JOHN KERGAN: HERMIT OF TRIAL ISLAND
Who was John Kergan? We know no more about him today than Victorians did over a century ago: that he had been a seaman on the Great Lakes and that he was adept at boat building, inventing and painting. Some even thought him a mechanical and artistic genius. To one and all he was the “Hermit of Trial Island.” Whatever his past, Kergan seemed to have but one desire in life: to live by himself without interruption or the amenities of civilization. Just offshore of Victoria, on Trial Island, then uninhabited but for seabirds, seals, mink and occasional picnickers, he constructed a crude shelter of driftwood. He was almost totally self-sufficient; with a home-made forge, and rip-saw powered by a windmill of driftwood, he built boats. His salt also was provided by the sea and wild berries on the...
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Remembrance: 75 Years Since Second World War
I grew up on the Second World War. On a street like Brett Avenue in Saanich, where every able-bodied father but one served in uniform, playing war was as natural to us kids as playing cowboys and Indians. And there was no question as to who were the good guys and who were the bad. We took turns wearing ‘Big Gordie’s’ army helmet. When, in my teens, I last saw it, it was lying in the bushes in the vacant lot across from my home, half-filled with dirt and moss and rusting away. HMCS Iroquois, the first of Canada’s legendary Tribal-class destroyers. Throughout the Second World War Canadian ships and Canadian seamen carried most of the load in escorting vitally needed freighters and tankers to Britain by running a gauntlet of U-boats in the North Atlantic. Come to think...
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John Cowley Preferred Flowers to Gold
John Joseph Cowley was one of the legion of hopefuls who sought to make his fortune in one of British Columbia’s several gold rushes. Few, in fact, of the tens of thousands who tried even recovered their expenses before having to go to work for those who’d been “lucky” or return to their previous occupations. Among these for the most part anonymous also-rans was John Cowley whose diary, today in possession of the British Columbia Archives, provides fascinating insight into what it was like to uproot one’s whole life and travel as much as halfway round the world to look for gold–but not find it. Very few prospectors struck it rich; few even made wages. The miner working fabled Williams Creek in the Cariboo in this government photo from 1938 appears to have an ambitious setup even though the...
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