Chronicles Readers Prove That Truth Really Is Stranger than Fiction
Never a week goes by but I receive fascinating emails from both regular readers and from those who track me down online or are referred to me with their queries and, not as common but best of all, offers to share their family histories and scrapbooks. These come from close to home and from afar, two of the most recent and most promising being from the Maritimes and the United Kingdom.
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Let’s begin with Cowichan Bay and former resident Tom W. who now resides in the historic Kootenay railway town of Ymir, located between Nelson and Salmo. (How I envy him his opportunities to explore this historic mining country with his son, who has a quad to boot!)
Last month, Tom wrote: “Nice read, keep up the good work. Do you know about the history of the first drug boat seized and...docked at the old oil pier in Cowichan Bay for years?
“We have had a number of strange boats there...”
I promised him I’d pull my Cowichan Bay file and I came up with two newspaper clippings on the motor ship Northern Light V. The first one, from 1987, had two photos, one of the former submarine net tender’s bow, the other of a family of seagulls who’d made their nest in the ship’s mast. But the real story, almost buried in a couple of short paragraphs, noted the ship’s seizure “off the west coast of Vancouver Island for drug running,” and the fact that a Cowichan Bay resident was convinced she was haunted:
“Characters appear momentarily on the upper deck and then mysteriously disappear as though they vanished into thin air”
The same informant, who regularly bird watched with his binoculars from his apartment overlooking the bay, had seen “a puff of smoke escape from the funnel as though the mystery crew down in the boiler room had had enough of their inactivity”.
It was in 1979, as the Samarkanda, that the 45-metre-long ex-U.S. Navy ship, used as a coastal freighter registered in Panama in the 1960s, was at the centre of what was called Canada’s biggest drug bust. She’d been caught by a combined RCMP-Armed Forces strike team while carrying 33.5 tonnes of high-grade Colombian marijuana from California. The seagoing SWAT team had swept down on her at dawn as her 23-man crew was unloading 625 jute-covered 100-pound bales in Sydney Inlet. First reports placed the value of her cargo at from $15 to $56 million.
RCMP and the Royal Canadian Navy destroyer HMCS Qu'Appelle busted the SAMARKAND in remote Sydney Inlet.--Wikipedia
So much for the projected millions. Instead, the entire cargo was shipped to the Cowichan Valley where the weed was destroyed at the regional district incinerator on Herd Road while Mounties armed with 12-gauge shotguns stood guard.
The subsequent trial was no less thrilling, the defendants denying that they were smuggling the marijuana into Canada but were headed for Alaska. They had to pull into lonely Sydney Inlet for emergency engine repairs and only began unloading part of their cargo after their ship hung up on a rock and was threatened with capsizing, they maintained.
Thanks to corroborative evidence by marine experts as to the danger of the Samarkanda capsizing—and the refusal of the presiding judge to hear testimony by naval officers as to how easily they’d freed the vessel and sailed it to CFB Esquimalt—the ship’s officers and crew were acquitted. What was said to have been a highlight of the trial was the testimony of one Mountie who, thinking he had armed backup, aimed his finger at three of the suspected smugglers and said, “Stop or I’ll shoot.” Lucky for him, stop they did.
Both the B.C. Court of Appeal and the Supreme Court of Canada were agreed there should be another trial. But time dragged on until, in 1988, the charge was thrown out of court.
Maclean’s Magazine called it “the biggest haul of them all” in a 1980 retro piece.
Proving yet again that truth is stranger than fiction, the drama in Sydney Inlet was a case of deja vu all over again, as the inimitable Yogi Berra would have put it. Just the year before, a multi-force team had scuttled a previous attempt to smuggle in 13 tons of marijuana via Sydney Inlet and arrested 13 Canadians and two Americans. At the time of the Samarkanda episode, several of them had been convicted and others were awaiting trial.
Of the men arrested in the second Sydney Inlet incident, that involving the Samarkanda, only one of them was ever charged in the U.S.—again using the Samarkanda. (Duh!)
When she was again in the news, in March 1997, she was up for sale and rusting at anchor off Union Bay. “She needs some money to be restored,” owner Samuel Hancock of Cumberland (sic) told Times Colonist reporter Roger Stonebanks.
At last report, undated but obviously the late 1990s, she was listed as being in active service as a tug with Victoria as her home port, S.M. Hancock, Comox, as her owner.
Obviously, I could write a book about this, but that’s enough for today and, I think, answers Tom W’s query about a seized drug boat having once having been docked in Cowichan Bay.
Coincidentally, another former Cowichan Valley resident recently wrote with a query on behalf of his sister who, in compiling a family record, found reference to a forebear having owned or managed the Lewisville Hotel in Chemainus. I wrote this story as a Cowichan Chronicles in the Citizen years ago but, because of time limitations, have opted for a recent Facebook post on Gold Trails & Ghost Towns by B.C. hotel historian Glen Mofford. It’s condensed, of course, but serves the purpose of today’s post which is intended to cover several readers’ requests.
The Lewisville Hotel in later years as the Green Lantern. --Author's Collection
Mofford notes that the ca 1891 Lewisville, long known, after several renovations and reincarnations over the past 130 years, as the Green Lantern Inn, and which now operates as a liquor store and sports bar, took its name from the small community that sprang up at the southern entrance to today’s ‘downtown’ Chemainus. Namesake Sam Girdlestone Lewis had thrown up his teaching job to open a general store then switched hats to become a hotelier upon the arrival of the E&N Railway which passes immediately behind the building, and to accommodate mill workers.
The original hotel was destroyed by a devastating fire caused by an overturned oil lantern in 1907; several inmates were injured when they had to save themselves by jumping out windows. S.J. Hagan rebuilt the hotel and, in various guises, it has carried on to this day.
I haven’t been able to get back to Paul Considine who requested a reprint of a Citizen column I did years ago on what had originally been a summer cabin at Maple Bay.
It was then owned by Shirley Garriock, the great granddaughter of Duncan namesake, W.C. Duncan. Unfortunately, this column is pre-digital (typed), meaning I can’t just email it to him, and it poses the problem of how best to answer. Mail him a photocopy or scan it and email it? No way do I have time to retype it, a dilemma that comes up because some of my writings go as far back as the last Ice Age which, need I say it, predates the computer.
But back to readers’ letters and requests. Paul Campbell has tracked me down from his home in the U.K. via Andrea Rondeau, editor of the Citizen, re: a Chronicles column on the torpedoing of the CPR’s west coast passenger liner, S.S. Princess Marguerite, during the Second World War. (This is the first Marguerite; her successor, when owned by the provincial government, was still operating between Victoria and Seattle as late as the early 1980s.)
I based my Chronicle column on a full-length article I’d written for The Islander, the weekend section of what was then The Daily Colonist, in 1963. I’d interviewed two of the Marguerite’s surviving officers who’d sailed her from the southern waters of B.C. where she’d served on the famous Triangle Run (Victoria-Vancouver-Seattle) until requisitioned by the government for conversion to a troopship. It was while she was serving in that role that she was torpedoed in the Mediterranean.
The S.S. Princess Marguerite in her heyday as a coastal passenger liner.--Author's Collection
Mr. Campbell’s interest in the Marguerite is the fact that his father was on board her when she was hit and, happily, was one of those who survived to tell the tale.
But I simply can’t do justice to the Marguerite in today’s venue so you’ll have to wait until I can share with you the full story of her sinking—some of it as told by the commanding officer of the U-boat that sank her, thanks to Mr. Campbell’s research into his father’s wartime service. Please stay tuned!
In my book Riches to Ruin, the story of the Mount Sicker copper mining boom at the turn of the last century, I tell of the Tyee Mine’s aerial tramline by which it moved its ores down the mountain to the E&N Railway. It was designed by an American named Riblet whose company is yet in existence, doing in effect the same thing more than a century later, except that their aerial tramlines are now used as ski-lifts. The Mount Sicker tramline was one of the company’s first efforts and it was a success from the beginning, unlike poor competing Henry Croft’s far more costly and less efficient roller coaster, the Lenora Mount Sicker Railway that I told you about several weeks ago.
Only a few years ago, a logging company exposed two of the surviving tramline towers that I hadn’t realized were still there after a century. But not for long; after flagging them they toppled them. So much for history.
I mention this because a gentleman has contacted me about a follow-up story to the book he’s written on the history of the Riblet brothers and their tramlines/ski-lifts. It turns out there’s a poignant epilogue to their story that he’s promised to share with me. When he does, I shall share it with you!
Also from south of the border, a lady has written to inquire about her uncle, Sue Lem Bing Jung who was one of Duncan Chinatown’s best known citizens. He lived to be 100; her own father was living in Seattle when he died in 1957.
My reply was, regrettably, brief: “In my forthcoming book Built to Last: A Social History of Duncan’s Finest Character Homes & Buildings, I have a chapter on Chinatown and its demolition in the 1970s. Here is my single reference to your uncle:
“‘Among the other businesses and institutions which became Chinatown landmarks were the Midway Hotel and Sue Lem Bing’s Pekin Chop Suey Restaurant (known to many as Cupcakes for its “excitable cook”), according to Duncan author Ian MacInnes. In his book The Way It Was: A Glimpse of Duncan in the ‘40s and ‘50s, he describes the popular practice of younger Valley residents to end their Saturday evenings out in Chinatown, first at Charlie’s pool hall, then at the Pekin—as much in hopes of seeing the cook lose his temper as for the fine food.’”
Ian has written other excellent books on Duncan history, by the way, but they’re only available at the Cowichan Valley Museum gift shop whose operating hours are now restricted by the COVID crisis. So phone first if you wish to investigate further.
Finally, for today, a query about Protection Island. Charles T. was passed on to me by the Nanaimo Historical Society. He’s gathering information on B.C.’s rum running history “and what role Protection Island might have played in it. The island totes a rum theme which is interesting in itself.” He wanted to know if I “know of any direct historic references to B.C.’s rum running history”.
My reply: “I have three books on the rum running/Prohibition era and can find no specific reference to Protection Island. Does this mean it didn’t suit the rum runners’ purposes, being on Nanaimo’s doorstep as it is? I don’t know, but I’d think Newcastle Island [just next door] would have better served their purposes as it was uninhabited.
“Boat Harbour has cropped up in other criminal cases I’ve researched; again, out of the way and easily accessed as the rum runners were motorized.
“As for Protection Island’s ‘yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum,’ that’s the brain child of realtor Frank Ney.”
I wished him well in his research. The rum running epoch has been written about before but it’s such a large and fascinating subject that I’m sure there’s more of the story to be told if it can be ferreted out after almost a century.
Another author, this one local and the self-publishing guru of Canada, Suzanne Anderson is writing a history of R/Admiral Rollo Mainguy, formerly of Maple Bay, who went from being a child butterfly collector to “Father of the Modern Royal Canadian Navy.” She asked me to dig out my source of an anecdote I tell in my book, Cowichan Goes to War, 1914-1918. As a young naval cadet Mainguy was in Halifax on the infamous day that two ships collided in the harbour and sparked the catastrophic Halifax Explosion. Fortunately for Mainguy, who was sprayed with flying glass, his injuries weren’t fatal.
Meaning another trip to my archives as time permits.
The Cobble Hill Historical Society is hard at work preparing a reprint of Adelaide Ellis’s long out of print history of Cobble Hill, At the Foot of the Hill. I owned the publication rights having been given them by a family member, the late Lester Barry. But life is too full these days and I knew I’d never get around to republishing the book; so when the CHHS asked to take it over I was more than pleased to agree, and to write the foreword.
CAPTION: Cobble Hill Village; the general store on the left is still there, the post office to its left is now at Whippletree Junction.
Cobble Hill Village; the general store on the left is still there, the post office to its left is now at Whippletree Junction. --Author's Collection
Dr. Watson Dykes was available all hours.--Author's Collection
A pioneer resident of Mill Bay-Cobble Hill, Adelaide was a storehouse of knowledge and, thankfully, she put it to pen in her later years. Books such as hers should never be allowed to go out of print because, in their own modest ways, they’re priceless. Latecomers such as myself (a carpetbagger from Saanich, no less!) can’t possibly research to any really great depth the wealth of personal knowledge of one’s community that comes naturally to one who has lived there for all or for most of their lives.
All power to President Brenda Krug and her fellow CHHS members in their quest to return Adelaide Ellis to print for a whole new audience of readers.
I’ve had other letters and queries from readers and fellow researchers but that’s enough for today. In last week’s promo for this post I used the above photo of Dr. Watson Dykes who promised his patients to be on-call, 24/7, and who was the Valley’s chief medical officer during the Spanish ‘Flu epidemic of 1918-19. He was a truly remarkable man, one of our best pioneers, and I’ve been promised photos of him and his wife by a descendant who lives in the Maritimes who has recently inherited the family archives. I’ll keep you posted.
The Green Lantern Hotel basketball team was famous in its day. --Author's Collection
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