You can’t get anywhere on the B.C. coast without taking a ferry.
For some, it’s a welcome chance to observe and appreciate the abundant delights of marine life, varied terrain and vegetation – while, for others, it can be simply a tedious several-hour pause in a busy schedule.
But if you have the opportunity to read – or even leaf through – Derek Hayes’ imaginatively written, sumptuously illustrated Coastal Connections – A History of British Columbia Ferries and Passenger Ships (Harbour Publishing, $50), there’s a good chance you’ll never take that ferry ride for granted again.
Hayes, a White Rock resident, is well-known for his series of books using geography as a way into history – Historical Atlas of Vancouver and the Lower Fraser Valley, Historical Atlas of Early Railways, Historical Atlas of British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest are just a few titles in a large body of work.
Many, including works dedicated to U.S. subjects, have been solid sellers, and the all-but-retired Hayes is now in the enviable position of writing only whatever takes his interest.
But once engaged in his researches, Hayes, trained as a geographer at the University of Hull in his native England, has a knack of finding intriguing stories in old maps, photos, engravings, posters and documents that, in other hands, might make for very dry reading.
Among the most arresting of the photos he features in the new book is a shot of the Canadian Pacific’s B.C. Coast Service ship Princess May, spectacularly high and dry after crashing into the Sentinel Island in thick fog the Lynn Canal, about 105 km south of Skagway, Alaska, in 1910.
Quite a few of the earlier photos feature such incidents as groundings, capsizings and sinkings – a testament to the common perils of B.C.’s coastline in the days before modern communications and navigational technology.
But Hayes’ text goes back much further – starting with to the earliest recorded forms of transportation on the coast, the canoes of the Haida and other First Nations.
With the arrival of the colonial population, many sailing vessels plied B.C.’s coastline, succeeded by steamships – often sidewheeler river boats acquired from from U.S. interests, such as the Surprise, Umatilla and Enterprise, all of which served the demand to transport miners to and from the goldfields in eastern B.C. during the 1858 Gold Rush.
By late 1859, Hayes recounts, “what might be considered the first regular ferry service in B.C. had been established” with a sidewheeler named Eliza Anderson that started a weekly schedule between Olympia, Wash., Victoria and New Westminster, which lasted almost 10 years.
Hayes also traces the interwoven histories of such early players in the coastal transportation game as the Union Steamship Company Company, created in 1889 with the idea of servicing the coast’s numerous logging camps, but which survived, as primarily a passenger carrier, until 1959.
Surely one of the most exotic early vessels described by Hayes was Cutch, an “iron-screw yacht” originally built as the personal luxury vessel of the Maharaja of Cutch in India. After he died, it had been “used in coastal trade in India, and then by the German government on the East African coast,” Hayes writes, and was subsequently listed for sale in London, where Union Steamships’ managing director, Captain William Webster.
“Webster travelled to India to pick up the ship, and then sailed it the 16,000 km to Vancouver via Singapore and Japan, arriving on 2 June 1890,” he adds.
After serving Union Steamships for a decade, including regular service to Nanaimo, Cutch was written off in 1900 after foundering just south of Juneau, Alaska, in 1900, but was rebuilt and converted, in 1902, to a warship in the Colombian Navy, then fighting a war with Peru, before ultimately being scrapped elsewhere in South America.
Unavoidable in any history of early water transportation in B.C. was the dominance of Canadian Pacific Navigation Company, taken over by the Canadian Pacific Railway in 1901 to become its B.C. Coast Service.
The CPR saw its coastal fleet of ‘Princess ships’, more than simply a connector between railway routes on the mainland and Vancouver Island, as providing an elegant sailing experience for B.C. residents and visitors from further afield.
It was a notion, Hayes told Peace Arch News, that was doomed with the exponential increase in automobile traffic after the First World War and the demand over subsequent decades for faster, more regular service between growing population centres on the coast.
“The B.C. coast has an awful lot of islands, and quite a lot have these pockets of agricultural land, with farmers who had to get their produce to market, although in the earlier days everything was a lot more flexible in terms of timing – they could put up with not very frequent service,” he said.
But the requirement to move large numbers of people – particularly on what became a triangle route between Vancouver, Victoria and Seattle – helped shape the nature of B.C.’s ferry service.
Hayes’ narrative follows the fiercely competitive efforts of the CPR, Union Steamships, Canadian National and the Black Ball Line to cater to the ever-increasing demand for service, culminating in the B.C. government takeover that created BC Ferries in 1960.
As the book notes, what began with just two ships in that year has grown to become one of the largest ferry fleets in the world, with 35 ships on more than 25 routes carrying more than 22 million people – and almost 10 million vehicles – yearly.
Continuing until the present day – and even predicting future developments– Hayes also manages to explain the evolution of what was for years a Crown corporation into the current British Columbia Ferry Services Inc., an independent B.C. regulated company capable of raising funding in Canadian bond markets (spurred partly by the politically-influenced “fast ferry debacle” of the late 1990s, which “ended up costing taxpayers many millions.”)
Hayes acknowledges that he may be one of the few B.C. residents thoroughly versed in all aspects of the history of B.C.’s ferries and passenger ships.
“In the beginning, I knew basically what most people know about the ferries,” he admitted.
”But I found it very interesting how they evolved, as I learned more.”
He also notes that Coastal Connections is in many ways a continuation of one of his earlier books, Incredible Crossings: The History and Art of the Bridges, Tunnels and Inland Ferries That Connect British Columbia.
”I thought ‘I should do the coastal ferries next,’ and in fact I did get an email from a member of the board of B.C. Ferries suggesting the same thing.”
The high level of cooperation from B.C. Ferries, as well as a great deal of material on early ferry service in various city archives, made his task easier, he acknowledged.
“B.C. Ferries have quite a lot of archival material – over the years they produced many brochures and timetables, although nowadays, with everything online, we don’t even think about consulting a printed timetable any more,” he said.
One of the appealing elements of the book is the reproduction of era-evocative graphics for newspaper advertisements and promotional posters from the early to mid-20th century.
There are also appealing photos of current ferries on their routes – a number taken by Hayes himself.
There were more than a few surprises during research for the book, he noted.
In the days before car ferries were designed with higher deck ceilings, and before the Black Ball Line’s first roll-on, roll off vehicle ferries changed the shape of the vessels in the early 1950s, ships used as ferries, such as the Canadian Pacific’s Princess Patricia, built in 1902, did not always have sufficient headroom to accommodate cars.
In the Tin Lizzie days of the early 1920s the practice was to remove car tops and windshields, and even let air out of tires, so that they could be parked between decks, Hayes pointed out – and that work, along with replacing the tops and re-inflating the tires before disembarking, was expected to be performed by crew members.
Also surprising, Hayes said, was the creation of the Tsawwassen ferry terminal in 1960 at the direction of then Minister of Highways Phil Gaglardi, who had simply put a ruler on a map and determined the shortest straight line across the Straight of Georgia from Active Pass was the outer edge of Roberts Bank.
“There was absolutely nothing there – it was just a windswept bit of coastline,” said Hayes, adding that Gaglardi left it up to engineer Frank Leighton and his team at Swan Wooster to figure out how to build a small island of dredged material and a causeway back to the mainland.
After creating and studying a hydraulic model at UBC, the engineers found that a causeway made of local sandy sediments, with flat sides, would best be able to “withstand the forces of wind and gales,” Hayes added.
“You’d think you’d have to build something up with stronger materials and tons of rock, and this was precisely the opposite,” Hayes marvelled.
“But it worked.”