CANADA'S ISLAND HIGHWAY.

THE 'Island Highway' stretches along the eastern shore of Vancouver Island on Canada's west coast, from Victoria at its southern tip to Port Hardy in the north, where the 'British Columbia Ferries' motor vessel Queen of the North leaves for Prince Rupert. Highway 19, it is called, and it is a broad, paved road which in places becomes a four-lane motorway cutting through reforested woodlands, as straight as a Roman road and as indifferent to the local terrain, and the old highway, renamed 19A, is reduced to a picturesque local road. North of Port Hardy the paved road runs out, and automobiles that get to Holberg must navigate a rough gravel road. From Holberg a Land Rover can reach the north tip of Vancouver Island at Cape Scott, where the Japanese Current washes up Coca-Cola cans from Singapore and spherical glass floats from the fishing nets of Japanese fishing boats.

For sailors, the channel which skirts the island's eastern shore is the 'Inside Passage', and in summer, it is populated by vast cruise ships. 'Gin palaces', my neighbour calls them. They are seasonal visitors which migrate to warmer waters when the days get shorter after the autumn equinox. But in the lazy days of summer they cruise from the port of Vancouver through the Gulf Islands, which is a corner of Canada with almost Mediterranean climate, past the misty Queen Charlotte Islands and on to Alaska. Before radar and sonar, these were dangerous waters. The cruise ships that sail up the Lynn Canal to Skagway in Alaska pass the Vanderbilt reef where the little Princess Sophia foundered in 1918 with all her passengers: more than 350 persons, 24 horses and five dogs. A few miles away is Shelter Island where the Princess Kathleen ran aground thirty-four years later and sank. This is also a route of broken dreams. There is a 'Miners' Bay' on Mayne Island named after the men who camped there overnight on their w ay to the Cariboo Gold Rush that began in 1858, and forty years later, the rusty ships that carried miners to the Kiondike Gold Rush in the Yukon sailed the Inside Passage. Some of the newcomers to these waters dreamed of utopias rather than gold. On Malcolm Island is Sointula: the name means 'Harmony' in Finnish. A century ago a Finnish socialist named Matti Kurikka founded a commune here. The early years were hard: Sointula attracted more intellectuals than practical farmers, and it survived only with the help of the native Indians. But survive it did, though Kurikka himself abandoned his utopia after only four years, and with the Vietnam War a new invasion arrived: American draft-dodgers with the 'hippie' ideals of the 1960s 'back-to-the-land' movement. The adjustment of the Finnish settlers to the new 'hippie' utopia was neither immediate nor easy, but by now an entente has been worked out. As one local historian put it, the two communities respect each other.

I had spent an idyllic summer on Mayne Island which takes its name from a lieutenant on a Royal Navy survey ship that charted these waters a century and a half ago. But summer was coming to an end. The days were growing shorter and the trees were beginning to take on their autumn colours. Twenty-five years had passed since my wife and I had driven up the 'Island Highway' in a Hillman Minx, and we decided it was time to revisit it. We put our car on the Queen of Nanaimo, and sailed to Salt Spring Island, and from there took the ferry for a brief voyage to Vancouver Island. Once there, we headed north.

There are odd historical memories scattered about this area. Port Hardy where we headed first is named after the captain of Nelson's flagship, H.M.S. Victory, at the Battle of Trafalgar. Thomas Masterman Hardy had no known connection with Port Hardy, but the inlet here was labelled Hardy Bay after him, presumably on the assumption that a naval man whom Nelson asked to kiss him as he lay dying should be honoured by a body of water, and when a European settlement began here a hundred years ago, it took its name from the bay. Only in the 1940s did the immigrants begin to outnumber the aboriginal population.

Beside the dock, the Seagate Hotel bears a plaque announcing that it is an historic site. It houses a pleasant restaurant, but its rooms are in a modern building across the street. History may attract tourists but for sleeping they want accommodations with all modern conveniences. Port Hardy on a damp, cool autumn evening is an unexciting place. Four fishing trawlers had tied up to the wharf, but their crews were nowhere to be seen. I peered into a small stucco building with a sign over the door saying 'Plato's Chicken and Pizza'. There were a few plastic tables with three bored aboriginal teenagers sitting at one of them, and in a cavernous space behind the counter an assortment of video games waited for patrons. Yet Port Hardy has a past. The oldest dated archaeological site on Vancouver Island is here. The ancestors of the three aboriginal youth in 'Plato's Chicken and Pizza' lived here 8,000 years ago.

The young woman behind the counter in the office at Telegraph Cove down the coast was practising diplomacy on some disgruntled tourists when I arrived. Telegraph Cove is a community rescued by tourism, though to get there tourists must still navigate a logging road and give right-of-way to the logging trucks that chew up the gravel surface. Directly across the cove a telegraph station was built in 1911, where Morse Code operators banged out messages until the Second World War. Then the Royal Canadian Air Force commandeered Telegraph Cove and took over its old sawmill which had been built in 1922 to make boxes for salted dog salmon. The war ended, the airmen left, and Telegraph Cove became a sawmill town again, providing custom-made lumber for boats and docks. Finally the mill closed and Telegraph Bay would have become a picturesque, decaying village that no one visited except for an unlikely saviour: the Orcimus Orca, the largest member of the dolphin family popularly (and erroneously) known as the 'Killer W hale'.

Telegraph Cove overlooks Johnstone Strait, one of the foremost habitats of the Killer Whale. Johnstone Strait and nearby Robson Bight are visited regularly by some 170 whales, travelling in pods which are matrilineal family units. They are playful, intelligent creatures which can be trained to make spectacular leaps out of the water, and consequently they have become favourite attractions in amusement parks where they live out unhappy lives, separated from their relatives and unable to return to the wild. Keiko, the whale that starred in the Hollywood movie, Free Willy, was brought back to his home waters around Iceland with much publicity, but at age 23, he has been incapable of adjusting to life in the ocean. In the wild, killer whales are more interesting than they are in amusement parks, and twenty years ago, the Stubbs family realized that Telegraph Cove sat on the edge of an unparalleled tourist attraction. They offered whale-watching cruises and restored the old buildings that perched on pilings along the rim of the harbour. Old houses, a bunkhouse and a mess hall, and even a recycled floating hospital were refurbished to provide tourist accommodation. The disgruntled visitors whom I encountered in the Telegraph Cove office were complaining that the whale-watching expedition left the next day at 10 a.m. and returned at 4 p.m., too late for their bus. Why couldn't it leave earlier?

The Spanish flu epidemic of 1918-19 hit this area hard, and a plaque at Telegraph Cove commemorates one incident. A family of six, four children and their parents, were living in complete isolation at the end of Baronets Passage. With no contact with the outside world, they should have been safe from the virus; nonetheless the mother fell ill. When the father began to develop symptoms too, he put his family in a rowboat and set out for Alert Bay. He reached Telegraph Cove where he collapsed and died, and his wife died later that night. It fell to the attendant at Telegraph Cove to row the six miles to Alert Bay with word of the family's plight.

Our own visit to Alert Bay was by ferry which runs from Port McNeil alternately to Alert Bay on Cormorant Island and Sointula, the old Finnish utopia on Malcolm Island. The old mission school at Alert Bay stands foursquare and ugly near the shore, with white paint peeling off its red brick, but it is not quite empty: the offices of the Alert Bay and District Credit Union are on the second floor, and beside it is the new 'U'mista Cultural Centre' with splendidly carved wooden doors. The mission residential schools for native Indians, which were run a generation ago by the churches, have left a vile reputation. The aim of the Canadian governments of the time was to assimilate the aboriginal population, and government-financed mission schools were their instruments. Young Indians were taken away from their families to these schools where they were cut off from their own culture and languages, given a Eurocentric education in English or French as the case might be, and then sent back to their reservations. It wa s the approved method of the time for dealing with aborigines; across the Pacific in Australia, a version of the same policy was inflicted on the Australian natives.

The Indians look back at the mission schools now with bitterness and have launched legal suits against the churches that ran them, alleging brutality, cultural genocide and sexual abuse. Matthew Coon Come, the elected chief of the Assembly of First Nations in Canada, recalls how he and his two sisters were taken from their village by a Royal Canadian Mounted Policeman and a government agent, put on an airplane and flown to a Catholic residential school. It was a new school; Coon Come as a youngster watched its official opening by the Minister of Indian Affairs at the time, who was Jean Chretien, now the recently re-elected Prime Minister of Canada. Coon Come was six, his sisters five and seven. They were kept in the mission school for nine years. It can be said in defence of the churches that they were only instruments of government policy, but their mission schools have left terrible scars on a whole generation of native Indians.

Turn right from the Alert Bay ferry terminal, however, and the road runs past some restaurants, a shuttered theatre and finally the 'Namcis Burial Ground' fronting the sea. This is a splendid collection of totem poles, though scattered among them are a few common garden-variety gravestones. I have no skill at reading totems, but I noted among them the wicked witch of the woods, Zonqua, with her pendulous breasts and protruding lips twisted into the shape of an 'O'. We stood with our backs to the sea, looking at the totem poles and obeying the 'No Trespassing' sign that ordered hoipolloi not to enter the burial ground, and as we stood, we sensed eyes behind us, looking at us. Behind us a large, black-hulled cruise ship had crept up quietly, slowing almost to a halt so that its passengers could look at the Alert Bay totem poles through their binoculars. Binoculars are de rigeur for Alaska cruises.

The blackest history of Vancouver Island, however, belongs to the coal mines of the Cumberland and Lake Comox area. In their day -- which stretched from 1888 to 1966 -- they produced some of the finest anthracite in the world. One Cumberland old-timer, a retired grocer, recalled before his death at 105 that he had heard a captain of the old Blue Funnel Line say that he would steam halfway around the world to fill his bunkers with Comox coal. The mines also held the world record for accidents. Deaths from explosions or collapsing tunnels were three times greater in Cumberland than they were in contemporary British mines. But coal was Cumberland's reason for existence and it was Vancouver Island's most important industry.

I first visited Cumberland just as the era of coal was closing down, in the mid 1960s. I remembered it as a sad, dismal place. It had made the fortune of the Dunsmuirs, one of the wealthiest families in the little provincial capital of British Columbia, Victoria. The mansion of Robert Dunsmuir whose company started mining here in 1887 is now a museum, and the estate of his son, James, has become a university. In 1910, James Dunsmuir sold his interest in the company to a Toronto financier who promptly issued stocks and bonds for more than twice what the company was worth. The victims were mainly British investors. The bondholders were finally paid off in 1947, but the common stock was worthless and preferred shares paid dividends for only two years. The little museum in Cumberland now has framed a newspaper story of James Dunsmuir, greedy robber baron and bitter enemy of the labour unions.

The coal industry has gone, but Cumberland has not. It has had a facelift. The dismal buildings I remembered have been painted. The false fronts along the main street might have stepped out of Disneyworld's Frontierland. But the Cumberland museum is full of mementos of the past, when Cumberland attracted miners from around the world: Welsh, Scots, English, Italians, Japanese, Afro-Americans, Central Europeans, Chinese. Cumberland's Chinatown was the third largest in North America after San Francisco and Vancouver. One miner who worked at Cumberland during the Great Depression wrote down his reminiscences for the museum. He came from the province of Ontario in central Canada and his first chore was at No. 5 mine, hauling timber beams with a donkey named Dempsey. Dempsey knew his job well: he pulled a cart that ran on rails, and where the roof of the passage was very low, he would get down on his knees and creep through. Next, the Ontario boy was assigned to drilling in a tunnel which was only three feet from floor to ceiling. Eighty-five to one hundred and fifteen holes a day was considered a good shift for a driller, though one miner nicknamed 'Double-Shift Joe' could manage one hundred and fifty. He was also famous for drinking twenty pints of beer on a Saturday night. However, in 1940, the miner concluded, 'the war overseas looked so bad I volunteered'. He never returned to Cumberland.

There is no market for Cumberland's anthracite now. Nor is there any place for the raw society of Cumberland, with its careless feeling for human life, its racial tensions and its brutal history of strikes and labour relations. But it has recycled its past gracefully. Forty years ago it was declining into a ghost town. Now with some paint and imagination it has become a tourist destination.

The road out of Cumberland, which leads three miles on to Lake Comox, where the miners' families used to camp in the summer, passes two cairns. The first marks the site of the 'pioneer black community who lived and worked in the Cumberland area from 1893 to 1960'. Some of their cottages are still standing as dilapidated witnesses to the past. The second marks the site of No. 4 mine, which operated from 1890 until the second world war, and produced the highest tonnage and best quality coal in the area. Fifty-one miners died in it in 1922 and 1923 when methane gas exploded in the tunnels. Lake Comox itself is deserted; the campers have left for the season. A rowboat was beached on the gravelly shore and abandoned there. The lake stretched serene and untroubled to the opposite shore where a hiker can still encounter bears and cougars. Comox Lake keeps its secrets, and there are some to be kept.