My historical writing narrates untold stories of the people of Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea, combining local history, family history and geography.
Vancouver Island and the Salish Sea. Thanks, Google Earth. (Labels added.)
I’ve published seven books about this region, including three histories in photographs. Two websites combine the threads of local, family and natural history.
Contemporary works include guidebooks to Victoria and Vancouver Island, the compendium Vancouver Island Book of Everything (in its second edition) and an album of photographs of the region and people by Boomer Jerritt that I curated.
I’ve published literary essays and reviews and many feature articles about my home province, British Columbia. I maintain websites on postmodern poetics and foreign travel.
These résumés are works in progress:
Current projects include a story of shipwreck on the Salish Sea, a biography of Captain William Henry McNeill and a revision of The Story of Sidney.
I give slide talks on local history and conduct neighbourhood and cemetery tours.
In the wider realm of historical scholarship I have recently published a long-form article about an occurrence of the so-called Spanish flu in Kansas in March 1918.
Facebook is my medium of choice.
Header photo by Godfrey Stephens. Background image: detail of Gonzalo Lopez de Haro’s 1790 Plano del Estrecho de Fuca
Hi Peter, my name is John Middleton and I am the director of the Vancouver Island Chapter of the Underwater Archaeological Society of BC (UASBC). I noticed recently that you were working on a book about the wreck of the SS Clallam in 1904, and was wondering if you might be interested in sharing the story and your research findings with us at one of our regular monthly meetings. We meet on the second Wednesday of the month at 7PM at Swan’s Hotel and Brewpub on Pandora Street.
There is an upcoming publication in the Seattle Times on the Clallam sinking, which mentions that the pilot house and parts of the upper deckhouse (which broke off from the foundering hull) were salvaged, brought to Victoria, auctioned and sold for planned display at a Victoria theater. Victor Daily Colonist March 216 1904 p.5 :”Wreckage Sold”
Any idea if any of this survived, such as the pilot house?