I note that there is a Hastings Mill Museum in Vancouver and I'm planning to visit it when I'm in the area in a couple of weeks. Dave McArthur is hosting a song party for me in nearby Richmond in Steveston Village on Thursday, August 25th, and it's a good bet that I'll be singing "Hastings Mill", "Lumber", "Pacific Coast" and "The Old Fiddle" that evening.

We then go on to Victoria where I'm planning to make a similar presentation at the Nautical Song Circle that takes place at the Bent Mast Pub in the James Bay neighborhood on Saturday, August 27.

Here's one of Cicely's descriptions of Victoria Harbour when she was hanging out there in the early 1900's:

From Cicely Fox Smith's SAILOR-TOWN DAYS, 1923 pp. 163-164


"You can sit on the edge of the Outer Wharf at Victoria, and fish for black bass with a bit of cotton rag, and watch the great ships come in from the sea with the wonder of the East in their holds.

Over across the Strait of Juan de Fuca the summits of the ranges of the American mainland are flushed with faint rose, for it is only at sunset that the black bass bite. There is a smell of forest fires in the air, and a glow on the flanks of the remote mountains, and a light wisp of cloud that means miles of ravaged woodland and an inferno of smoke and flame in which men are fighting, parched and blackened like demons. The light on Brotchie Ledge has just begun to wink leisurely, and far out on Race Rocks the lighthouse answers it with his occulting beam.

The sun has gone down into the China Seas in a great fiery golden pomp, like the sea-burial of an old Norse king, and a splendid afterglow, slow and solemn as a funeral march, goes flooding up to the zenith like the glow of a funeral pyre; and on the edge of it hangs a lonely star. A small moon drifts like a feather dropped from an archangel's wing. A riding-light has begun to glimmer in the rigging of the anchored windjammer in the Royal Roads."

Cheerily,
Charley Noble