The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest

by Timothy Egan

  Of course, there’s a castle on the highest hill in town, a four-story haunt of sandstone and brick with thirty-nine rooms, eighteen fireplaces, a three-thousand-pound billiard table, and chairs with little notches in them (a place for the gentlemen to put their swords). “Those Victorian men were so imaginative then,” says a blue-haired keeper of the Craigdarroch Castle, which looks like the Gothic home of Laurence Olivier and Joan Fontaine in the Hitchcock film Rebecca. On this side of the Tweed Curtain, the Resource Barons built great monuments to themselves after stripping the forests and digging up the earth. Craigdarroch is the stone dream of a Scotsman, Robert Dunsmuir. Having exploited the richest seam of coal ever found on Vancouver Island, he tried to build his Xanadu here, but died the year before it was completed in 1890. The British Empire was at its peak then, covering more than nine million square miles with a total population of 305 million people. However, the Empire had a trade deficit, importing thirty percent more than it exported. I culled this information from a hundred-year-old dish inside the castle, a commemorative plate from Queen Victoria’s golden jubilee. “Don’t touch, sir,” the keeper scolds me, flashing a frown identical to the scowl worn by the Queen in the souvenir dish.

  Walking away from the castle, I look out across the strait at the Olympic Mountains, still puzzled as to how this carpet of Anglo civility was laid over this land of glacial disorder. Some of the natives on this island were cannibals, others fierce warriors, but they are best known as artists, carvers of the totem pole and sculptors of animistic face masks. The Russians, the Spaniards, the French and the Yanks all nibbled at parts of Vancouver Island. It was the British, the apostles of rose gardens and high tea, who nicknamed this place “England of the Pacific,” and sent boatloads of pipe-smoking, tweed-wearing, Queen-loving, tea-drinking gentlemen here to settle it. Unlike the American settlers, who brought bibles and guns to their new land, the British immigrants were urged to arrive with cricket bats, carriage harnesses and a library of the classics. In 1853, the same year Winthrop visited the Hudson’s Bay Company outpost of Fort Victoria, the Honourable Charles Fitzwilliam, a member of the British Parliament, was also touring the colony on the Pacific. “The climate appeared to me particularly adapted for settlement by Englishmen,” he wrote.

  The monthly mean temperatures of Victoria are almost exactly those of London—both cities average 55 degrees Fahrenheit in May, 60 in June, 63 in July, 63 in August, and 39 in January. But climate alone does not make a cousin. Rudyard Kipling wrote after his visit more than a half-century ago:

  To realize Victoria, you must take all that the eye admires most in Bournemouth, Torquay, the Isle of Wight, the Happy Valley at Hong Kong, the Doon, the Sorrento and Camps Bay; add reminiscences of a thousand islands and arrange the whole around the Bay of Naples, with some Himalayas for backdrop.

  Most early English visitors intended nothing more than a stopover on the way home from Empire duty, expecting to find horizontal showers and suicide-gray skies. Instead, they found the Blue Hole, a term used by pilots cruising above the predominant cloud cover. The Olympic Mountains snag the Pacific clouds and wring them till they’re dry, creating a rain-scarce zone over the northeast tip of the Olympic Peninsula, the San Juan Islands and the lower part of Vancouver Island. So, while it pours 150 inches or more on the Pacific shore, fifty miles away the American town of Sequim gets less rain than Los Angeles. Victoria is at the north end of the Blue Hole. As I look out now at the Olympics, the tips are covered in dense clouds while sunlight saturates Victoria. This is Canada’s Palm Springs; people from all over the Great White North come here to “winter” in a town that is actually farther north than any of the major cities of Eastern Canada.

  In the last grip of sunlight, the world is as it would be if every square inch of land had a benevolent keeper. Azaleas, dwarf junipers and the yellow blooms of the marsh marigold crowd the view to the south. The view the other way brings flowering Japanese crabapples near beds of anemone and polyanthus. The land rolls and buckles, rippling color lines in the fading light. Then, the sun drops behind the glass of Brentwood Bay, fifteen miles north of the center of Victoria. A full moon is on the edge of the tree line, sending light back into the lake below, an abandoned quarry pit. From the center of the deep lake, water shoots up, a lavender-colored spray followed by a pair of green bursts and now a rainbow finale. The effect is of a giant blossom, a hydro-flower, unfolding then retreating in the kind of fast-forward used in the old Disney nature films. Other lights come on, spotlighting rockeries in full flower, archways of purple roses. All around, a full 130 acres has been crafted into controlled beauty, offset only by the odd sight of an old kiln stack poking above the trees. It is not the muscled supergrowth of the rain forest, nor the wildflower-meadows of the high country. It is the stamp of the Empire in the land of evergreen.

  When the railroads were emptying thousands of newcomers into the cities of the Northwest and the forests and mines were being scraped in a frenzy, Robert Pim Butchart ran a turn-of-the-century limestone quarry here, from which he extracted material for cement. It made him a very wealthy man. When the quarry was all used up, Mrs. Robert Pim Butchart was repelled by the brutalized landscape left behind; it was ugly and offensive. She set out to remake it, planting poplars and rhododendrons, wallflowers and creeping ivy—anything that would grow and produce lasting beauty in the temperate climate of southern Vancouver Island. Thus began Butchart Gardens, a shrine as pulse-quickening to gardeners as Graceland is to Elvis Presley fans.

  The Blue Poppy of Tibet, first planted in North America here from seeds given Mrs. Butchart by the Edinburgh Botanical Gardens, leaves an Impressionistic blur against the fountain of bronze dolphins cast in Florence. The poppies are a British colonial legacy, brought back to England by an army captain. I have never seen anything like them. Here, they coexist with a Japanese garden that is a hundred yards from the seashore, and an Italian garden surrounded by fifty-foot-high cypress trees. The mind rushes to overstatement. But this much seems obvious: not even the Tuileries of Paris can compare. Strolling on the grounds, I hear Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, French, Dutch, Japanese. They make the common sound of awe. In transforming this quarry pit to paradise, Mrs. Butchart has proven that the land of the Northwest does not have to be scraped bare to turn a profit.

  The lesson seems lost on the rest of Vancouver Island. From the fjords of the east side to the ocean shore of the west, hill after hill has been completely stripped. On this week in midspring, the largest western red cedar in the world has just been discovered in the thin coastal sanctuary of Pacific Rim National Park. The joke around Victoria is that the tree is the only western red cedar left on the island. A marvel, this tree, twenty stories high, as big in diameter as a municipal water tower, sixty-two feet around, more than 2,100 years old. It was a seedling before Julius Caesar was born, an aging giant long before Columbus landed in the Bahamas. There are more of these monoliths hidden in the park, but few people know about them.

  Going from the perfection of the Butchart Gardens to the fecundity of the island’s remaining rain forest, I’m struck by this irony between the British view of natural beauty and the native perspective. In Victoria, they have taken virtually every plot of available land and whipped it into a proper, weedless, well-mannered thing of beauty—controlled at all times by the tastes of the master. Much of the rest of the island is a moonscape with stumps. Those groves of old trees still standing and the unmarred shores of rock and wildflower—the draws of a province which advertises itself to the rest of the world as Super, Natural—have received only belated attention from the government or the garden clubs. “Yes, that’s the old-growth forest,” you hear them say. “And where’s the bloody horticultural identification tag?” The wild becomes beautiful only after it’s shackled, put on a diet of chemical nutrients, and trained to perform on a seasonal schedule.

  According to the native ideal common among most Coast Indian tribes, The Trees and The Rocks were thought to be as endo
wed with spirit and beauty as The People. When British civilization, then less than 1,800 years old (dating to the point of the early Roman invasions) landed on these shores in the form of fur-trading mariners, they met a people who had been building wood-framed homes, conducting religious ceremonies rich in theater and myth, creating artwork as startling as twentieth-century Cubism, and feeding themselves quite nicely, for nearly ten thousand years.

  Before the arrival of Europeans, more than eighty thousand people lived in the land now called British Columbia, perhaps half of them on the coast of Vancouver Island in permanent villages enriched by a prosperous fishing industry. They dried and smoked enough fish to live comfortably through the winters, supplementing their diet with berries, seaweed cakes, roots. Cedar, the mighty Western Red with its waterproof, mildew-resistant qualities, was the source of all life, hollowed into forty-foot war canoes, shredded and twined into dresses, hats, baskets, mats and baby diapers. Their houses, most of which were much bigger than the typical home found on the island today, were built of planks cut from the big cedars. The tribes of the northern part of the island used more than 110 species of plants for food, tools, twine and art. They also traded in slaves and waged short, vicious wars with other native peoples, and killed the second of newborn twins.

  “The vices of these savages are very few when compared to ours,” wrote José Mariano Mozino, a Mexican-born botanist who visited the island more than two hundred years ago. “One does not see here greed for another man’s wealth, because articles of prime necessity are very few and all are common. Hunger obliges no one to rob on the highways, or to resort to piracy.” The natural bounty was so great that the natives actually fought some wars with food, trying to outdo one another with culinary gifts at their potlatches.

  When Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy arrived in 1778, his men were sick with scurvy, having found little along the Northwest Coast to add to their diet of hardtack and pickled pork. The natives taught them how to brew spruce beer and catch salmon. What gave the Salish such a bad reputation was one particular feast with Cook’s men, an imaginative meal that didn’t go over well and may have doomed the tribes for centuries afterward. Cook’s two British ships were looking for the Northwest Passage, that great geographic myth of four centuries, and they were in dire need of repair when they anchored in Nootka Sound on the western shore of the island in the spring of 1778. They tied up at a place Cook called Friendly Cove, known to the natives as Yuquot, meaning “Place-That-Is-Hit-by-Winds-from-All-Directions.”

  The sketch of Yuquot left behind by John Webber, Cook’s official artist, shows several big houses perched up on the shore, half-clad natives tending their canoes, and the well-dressed emissaries of Her Majesty, Cook’s men, greeting them with flag and handshake. A good enough start. Cook proceeded to repair the Discovery and the Resolution and to inquire about the local stock of animal pelts. From a book published in 1783, A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage, by John Ledyard, one of Cook’s officers, we pick up what happened next:

  These Americans are rather above the middle stature, copper-coloured and of an athlete’s make. We saw no sign of religion or worship among them, and if they sacrifice it is to the God of Liberty. Like all uncivilized men they are hospitable, and the first boat that visited us in the Cove brought us what no doubt they thought the greatest possible regalia, and offered us to eat; this was a human arm roasted. I have heard it remarked that human flesh is the most delicious, and therefore tasted a bit, and so did many others.

  Cook tried to dissuade the natives from this beastly custom, or so he said. There is some dispute over whether the roasted human arms were a joke, a warning to scare the big white ships away, or a legitimate snack of high nutrient value. In any event, the natives of Vancouver Island, now widely recognized as one of the most advanced of all aboriginal North American peoples, were tagged as cannibals. A few years later, an American trading-ship captain said of them: “A more hideous set of beings, in the form of men and women, I had never before seen.”

  Cook himself, of course, was hardly a paradigm of civility. With Cook was Captain William Bligh, and the two leaders made a spectacle of flogging their men, regularly and with great relish. Long before Bligh became famous for uprisings against him, his men nearly mutinied on the voyage to the Northwest Coast. His legacy here is a small tuft of land off the west shore of Vancouver Island—wind-flogged Bligh Island. Bligh’s name will continue to be cursed into the next century: a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, also named for Cook’s chief officer, snagged an Exxon tanker on March 24, 1989, causing the worst oil spill ever in North American waters.

  For the Northwest, Cook’s voyage was the most consequential of all the early European trips. He was not only the first British subject to set foot on what would become British Columbia—a minor accomplishment, considering where else he’d been—but also the first non-Indian to realize a substantial profit from a resource of the Pacific Northwest. While charting the west side of the island, after missing both the mouth of the Columbia and the entrance to Puget Sound, Cook purchased 1,500 beaver skins. He also picked up sea otter furs, which fetched $100 apiece in China, the equivalent of two years’ pay for the average seaman. To the mandarins of Canton, the sea otter was a cloak of gold. Easily killed as they played while swimming on their backs, with a two-inch-thick hide, the otter wore the most valuable coat of fur in history. If you took all the hair on the average human’s head and compressed it down to one square inch, you would have the thickness of the sea otter’s pelt. In the trade marts of the Pacific Rim, one human slave was generally worth two sea otter pelts. When Robert Gray of Boston built a schooner in Nootka Sound in 1792, he sold it to the Spanish for seventy-five otter furs.

  Cook, whose statue is second in prominence only to Queen Victoria’s in the capital city’s inner harbor, was killed by natives while wading offshore in Hawaii, where the British went for cheap labor and winter sun. When his ships returned to England in 1780, word of the valuable fur trade spread; the rush was on, and the end was near for the native culture. Captain John Meares arrived in May of 1788, loaded with fifty Chinese laborers who built a trading post at Friendly Cove. The next year the post was taken over by the Spanish, who claimed that most of Northwest America had been given them by the Pope three hundred years earlier. England and Spain nearly went to war over the seizure at Friendly Cove, which gives some idea of how much sea otters meant to the treasuries of both countries. The dispute was settled by treaty awarding the property to England, for a considerable sum. Captain George Vancouver was sent out to reclaim the land and resume the search for the Northwest Passage.

  He didn’t find the River of the West, but Vancouver discovered that this sylvan slice of property was an island, not the mainland coast. In the spirit of cooperation, he named it for himself and for the Spanish explorer Señor Don Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra (although Don Juan’s name was quickly dropped).

  Between 1785 and 1825, about 450 European ships arrived on the wild shores of the island to trade; more than a quarter-million sea otter pelts were taken from the Northwest Coast to China. Many English sailors and many English merchants got very rich; the Coast Indians lost their way of life, corrupted and diseased by the trading tools of the Empire, especially Nicholson’s London Dry Gin—“bottled and guaranteed by the Hudson’s Bay Company.” By 1885, two-thirds of British Columbia’s native population had disappeared.

  There were, of course, a few rebellions. Chief Manquinna of Nootka Sound attacked the Boston in 1803, killing all but two men, whom he took as slaves. The ill-fated Tonquin, piloted by the ill-tempered Captain Thorn of Boston, was burned in 1811 and all his men were murdered. The fierce Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands, with their huge war canoes which gave them a raiding range of six hundred miles, fought battles until the late 1880s and even skirmished into the twentieth century. Unlike the Yanks, the leaders of the Hudson’s Bay Company—originally chartered by King Charles in 1660—never
waged war against the native people. But then, after a while, they didn’t have to: smallpox and alcohol did to the majority of traditional inhabitants what a few British naval officers never could.

  When the Hudson’s Bay Company scouts went looking for a northern foothold to hold off the Yankee wagon train invasion of the Oregon Country in the 1840s, they found only a handful of native women gathering camas bulbs on the rich plateau where Victoria now sits. The setting, at the southern tip of the island in a protected harbor under the Blue Hole, close to the mouth of the Fraser River, and close to the Pacific and Puget Sound, seemed a perfect place for the Western World’s oldest monopoly to dig in. Even before a single log was cut for the fort, one of the company’s Gentlemen Adventurers called the setting “An exact copy of English park scenery.” When the island was declared the British Colony of Vancouver Island, the boys in the fur trade were rewarded with complete government control, for a nominal fee of seven shillings a year—the first time the Gentlemen had ever been given actual governing powers. They promptly raised the Union Jack and the flag of the Gentlemen’s Company, an emblem with two elk holding a cross above the Latin motto pro pelle cutem. Roughly translated—“You give your skin to get a skin.”

  Victoria was to be no ordinary colony. No Irish castoffs, no hardscrabble exiles from other parts of the Empire, no Yankee religious fanatics, none of the indentured servants who toiled in the tobacco plantations of the British colonial South or the chained convicts sent to the penal colony of Australia. The company wanted only gentlemen to settle the toe of the Empire—generic gentlemen who could become Hudson’s Bay Company Gentlemen. When the settlement was platted, one of the first things company factor James Douglas did was to set aside the stunning sweep of land on the bluff above the strait as Beacon Hill Park. In contrast to the founding of American towns, growth was controlled and orderly; speculation was discouraged. They set up four large farms as part of the Puget Sound Agricultural Cooperative; before long the Gentlemen were growing enough food to sell to the Russians up north and the Yanks in the south. Furs moved in and out of the post, although the sea otter, slow to breed and bearing only a single pup every two years, was fast disappearing.