Lynne Jordan, former President of the Cortes Island Museum, is writing a history of Whaletown. Her manuscript is already 300 pages long. In the first of a series of interviews about her research, Jordan describes the history behind Whaletown’s name.

The First Nations were hunting whales long before the Europeans arrived.

“It was certainly more dangerous for the ones up around Haida Gwaii, that were fishing whales in the open ocean. A flip of a whales tale could totally destroy a canoe and everybody in it,” said Jordan. 

A pictograph of a man and a whale stares out from the cliff face at the mouth of Gorge Harbor, on Cortes Island. Jordan says nobody knows anything about it, but there were two village sites nearby. There is also a nine foot rock carving of whale on the beach between Mansons Lagoon and Smelt Bay. 

“That’s the only petroglyph that’s been found on Cortes so far. There’s some on the rocks at the south end of Marina Island as well,” she explained.  

In the podcast, Jordan reads out a story about the ancient villagers at Smelt Bay trapping whales on the beach. In response to a signal that a whale was coming up the Georgia Strait, they would launch their canoes and form a long curved line that stretched out into the ocean. When the command was given, they started dropping clam shells into the ocean. The whale’s sonar picked this up as a solid wall. Swerving to avoid the obstacle, the creature beached itself in the long sandy beach. 

“All they had to do then was wait for the tide to go out a little further and they could kill that whale with no danger at all to anybody. One whale is all they really needed. It would supply meat for a long time for everybody in the camp,” explained Jordan. 

This probably went on for thousands of years before the Europeans arrived. They originally sought timber for ship’s masts, but American whalers were plying British Columbian waters in the late 1700’s and early 1800s.

In 1869, James Dawson built a rendering factory close to where the present ferry terminal in Whaletown. It was there for a year and a half, during the peak of the whaling industry.

“The first year they did really well. There’s no paper records anywhere, but they figure that in the year and a half the whaling station in Whaletown actually rendered 300 whales, mostly humpbacks,” explained Jordan.

“There’s a cleared patch in the beach where ships would’ve come in, but there was also a wharf for the ‘Kate, to come in. Wherever they killed a whale, they would then tow it to the nearest beach and flense it. The blubber and the livers would be put back on board the ‘Kate,’ which would then deliver it to Whaletown for rendering. They had big pots that they built fires underneath, for boiling the blubber down to oil.”

One day a humpback struck back, capsizing the small boat carrying Captain Abel Douglas and his crew. The creature was wounded, having already been harpooned twice. The ‘Kate’s’ other small boat closed in to deliver the fatal blow. Then, leaving Douglas and his crew in the water, they towed the valuable whale carcass to the beach. Once the valuable whale blubber was secured, they returned to rescue their captain and his crew.

The whaling station relocated to Hornby Island in 1870, shortly before the collapse of the industry. They had hunted the whales into near extinction. Dawson had by that time amalgamated with another company, and they went into bankruptcy.

There was a brief revival of BC’s whaling industry in 1907, but after a year they once again wiped out most of the whales.

The last active whaling station in British Columbia, Coal Harbour in Quatsino Sound, closed in 1967.

There were no known humpback whale sightings in the waters surrounding Cortes for decades after 1870.

“I think because they had wiped out all the whales, there were no whales left with the knowledge of where to enter the inside passage. So whales continued up the coast to their summer feeding grounds up off Alaska,” said Jordan.

The first indication she has of this changing came in 2010, when she picked up a hitchhiker who had been diving off Marina Island. When he and his partner spied a whale, they swam closer.

“They started underwater from their boat, but very quickly discovered the whale had come over to view them. It swam down underneath them and rolled on its side, with his eye looking up at them.”

The hitchhiker was so pumped by the experience, that he kept talking about it throughout the entire ride.

Lynne Jordan and her husband, the late Joe Jordan, were in the ferry line-up when five humpbacks delayed the sailing in 2017. Someone spotted one of the whales breaching. Everyone left their cars and walked down to watch the show. The ferry came to a stop outside the harbour and waited.

“Eventually the whales did move, but we watched them for what must have been 20 minutes.  I wondered at the time if they knew that had been a whaling station, once upon a time and maybe they were paying homage to it. I have no idea.’ Remembers Jordan.

“They finally moved off a little bit and the ferry came in rather late,  offloaded then on loaded. As we’re going out of the Harbor, you get that little message and the captain came on to add, ‘Welcome to the BC Ferry’s Whale Watching tour to Heriot Bay.'”

The whale show continued as the ferry departed.

“In 2019, the fishery statistics said that there were 50 to 60 humpback in the Salish Sea and that has increased steadily every year. It’s well above that now,” said Jordan.

 Cortes Currents asked, how did Whaletown get its name?

“Whaletown started out as ‘Whale Bay’, because of the whaling station and then it became Whaleton ( T O N at the end).  When the name was registered, the end was it spelled T O w N. So it became Whaletown. But there was no town and there still isn’t,” replied Jordan.

Originally published on Aug 18, 2022, republished on July 10, 2023 and Oct 25, 2023.

Top image credit: Flensing a whale, the baleen hangs from its mouth – Photo courtesy Lynne Jordan

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