CRUISES: Canada’s Queen Charlotte Islands: A Voyage into History

Story and photography by
Nancy & Eric Anderson 

 

The books in the library of the Island Roamer leave no doubt where the boat is heading: Land of the Ocean Mist reads one title, A Journey Through Time and The Last Great Sea are others. The 69-foot ketch is, in fact, roaming the Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve, the southern part of British Columbia’s Queen Charlotte Islands, an archipelago of 100 or so islands that have been called the Canadian Galapagos. They are now a UNESCO World Heritage Site.

A limited number of visitors are allowed into the area -- by boat or floatplane as there are absolutely no roads. Randy Burke whose company, Bluewater Adventures has sailed the area for 30 years was grandfathered in and his ketch, Island Roamer, is one of the few signs of modern life in the vast park.

Burke has something to say about that. “I want to talk about safety,” he says pointing to the harbor behind us. “That is civilization,” he says. “We are going the other way. Be aware of the dangers of the wilderness because if-you-are, nothing bad will happen.” He explains his rules including the need for all passengers to use common sense, and for each one to look out for the interests of the other, and be ready to offer a hand.

The 12 passengers about to explore this wilderness are, as the saying goes, a motley crew. There’s an ex-colonel in the Royal Canadian Air Force and his wife, a psychologist, and a cardiologist and his wife, a community development expert. All are sailors; they are studying the boat’s canvas and, thank God, nodding in appreciation of what they see. There are two married social workers “with expertise in canoeing close to shore,” hugging like honeymooners. Sitting bedside them are an architect and his wife, a massage therapist, sailors also -- he “went to the South Seas for two years in search of romance but found it and his future wife on a Vancouver 3rd Avenue bus.” Peering out to sea are a San Diego family physician and his wife, a nursing educator, both Southern Californian wimps who are wondering if they’ve brought enough warm clothes. Wielding one of the boat’s many pairs of binoculars is a former business security advisor who retired because he “got tired looking through keyholes.” He’s traveling with a companion who is married to the advisor’s cousin. The companion, checking out the boat’s cockpit is a one-time Boeing ergonomic engineer aged 86 who started boating in the Boy Scouts and ended up licensed for 65 foot craft.

To all this Burke (who has crossed the Atlantic three times and the Pacific once) says: “I feel I am in good hands!”

Actually we’re all in good hands. His boat has state of the art navigation equipment and redundant systems including twin 165 hp diesels. On board he has an able staff: Kitty Lloyd, a naturalist with a degree in marine biology now in her 10th season with the company, Kate Riddell, with a degree in history in her 8th season of serving cordon bleu meals from a 7 by 9 foot galley, and Steve, “the third mate,” with a diploma in outdoor recreation, who seems always there with a helping hand when passengers stumble on shore. And they sometimes stumble. A shore landing can be wet or dry depending on tides and weather.

Ahead of all for the next ten days is what Burke calls the “best coastline in the entire world.” It is, however, a remote, desolate world of fog, rain and wind -- and 24-foot tides, in other words, a sailor’s paradise. It is also a naturalist’s dream. On this cruise Kitty will identify 55 species of land and bog plants such as Newcombe’s butterweed and Lyngby’s sedge, 12 sea plants from Laminaria to sea lettuce and 35 invertebrates from a hooded nudibranch to some moon jelly; she will document sightings of 25 species of birds including bald eagle and tufted puffin and point out 13 mammals including black bear and orca whales.

Passengers will kayak and swim in natural hot springs with water temperatures in excess of 100 degrees F. Two, both aged in their 70s, will swim later in the cold, cold sea and one, subsequently, will get hoisted 80 feet up the main mast for a special photograph. Passengers clad in oilskins and rubber boots will glide to shore in inflatable Zodiaks and then comb beaches and some of the world’s best inter-tidelands for 12 inch-long sea cucumbers and giant starfish. They will explore abandoned copper mines and former whaling stations and hike to high ground to see vistas of a land of yesterday forgotten by the people of today. And that is the thrill for most passengers: venturing into the unknown, into the mystical territory of one of the least understood Native American cultures of all time and into the land of the Haida.

The Queen Charlotte Islands are remote, an archipelago of about 150 islands forming a triangular land mass 250 kilometres long from top to bottom with the largest dimensions to the north. Access is by ferry from Prince Rupert, or by air from Vancouver to the sleepy little airport at Sandspit Harbour. The islands lie about 80 kilometres from Prince Rupert on the BC mainland and separated from it by the fearsome Hecate Strait. Says a weather notice at the Sandspit airport, “Please be advised that a small craft warning is always in effect for the waters surrounding the Queen Charlotte Islands.” The islands were named after the wife of King George III who has been described as a stolid, kind, unassuming German woman whom the king evidently loved passionately. Queen Charlotte never saw the islands that bore her name. Maybe she was too busy bearing the king their 15 children.

There were kings, too, on those islands where the Haida nation lived. Their subjects had in some ways the perfect life although storms could surely sink their long boats.

“Even on calm days,” says John Vaillant, author of The Golden Spruce, “the coastline may be shrouded in a veil of mist as three thousand kilometers of uninterrupted Pacific swell pummels itself to vapour against the stubborn shore.” But the sea could be bountiful. It was said you could die quickly there but you’d never starve to death because when the tides out, the table’s set. It’s been said the Haida intertidal areas were so rich there was more protein per square metre there than in an Iowa wheatfield.

A primitive society surely cannot be called primitive if, beyond just existing, it makes time for art, story telling and music. The Haida had all three. John Swanton, an anthropologist, sees the Haida nation like the Highland Scots with its 17 major clans. Asked why all the ceremonial poles, historian John Smiley said he sees them as heraldic devices like those on Crusader’s shields. Says he, “The same motives that prompt people to wear the clan tartan or to monogram the family silver moved the Haida to mark their property with the family crest.”

The Haida nation lived here for ten thousand years. Their origins are lost in time though their art somewhat resembles the Maori’s of New Zealand and their language, strangely, has something in common with Comanche. In the late 1700s, the Haida, 20,000 strong, lived in more than 100 coastal villages. They were resourceful people who mastered the challenge of surviving a sometimes angry sea.

The ceremonial poles are, without doubt, the most interesting aspect of Haida history to visitors. Although the villages were abandoned by 1890 they had been photographed by George Dawson in 1878 during his Geological Survey of Canada and identified for him by the villagers. One mortuary pole was for “Consumes white eagle down.” Another for “Refuses offered food like a child,” and yet another for “Rolls from side to side like a huge log in a heavy sea.” And one for “Prince capsized himself.”

All the houses in the villages were named as well. Some in Tanu were “House that makes a noise.” Another “Sounds of clouds rolling upon it.” And in Ninstints, “House that is always shaking,” and, next door, “Thunder rolls upon it.” The natives knew perhaps the threat of bad weather but they were unprepared for the diseases that ended their life style and their lives. One, Robert Davidson, a master Haida carver and one of Canada’s most respected and important contemporary artists talks about this. “The three obstacles the Haida had to face in this life pressed between the forest and the sea,” he says, “were anthropologists, missionaries and smallpox.”

Koona’s population of 700 souls fell to five as the village with a forest of totem poles succumbed to influenza, brucellosis and smallpox. In 1840 Ninstints had 308 people and 20 houses, but by 1875 only six residents were alive. Young men who earlier had sought work elsewhere on the coastline sometimes came back with tuberculosis or venereal disease to further decimate a population already weak from disease. Cumshewa (the name means “rich at the mouth of the river” was the last village to be abandoned. It had 20 houses and 286 of a population in 1841.In 1905 its few members were taken to Skidegate by Methodist missionaries.

The few hundred total survivors of the Haida nation dragged their way to a missionary village, leaving their “dead abandoned on the beaches, their canoes rotting in the rain forest and their signature totem poles decaying in the marshes. They were,” says historian Moira Johnston, “a forgotten culture and a people starved for their own history.”

Not now. Descendants have rediscovered their skills, their art, their stories and even themselves. They have succeeded in getting their land declared part of the Canadian National Parks and in August 2005 National Geographic Traveler magazine named the Queen Charlotte Islands’ Gwaii Haanas National Park Reserve the best national park in North America. Before that happened many totem poles had been harvested by museums and stolen by others. Most of those remaining have been consumed by the rain forest and lie as moss-covered debris beside the cedar logs that once were walls and roofs of houses. In some villages like Cumshewa, Skedans and particularly Ninstints some poles have survived being devoured by nature and still stand, albeit forlornly, like weary sentries guarding the Haida legacy.

Perhaps that legacy won’t be forgotten. Said one of the passengers as the Island Roamer finally returned to its dock: “I came without expectations but this magical, spiritual place has changed me. I now feel -- as long as people are willing to immerse themselves in another culture and learn from it – there is hope for the world.”

If You Go

Space aboard Island Roamer is limited to eight cabins and only thirteen sailings happen each year so you should book early. Advice regarding clothing and personal gear is available on line. Irrespective of the season you can expect some rain.