Owen Laukkanen and the SiWC

Owen Laukkanen and the SiWC

by | Oct 22, 2018 | Canadian writers, journal

Owen Laukkanen. I was one of the lucky writers who managed to sneak into a “blue pencil” session with Owen because had a cancellation, and we had a brilliant conversation and a few laughs. But, Owen also told me what worked and where I could prolong the tension to create more suspense in the first chapter of my new novel. It was a first draft of a scene I’d written two days before so I’d have something to present for critique. Who better than a maritime thriller writer to comment on a B.C. lighthouse novel? And he bought a copy of my book!

For Owen’s take on the Surrey International Writers Conference, read  So Surrey | Home | Project Nomad then sign up for next year’s conference because what he says is true. SiWC is truly “one of North America’s premiere writing conferences.”

All Aboard the Uchuck III

All Aboard the Uchuck III

by | Jul 25, 2018 | history, journal, travel, writing and publishing

As I’ve said before the best research is hands-on. That way, you can indulge your senses.
Last Saturday, we enjoyed a day cruise from Gold River (on Vancouver Island, British Columbia) to Yuquot at Friendly Cove. This is Nuu-chah-nulth traditional territory. The term, Nuu-chah-nulth means “all along the mountains” and refers to sixteen tribes from Alaska to Washington state that speak different dialects, but collectively are sea-faring people.
Uchuck means healing waters. “The Uchuck III can move along at twelve knots, and carry up to 100 day-passengers and 70 tons of general cargo including three or four cars” (Get West.) We watched from the upper deck as the crew loaded supplies using a crane for the folks at Yuquot. This included a new red ATV that was immediately put to work when we arrived. bowWhen we were underway at last, the two-hour cruise took us through Muchalaht Channel past controversial fish farms and logging swaths, around Bligh Island (named for a young Captain Bligh of Bounty fame), and through Cook Channel into Friendly Cove.
cruisingIt was a perfect day of sun and fair breezes and the calm waters certainly felt healing. The captain said that humpback whales often come into Muchalaht Channel. All around Nootka Sound, salmon fishermen were hoisting their catch to show off their prizes.
In 2014, I lived at the Nootka Light Station for two months, while working as a relief lighthouse keeper. Although it was a short stint, catching sight of the white and red Coastguard buildings felt like coming home. We had three hours to explore the Yuquot site, which includes an amazing pebble beach, a portion of the Nootka Trail that leads past a graveyard and rentable cabins at Jewitt Lake, the old church which has now been reclaimed by the Indigenous community as a cultural centre, and of course, the light station.
FriendlyCoveBut I am setting a murder mystery here, so was most interested in locations where one might kill someone without being seen and hide something precious. This landscape is not new to killing.
White SlavesIn 1788, Maquinna (the Mowachacht chief) sent his people aboard The Boston to repay many insults—including the murder of his brother-in-law—by European sailors. The entire crew was murdered and decapitated except for the blacksmith John Jewitt, and the sailmaker who hid below. Maquinna needed Jewitt’s skills so kept him alive, and Jewitt convinced Maquinna that the sailmaker was his father. Jewitt lived three years as part of Maquinna’s family, wrote his story on the dead captain’s paper, and eventually returned to Boston where it was published.
The long pier was teaming with people as the Mowachaht/Muchalaht community was holding their annual Spirit Summerfest campout in the grassy area near the church and many friends and relatives had come out aboard the Uchuck III to visit. There was also a celebration in the church as this year marked the 240thAnniversary of Captain James Cook’s arrival at Nootka Sound.
As the story goes, Cook arrived in what he first called King George’s Sound in the spring of 1778 with the Resolution and Discovery. Making the usual European blunder, he named the people and the place based on his suppositions. The Indigenous people—who’d been living here for thousands of years—called out and told the captain to go around to avoid the reefs. More precisely, it happened like this:
“Captain Cook’s men, asking by signs what the port was called, made for them a sign with their hand, forming a circle and then dissolving it, to which the natives responded ‘Nutka’. No.tkak or no.txak means “circular, spherical” (Sapir and Swadesh 1939:276) in The Whaling People. 
Though the village was teaming with people, Cook claimed the land for Britain. The British soon called all the people there, the Nootka, though there were 1500 Mowachacht people living in villages in the area. Yuquot was the summer home of Maquinna’s people and they wintered down the channel in Tahsis. The Mowachacht—“people of the deer”—began a lucrative (especially for the British) trade in sea otter pelts.
Captain Cook’s claim on Yuquot set the stage for later conflicts between the Indigenous people as well as the Spanish, who built Fort San Miguel on the rocks beside the lighthouse. Sadly, within forty years, the sea otter disappeared. Fortunately, they are now back in the area. I remember seeing them playing near the pier when I lived there. This charming sea otter photograph was taken by my friend Ivan Dubinsky, principal keeper at Scarlett Point Lightstation north of Port Hardy.
sea otter by ivan
On our return voyage, we sailed through the more turbulent waters of Zuchiarte Channel. I went up to the wheelhouse to ask about the ship, but Captain Adrien said that he’d only answer my questions if I took a turn at the wheel. So, under his direction, I steered the Uchuck III through King’s Passage.
captain
The wheelhouse is beautiful and it was a thrill to turn the wheel two spokes starboard and then back to port to straighten her out while keeping my eyes on the bow.
The fabulous photo below was taken by Low Light Mike, August 28, 2010. One of the crew had just polished the engine-telegraph (to the left of the wheel) a piece from BCCS’s Princess Victoria,a River Clyde vessel that sailed around Cape Horn in 1904.
Wheelhouse
We arrived back in Gold River at 5:30pm. It was a long glorious day, and I recommend taking a voyage aboard the Uchuck III so you can get a taste of history firsthand. For more photographs, cruise and booking information, check out Get West. Below is a site map of Yuquot and a directional map to Gold River.
All maps Friendly Cove and Map to Gold River

The Whaler’s Shrine at Yuquot

The Whaler’s Shrine at Yuquot

by | Jul 19, 2018 | history, journal, writing and publishing

The weathered church that stands today in Friendly Cove was erected in 1956, for the purposes of “educating” the people of Yuquot. In the vestibule, old plaques and photographs are displayed, memories and keys to the significance of this place. One article in particular captured my attention. It tells a familiar story; one of loss, and betrayal, and exploitation.
In 1904, the entire Nootka Whalers’ Washing House, a 5×6 metre building, plus its contents was “purchased” from two elders and spirited away under cover of night. It was whaling season, and most of the community was off at work. A shady deal, no doubt, that the whalers would have objected to had they known. George Hunt, working under the famous anthropologist, Franz Boas, orchestrated the deal, which reportedly gained two men $500.00 but lost a community something sacred and precious. It ended up in the American Museum in New York, and has stayed there, in the basement, for the past century. This is an image of the contents:
What follows is a partial transcript of a framed article hanging inside the church. “Reviving Dark Forces” was written by Mark Hume and published in the Vancouver Sun, Saturday, May 25, 1991.
The shrine includes 60 carved human figures, 25 human skulls and two wooden whales. Native legend says the prayers and rituals practised by shamans gave hunters the magic they needed to find whales; it also made the sea send dead whales to the beaches around Nootka Sound.
 
What the magic was, and how it worked, may be beyond comprehension today, but Inglis says that looking on the faces of the shrine it is easy to believe it once had immense power. [At the time of writing, Richard Inglis was Head of Anthropology at the Royal BC Museum in Victoria.]
 
The people of Nootka Island who used the shrine believe it still has that power. One of the native concerns now under discussion is whether such dark forces should ever be brought into the open again.
 
“It’s incredibly powerful stuff,” says Inglis of the magic attributed to the shrine.
 
“One of the issues is whether you want to bring that power out again.”
 
The shrine, a magic house that was considered “a great treasure” of the Nootka people, was in continual use for 300 years before it was collected by the American Museum in 1904.
 
Generations of Nootka whalers performed rituals at the shrine which at times drew its black magic from human sacrifice and grave robbing.
 
Inglis, who has been researching the monument for several years, says the native community has mixed emotions about the shrine.
 
Some want it returned to Yuquot, to be shown in a museum or cultural centre. Others think it should never be put on public display again. 
 
European mariners turned whale hunting into a deadly, highly mechanized science that brought world populations to the verge of extinction. But in the native world, during the shrine’s centuries of power, killing whales was a dangerous job that required the help of spirits.
 
Anthropologists say the Nootka developed the most spectacular sea hunting techniques on the entire Pacific coast. Travelling in large, ocean-going canoes, they killed whales with harpoons that had cutting heads made of mussel shells; sealskin buoys were connected to long lines made from animal sinew.
 
The techniques for hunting—and the magic—were cherished family secrets passed down from chiefs to their sons. In addition to the hunters, the Nootka had whale-ritualists, shamans so powerful it was said they didn’t have to hunt whales at sea, but magically drew to shore those that had died from natural causes.
 
Tsaxwasap,a man with great shamanistic powers, was one of those who first used the shrine. He intensified the power of the magic house by bringing dead bodies to it, and live infants stolen from their mothers. When Tsaxwasap inherited the shrine it had only four human skulls.
 
In her book, From the Land of the Totem Poles, Aldona Jonaltis, of the American Museum, says Tsaxwasap kidnapped infants and robbed graves to build the shrine’s power.
 
“He began removing from graves the skulls of men who had been long dead and then placed 40 skulls on the right-hand side of the shrine, 40 skulls on the left-hand side, eight skulls atop sticks on the right side, eight skulls atop sticks on the left, and four in front of the house to serve as watchmen. Then Tsaxwasap found 12 dried up corpses of people and placed them in two rows in the centre of the structure facing the door. After this, he kidnapped 120 more infants and placed them, in their cradles, in his house. This magical house served its purpose well, for many, many whales came to Tsaxwasap.”
 
The shrine, which dates back to 1700 and could be much older, was used by at least eight generations of whale ritualists. After the third generation of use, wooden figures were substituted for human skeletons.
 
There were only 14 skulls at the site when it was collected in 1904.
The wooden figures appear in the photograph above. I suspect the 25 human skulls may be all that remains of the crew of The Boston, killed by Maquinna’s warriors in 1803, but who knows? Friendly Cove was once the most important point of anchorage on the Northwest Coast.
As far as I know, the items in question are still housed in the American Museum. An article in the Vancouver Sun, April 2013, states that the museum has tentatively agreed to repatriate the shrine. One challenge is financial; moreover, what should the community do with the shrine once it is returned? This is a complex issue. The Nuu-chah-nulth people hope to build a Cultural Centre here, but to do so takes a great deal of money. Also, the cove is only accessible by boat or floatplane. Still, it makes no sense to me that this powerful, sacred treasure should be crammed in the basement of a New York museum. What do you think?