Texada is one of the Northern Gulf Islands, a long spine of rock lying across Malaspina Strait from Powell River, with the open Strait of Georgia along its western shore. In the era when whaling stations worked this coast, Blubber Bay offered what such an operation needed: deep water close in, a sheltered beach, and distance from anyone who might object. Carcasses were winched ashore and flensed — the blubber cut away in sheets and fed into try pots that ran day and night. The oil went to lamps, lubricants and soap. What remained went into the water or onto the rocks. It was filthy, dangerous, profitable work, and the men who did it were paid to do it fast. Nothing of that operation survives on the shoreline today except the word painted on the ferry schedule.

What replaced whaling was an industry with an even simpler logic: the island itself is the commodity. Texada holds enormous reserves of limestone, and Blubber Bay became a quarry town where the pits, offices and workings climb the hill directly behind the dock. On the north rim of the bay sit the disused works of the BC Cement Company — a wharf, a work area, and a string of pits stretching out toward the headland, all of it now weathering quietly. In 1970 the settlement was still a company town outright, thirty-five families living under the ownership of Domtar Chemical Company and cutting limestone for concrete manufacture. Texada's other main community, Van Anda on the east coast, had grown up the same way around iron. Two towns, one island, both built on the proposition that the ground under them was worth more shipped away than left in place.

In the late 1930s Blubber Bay belonged to the Pacific Lime Company, and its roughly 156 workers had already tested the company once. A six-week walkout won a modest wage adjustment and a promise that union activists would not be singled out. As soon as production resumed, the company fired local president Jack Hole and twenty-two others. On June 2, 1938, two-thirds of the workforce walked out again, this time as the first serious test of the newly formed International Woodworkers of America in British Columbia. Roughly seventy of the strikers were Chinese workers who had been paid less than their white coworkers for the same labour — the standard arrangement of that era, and precisely the wedge companies relied on to break a picket line. It did not work here. The union seated Chinese strikers at its meetings and counted their votes, and the warnings posted for strikebreakers went up in both English and Chinese. Men fed themselves through the winter by fishing rock cod off the docks and hunting deer and pheasant on the island. In mid-September the dispute turned violent: eleven people were hospitalized and twenty-three arrested. Constable Andrew Williamson beat union vice-president Bob Gardner badly enough to break four ribs. Twelve strikers were sentenced to four to six months for rioting, and Williamson drew six months himself. Gardner, still recovering from the beating, caught influenza in prison and died there. The strike ran eleven months and then ended in defeat. The IWA all but vanished from British Columbia afterward, even as it thrived south of the border.

The ferry from Powell River still crosses Malaspina Strait and lands at Blubber Bay, and most people who step off it drive straight through, heading south toward Van Anda and the rest of Texada. Those who stop find a small store and, above the landing, a museum and archives where the island keeps its own record — the quarry, the company town, the strike, the names. It is a modest building for a large amount of history. The pits above the road are still worked, the BC Cement ruins still stand on the north rim, and the bay still carries a name earned by an industry nobody here remembers firsthand. Blubber Bay has been asked to give up whale oil, limestone and labour in turn. It is one of those places where the whole argument of the twentieth-century coast — what a resource is worth, and who gets paid for it — is written small enough to see in one glance from the deck of a ferry.