The first Chinese people known to have set foot in what is now Canada arrived in 1788, and they came to build a ship.
John Meares was an English trader working the sea otter route between the Pacific coast and Canton. The furs were bought cheap on this coast and sold dear in China, and Meares wanted a base at the near end of that run rather than a long voyage each way. So he recruited in Canton and Macao — shipwrights, smiths, carpenters, sailors — and carried them across to Nootka Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, in 1788.
The numbers are not settled. Around fifty is the figure usually given for the artisans on that voyage. One account says seventy carpenters. A broader count of Chinese contract workers in the enterprise runs to about a hundred and twenty. Nobody was keeping the kind of register that would let us be exact, and the vagueness is the first thing to notice about the record.
What they built is not vague. They put up a dockyard and a fortified post at Friendly Cove, and then they built a ship — the North West America, a schooner of about forty tons, framed at Nootka and launched on the twentieth of September 1788. It was the first European-rigged vessel built on this coast.
An older reference work describes it as "the first vessel constructed by white men in that part of the world". The men who constructed it were Chinese. That sentence is not a typing error and it is not unusual for its period; it is what happens when the category doing the work in a writer's head is the flag a ship sails under rather than the hands that framed her. We have the launch date, we have the tonnage, and for most of two centuries we had a description of the builders that left the builders out.
The Canadian Encyclopedia's position is straightforward. These artisans, it says, are "the first documented Chinese people in Canada".
That is a careful sentence and the care is in the word documented. Not a theory, not an inference from a court history, not a claim resting on what a fleet could in principle have done. A trader's own journals, a dated launch, and a ship that then went to work.
It is worth sitting with the sequence for a moment, because the ordering is almost comically neat. Chinese shipwrights launched the first European-style vessel on this coast seventy years before the gold rush, ninety-seven years before the head tax, and seventy-nine years before Confederation. Whatever else is arguable about the Chinese place in this country, priority on the Pacific coast is not.
The Nuu-chah-nulth were already there, and had been for a very long time, and it was their harbour. The post at Friendly Cove existed because Maquinna permitted it. A story about who arrived first on this coast that forgets the people who were not arriving is not worth telling, and the Nuu-chah-nulth are in the record here as hosts and as traders, not as scenery.
What happened to the men afterwards is where the documentation thins out and then stops.
Some sailed on. The enterprise collapsed into the Nootka Crisis of 1789, when Spain seized Meares's ships and post and very nearly started a war with Britain over it, and in that confusion the workers scattered — some to Macao, some into other crews, some nowhere the paperwork follows. There are Nuu-chah-nulth oral accounts that some of the Chinese stayed and married into the community. Those accounts are not corroborated in the written record and this paper is not going to assert them as fact. They are also exactly the kind of thing the written record of 1789 would not have bothered to put down, which is a reason to hold the question open rather than closed.
So the strand runs out. There is no continuous Chinese presence from 1788 to the gold rush of 1858; the thread is cut, and the community that exists on this coast today traces to the later arrivals, not to Meares's shipwrights.
That is the honest shape of it, and it is better than the tidier version. A tidy version would have the 1788 artisans as founders of something. What they actually were is a group of skilled men hired a very long way from home, who did difficult work competently in a place nobody from their country had worked before, and whose names were not recorded because nobody thought to record them.
Which, as it turns out, is the same sentence you end up writing about the men in the Fraser Canyon ninety-seven years later.
This is the second piece in Before the Maps, a series on early contact and the stories told about it.
