kind of vaccination, “variolation,” was also often effective against the pox, but the authorities in Victoria were loath to apply it to Indigenous People, and they, in turn, resisted being quarantined or variolated.  Hamilton admits the complexity of dealing with such a situation, but concludes “the administrators of the colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia could and should have done much more to contain the smallpox outbreak.”  An estimated one-third of all Indigenous People died. 

Although most of the articles rely on library or archival research, several are based on small-boat outings by Hamilton to places like Haida Gwaii or Jervis Inlet, or on the adventures of friends from Lasqueti Island.  He concedes that “there is much to be said in favour of kayaks, canoes and other self-powered boats, but creeping age has dampened my enthusiasm for tests of endurance and strength.”  Cost was also an issue.  So, he mainly travelled in a 13-foot aluminum skiff powered by a 10 hp outboard, which led to some misadventures and failures to reach planned destinations.  But on the plus side, he says, “remember, anyone can do this.  You don’t have to be rich, athletic or even well connected.  Our stunning coasts and varied islands are open to all.” 

[Editor’s Note: Douglas Hamilton’s Who Shot Estevan Light? was recently chosen to be part of the Vancouver Sun‘s summer reading list]

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Tom Koppel is a veteran BC author and journalist who has published five books on history and science. For 35 years, he has contributed feature articles to major magazines, including Canadian Geographic, Archaeology, American Archaeology, Equinox, The Beaver, Reader’s Digest, Western Living, Isands, Oceans, and The Progressive. His book Kanaka: The Untold Story of Hawaiian Pioneers in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest (Whitecap Books, 1995) is available by email from  koppel@saltspring.com  Tom lives with his wife Annie Palovcik on Salt Spring Island. [Editor’s note: Tom Koppel has also reviewed books by Lou Allison (ed.), with Jane Wilde, Ian Gill, Dr. Allen Jones, M.D., Kirsten Bell, Steven Earle, and Daniel Kalla 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.

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