Spindrift: A Canadian Book of the Sea, edited by Michael L. Hadley and Anita Hadley, is an anthology of 170 pieces of writing from over 130 of Canada’s most significant literary voices. The passages range from Kwakiutl prayers to stories of immigration and exile; from tales of nautical exploration to humorous portraits of coastal characters; and from classic Canadian poetry to sea-themed contemporary fiction. It showcases the relationship of all Canadians to the three oceans that frame our country.

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from the Introduction, by Anita Hadley:

Beginnings

The inspiration for [Spindrift: A Canadian Book of the Sea] arose from an evening of nautical readings held at the Maritime Museum of British Columbia, Victoria. Entitled “Master and Commander,” the presentation offered an entertaining selection describing daring exploits upon the high seas. While passages were largely drawn from the adventures of Patrick O’Brian’s swashbuckling hero, Captain Jack Aubrey, other works from around the world were also represented. We were enthralled—and our seagoing imaginations tweaked. As we walked home past the vessels moored in Victoria’s Inner Harbour, we began to imagine a similar evening based on Canadian nautical writings. What would it include? Who would be the writers? How varied the experiences? How deep the emotions?

So began a five-year quest for Canadian nautical writings. It was a time of joyful discovery. Casting a wide net, we began with literature—novels, poetry, short stories, plays—but soon moved beyond this rich source to include non-fictional writing: journals, histories, biographies, memoirs, even articles. And sometimes we found that they all seemed to be rolled into one. Ship’s logs, myths, stories of quiet exaltation and wrenching lamentations can all become poetry when the experience resonates deeply with the rhythm of the human heart.

What we discovered has changed forever the way I think and feel about my country. I once had an image of Canada—narrowly populated from east to west along its southern reaches, then stretching endlessly northward towards limitless, unrelenting ice. It was the land—not the sea—that defined my country. But reading about the Canadian experience of the sea has reconfigured my image. From the Atlantic to the Arctic to the Pacific—yes, also to the Great Lakes—this land of heroic proportions is, as writer and novelist Rudy Wiebe has discovered, shaped and defined by water. Whether we live close to the sea, or far from its shores, it is the oceans that bind our destiny and inform who and what we are as a nation. 

The ten sections of Spindrift attest to the breadth—and sometimes contradictions—of our relationship as a nation to the sea. How our oceans encompass us, defining the limits of our vast land mass—at once connecting, separating, nourishing, threatening, bestowing, destroying, enthralling, betraying, inspiring…

A whole community of seafarers inhabits these pages: Inuit, First Nations, explorers, navigators, immigrants, refugees, fishers, whalers, crabbers and squid-jiggers, hunters, boat builders, traders, scientists, adventurers, former slaves, lepers, missionaries, lighthouse keepers, divers, salvagers, travellers and pleasure boaters, poets, surveyors, rescuers, survivors and victims… and those who wait silently in solitude. The stories they tell—or that are told about them—are, in fact, our stories, for they broaden our experience of who we are as a nation. I can no longer remain detached from events occurring on one of our distant shores. From shore to shore to shore, we are bound to one another by a surging in our veins awakening some primordial memory deep within our common experience.

In his book, The Idea of Canada: Letters to a Nation (2016), Governor General David Johnston challenges Canadians to give their country a gift to celebrate Canada’s 150th anniversary of Confederation. In celebration of our nation’s unique relationship to the three great oceans that bind us, we offer as our gift, Spindrift: A Canadian Book of the Sea.

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The three following excerpts that are featured in Spindrift represent the three oceans. 

 From “The SS Atlantic’s Last Resting Place,” (Cochkanoff and Chaulk) p.37

The SS Atlantic wrecked on the starkly beautiful coastline of Meagher’s Island, southwest of Halifax. A white granite outcropping of the Appalachian Mountains, the island boldly defies the open Atlantic Ocean… At the water’s edge, the hard rock is worn smooth and sculpted from the relentless waves beating against the shoreline. For several hundred feet from the tide line, the granite is bleached and scoured from the frequent winter storms. During these wild events, waves well over fifty feet high explode against the unyielding granite, sending millions of tons of water surging over the rocks and carrying away anything movable, even huge boulders, which it sometimes tosses back a week or two later…

The barren landscape above belies the thriving marine life below the water’s surface. The rocky shoreline plummets abruptly to a depth of eighty feet less than a stone’s throw from shore, which contributed to the great loss of life when the Atlantic wrecked. But, even though this area witnessed so much suffering and death, the inconceivable amount and variety of life there now serves as a reminder of the cycles of nature, as life follows death like the new growth that sprouts up following a forest fire.

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from “The Haida Canoe,” Martine J. Reid, p. 77 

Like other traditional artworks, canoes were vessels of knowledge. They communicated significant information about the individuals and societies that produced them—information that was also expressed in various cultural and spiritual contexts, such as in myths and rituals. Due to their implicit connecting faculty, Northwest Coast canoes were metaphors for different sets of ideas, including wealth and property, exchange and gift, war, marriage and death.

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From “The Whalers of Pangnirtung”, Etooangat, p. 176

When I was a child, if the whalers were short of men I was asked to fill in and help them. I actually took part in killing the blue whales even though I was only in my early teens. Every spring, in the month of June, while the floe edge was still a long way from land, the whaling boats would be taken down to the water on big sleds pulled by lots of dogs. The kind of boats I’m talking about had a roof over them, although some were open boats. Once the seal hunting began, the boats would stay out for weeks. Every week a boat would come around the other boats to pick up the catch and take it back to camp, and the other hunters would carry on hunting more seals to fill their boats. The boats would stay in the water until the ice was all gone, which is usually in July.

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These excerpts are taken from Spindrift: A Canadian Book of the Sea, edited by Michael L. Hadley and Anita Hadley, copyright © 2017. Reproduced with permission from Douglas & McIntyre, Vancouver.