Tom Henry

Westcoasters: Boats That Built British Columbia

• Broschiertes Buch

Produktbeschreibung

A #1 BC Bestseller and the Winner of the 1999 Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award for BC Book of the Year.

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Produktdetails

• Verlag: Harbour Publishing Co. Ltd.
• Seitenzahl: 192
• Erscheinungstermin: August 2001
• Englisch
• Abmessung: 279mm x 216mm x 13mm
• Gewicht: 726g
• ISBN-13: 9781550172331
• ISBN-10: 1550172336
• Artikelnr.: 22283491

Autorenporträt

Tom Henry was born in Duncan, BC in 1961. He earned his BA in history from the University of Victoria, and has worked on tugboats, in logging camps and owned his own firewood business. A former staff writer for Monday Magazine, Henry has authored several books including Westcoasters: Boats that Built BC (winner of the Bill Duthie Booksellers' Choice Award), The Good Company: An Affectionate History of the Union Steamships (winner of the BC Historical Federation's Lieutenant Governor's Award), Dogless in Metchosin, The Ideal Dog and Other Delusions, Paul Bunyan on the West Coast and Small City in a Big Valley: The Story of Duncan. Henry's audiotape of readings from Dogless in Metchosin is popular with listeners who know him from his CBC Radio "Country Life" column. He lives in Victoria, BC.

Inhaltsangabe

Preface
Discovery
Beaver
William Irving
Lorne
Thermopylae
Beatrice
Columbia
Princess Maquinna
Malahat
Lady Alexandra
BCP No. 45
Sudbury
Pisces I
Lootaas
Bibliography
Acknowledgements
Index
PREFACE
In the morning of Thursday, December 16, 1791, an officer of the Royal Navy
stepped from a horse-drawn carriage onto the wharves at Deptford, on the
south bank of the River Thames. Deptford was home to the Victualling Board,
the provisioning centre for the navy's great voyages, and as the officer
strode along the docks, he noted the coiled hawsers, fine spars, and
barrels of sauerkraut and salt pork. The air carried its own inventory too:
sweet tars and bitter oakum and the must of wet canvas. Though there were
many fine vessels at the dock, the officer did not pause until he was
alongside an inglorious three-masted ship. One hundred feet long,
barge-like in its dimensions, it was the type of craft that is generously
described as sturdy. The officer, a pudgy man with a religious bearing and
grey, yellow-flecked eyes, appraised the ship for a moment, then, without
ceremony, marched up the gangplank.
I say this is where BC history begins. Not West Coast history, for that is
rooted in the tidal shifts of glaciers; nor is it Native history,
traceable, depending on your belief, to the existence of a land bridge
linking Asia to Alaska 12,000 years ago, or to a raven's playfulness. No;
it is the seed of BC - that writhing, ill-named burgoo of Natives,
non-Natives, logged-off valleys, timbered cities, beautiful, stinky pulp
mills, seaweed poets, freaky politicians and big mountains that Jack
Hodgins called "the Ragged Green Edge of the World."
And it begins on a creaky gangplank two hundred years ago.
The man was Captain George Vancouver. The ship was the Discovery. The two
were about to set off from England on a journey of exploration to the
northwest coast of North America that would last four and a half years. The
trip changed the region forever. Prior to the Discovery's journey, the
coast was a Native domain; to Europeans, it was a mystery, a blank on the
globe where armchair geographers doodled ancient fancies, such as the
passage to China. The Discovery slaughtered the dream and replaced it with
a map. With Vancouver's intricate charts in hand, European empire builders
could draw lines through the land, rename, reallocate, give and take-all
the things that define a country, as opposed to a land. Awkward and
resilient, the Discovery marked both the end of Native dominance of the
Northwest, and the ascendance of European-style notions of geography,
property and politics.
Nor was the Discovery the only important ship in BC history. it was
succeeded by the Beaver, a black and dirty little steamer that played so
many roles in nineteenth-century coastal history that it is best understood
as a fleet rather than an individual ship. The Beaver was followed by the
William Irving, a Fraser River sternwheeler as grand as the family that ran
it; the Dunsmuirs' trend-setting tug Lorne; the glorious Victoria-based
clipper Thermopylae; and the humble, seemingly indestructible
ship-of-all-trades, the Beatrice. The first three decades of the twentieth
century are synonymous with some amazing ships, too, including the "Bible
barge" Columbia, the Canadian Pacific Railway's adored Princess Maquinna,
pioneer rurnrunner-cum-log carrier the Malahat, and the Union Steamships'
premier "Daddy boat," the fine Lady Alexandra. No account of modern BC
could omit the deep-sea salvage tug Sudbury, the less glamorous but equally
important classic wooden-hulled seiner the BCP No. 45, or the Pisces, an
improbable 1960s-era submersible that fixed Vancouver at the centre of the
underwater high-technology world. And finally, the book closes with a
chapter on Bill Reid's quest-inspired dugout Lootaas, whose magnificent
hull is a powerful symbol in the long, often-troubled, often-heroic rise of
Native culture from the deprivations instigated by European newcomers in
the era of the Discovery.
Fourteen boats, in some ways as subjective as my choice of shirts. But I'll
trust the list to stand on a simple explanation: while it would be as easy
as falling off a yardarm to add a dozen worthy ships to this account, you'd
be bucking the current to argue any of the mentioned boats out. Each of
these vessels helped define the coast, gave it some of the shape,
character, sound, humanity that distinguish it today. Take away just one
and the story springs a plank, takes on water, founders. From sloop to
canoe, the careers of these ships overlap, like the planks on a lapstrake
hull, so it is possible to read the province's history through their
stories. Call them westcoasters; they are ships that built BC.