It is said that when the little riot broke out in
Vancouver these ‘heathen’ were invited
by other Asiatics to join in defending themselves
against the white man. They refused on the ground
that they were subjects of the King. I wonder
what tales they sent back to their villages, and where,
and how fully, every detail of the affair was talked
over. White men forget that no part of the Empire
can live or die to itself.
Here is a rather comic illustration of this on the
material side. The wonderful waters between Vancouver
and Victoria are full of whales, leaping and rejoicing
in the strong blue all about the steamer. There
is, therefore, a whalery on an island near by, and
I had the luck to travel with one of the shareholders.
‘Whales are beautiful beasts,’ he said
affectionately. ’We’ve a contract
with a Scotch firm for every barrel of oil we can deliver
for years ahead. It’s reckoned the best
for harness-dressing.’
He went on to tell me how a swift ship goes hunting
whales with a bomb-gun and explodes shells into their
insides so that they perish at once.
’All the old harpoon and boat business would
take till the cows come home. We kill ’em
right off.’
’And how d’you strip ’em?’
It seemed that the expeditious ship carried also a
large air-pump, and pumped up the carcass to float
roundly till she could attend to it. At the end
of her day’s kill she would return, towing sometimes
as many as four inflated whales to the whalery, which
is a factory full of modern appliances. The whales
are hauled up inclined planes like logs to a sawmill,
and as much of them as will not make oil for the Scotch
leather-dresser, or cannot be dried for the Japanese
market, is converted into potent manure.
‘No manure can touch ours,’ said the shareholder.
’It’s so rich in bone, d’you see.
The only thing that has beat us up to date is their
hides; but we’ve fixed up a patent process now
for turning ’em into floorcloth. Yes, they’re
beautiful beasts. That fellow,’ he pointed
to a black hump in a wreath of spray, ‘would
cut up a miracle.’
‘If you go on like this you won’t have
any whales left,’ I said.
’That is so. But the concern pays thirty
per cent, and—a few years back, no one
believed in it.’
I forgave him everything for the last sentence.
Canada possesses two pillars of Strength and Beauty
in Quebec and Victoria. The former ranks by herself
among those Mother-cities of whom none can say ‘This
reminds me.’ To realise Victoria you must
take all that the eye admires most in Bournemouth,
Torquay, the Isle of Wight, the Happy Valley at Hong-Kong,
the Doon, Sorrento, and Camps Bay; add reminiscences
of the Thousand Islands, and arrange the whole round
the Bay of Naples, with some Himalayas for the background.
