Canada's Island Highway

Contemporary Review, April, 2001 by James Allan Evans

THE 'Island Highway' stretches along the eastern shore of Vancouver Island on Canada's west coast, from Victoria at its southern tip to Port Hardy in the north, where the 'British Columbia Ferries' motor vessel Queen of the North leaves for Prince Rupert. Highway 19, it is called, and it is a broad, paved road which in places becomes a four-lane motorway cutting through reforested woodlands, as straight as a Roman road and as indifferent to the local terrain, and the old highway, renamed 19A, is reduced to a picturesque local road. North of Port Hardy the paved road runs out, and automobiles that get to Holberg must navigate a rough gravel road. From Holberg a Land Rover can reach the north tip of Vancouver Island at Cape Scott, where the Japanese Current washes up Coca-Cola cans from Singapore and spherical glass floats from the fishing nets of Japanese fishing boats.

For sailors, the channel which skirts the island's eastern shore is the 'Inside Passage', and in summer, it is populated by vast cruise ships. 'Gin palaces', my neighbour calls them. They are seasonal visitors which migrate to warmer waters when the days get shorter after the autumn equinox. But in the lazy days of summer they cruise from the port of Vancouver through the Gulf Islands, which is a corner of Canada with almost Mediterranean climate, past the misty Queen Charlotte Islands and on to Alaska. Before radar and sonar, these were dangerous waters. The cruise ships that sail up the Lynn Canal to Skagway in Alaska pass the Vanderbilt reef where the little Princess Sophia foundered in 1918 with all her passengers: more than 350 persons, 24 horses and five dogs. A few miles away is Shelter Island where the Princess Kathleen ran aground thirty-four years later and sank. This is also a route of broken dreams. There is a 'Miners' Bay' on Mayne Island named after the men who camped there overnight on their w ay to the Cariboo Gold Rush that began in 1858, and forty years later, the rusty ships that carried miners to the Kiondike Gold Rush in the Yukon sailed the Inside Passage. Some of the newcomers to these waters dreamed of utopias rather than gold. On Malcolm Island is Sointula: the name means 'Harmony' in Finnish. A century ago a Finnish socialist named Matti Kurikka founded a commune here. The early years were hard: Sointula attracted more intellectuals than practical farmers, and it survived only with the help of the native Indians. But survive it did, though Kurikka himself abandoned his utopia after only four years, and with the Vietnam War a new invasion arrived: American draft-dodgers with the 'hippie' ideals of the 1960s 'back-to-the-land' movement. The adjustment of the Finnish settlers to the new 'hippie' utopia was neither immediate nor easy, but by now an entente has been worked out. As one local historian put it, the two communities respect each other.

I had spent an idyllic summer on Mayne Island which takes its name from a lieutenant on a Royal Navy survey ship that charted these waters a century and a half ago. But summer was coming to an end. The days were growing shorter and the trees were beginning to take on their autumn colours. Twenty-five years had passed since my wife and I had driven up the 'Island Highway' in a Hillman Minx, and we decided it was time to revisit it. We put our car on the Queen of Nanaimo, and sailed to Salt Spring Island, and from there took the ferry for a brief voyage to Vancouver Island. Once there, we headed north.

There are odd historical memories scattered about this area. Port Hardy where we headed first is named after the captain of Nelson's flagship, H.M.S. Victory, at the Battle of Trafalgar. Thomas Masterman Hardy had no known connection with Port Hardy, but the inlet here was labelled Hardy Bay after him, presumably on the assumption that a naval man whom Nelson asked to kiss him as he lay dying should be honoured by a body of water, and when a European settlement began here a hundred years ago, it took its name from the bay. Only in the 1940s did the immigrants begin to outnumber the aboriginal population.

Beside the dock, the Seagate Hotel bears a plaque announcing that it is an historic site. It houses a pleasant restaurant, but its rooms are in a modern building across the street. History may attract tourists but for sleeping they want accommodations with all modern conveniences. Port Hardy on a damp, cool autumn evening is an unexciting place. Four fishing trawlers had tied up to the wharf, but their crews were nowhere to be seen. I peered into a small stucco building with a sign over the door saying 'Plato's Chicken and Pizza'. There were a few plastic tables with three bored aboriginal teenagers sitting at one of them, and in a cavernous space behind the counter an assortment of video games waited for patrons. Yet Port Hardy has a past. The oldest dated archaeological site on Vancouver Island is here. The ancestors of the three aboriginal youth in 'Plato's Chicken and Pizza' lived here 8,000 years ago.