SCHOONER CASCO KNEW FAME, INFAMY
It was said that customs officials suffered insomnia because “it was generally conceded that once Casco spread her wings nothing on the high seas could catch her”. If ever haunted lady darkened Pacific Northwest waters, it was the ghost-ridden schooner Casco. For haunted the Casco must have been: by the memories of a distant maidenhood when she’d known respectability—even fame—to the moonless nights of middle age when she’d descended to the iniquity of smuggling and murder. Even had Dr. Samuel Merritt been blessed with the gift of prophecy and a vivid imagination it’s unlikely that he’d have foreseen the remarkable career his palatial yacht was to experience in 41 adventurous years. A wealthy Oakland physician who practised in San Francisco, Merritt had 85-foot Casco designed along the lines of the famous tea clippers for idle cruising and racing in...
Read MoreJOHN 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...
Read More
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...
Read More