The post-contact story begins in 1865, when an English immigrant named Charles Irvine set up a small trading post on the point at the harbour mouth. It was the first settler establishment in the ḵalpilin area and it worked because of geography rather than ambition. Pender Harbour is a deep, complicated inlet of rocky bays and islets on a coast that otherwise offers very little shelter, and any vessel working the strait had a reason to come in. Irvine's name stuck to the spot and has outlasted everything he built. What has not survived, officially, is the apostrophe. Canadian naming authorities began stripping apostrophes from place names in the late 1800s, so BC Geographical Names lists the site as Irvines Landing, whatever the locals write on their mail.

Gonsalves arrived at Pender Harbour carrying a grievance. He had been living at Brockton Point in Vancouver, part of a small mixed community of Portuguese, Indigenous, and other families settled on the peninsula, when the city and the province set about clearing the land to create Stanley Park. He fought the eviction in the Supreme Court and lost, and he and his family moved north. On this coast he found something harder to take away from him. Under the banner Gonsalves and Dames General Traders, he and Steve Dames expanded steadily, buying up waterfront and putting up the Irvines Landing Hotel and Store. Locally he was known as Portuguese Joe. He died in 1939, part of his property went to the community, and the village across the harbour bears the name of the island he was born on: Madeira Park.

Before roads reached this coast, the Union Steamship Company was the coast. Its vessels ran north from Vancouver on fixed schedules, and where they tied up, a place existed; where they did not, it effectively did not. Irvines Landing was an early Union stop, which made the hotel and store the clearing house for everything moving through Pender Harbour. Loggers came down out of the camps for supplies and for a night in a proper bed. Settlers collected mail and freight. Fishermen provisioned. The general store carried the improbable inventory that isolation demands, from flour and boots to engine parts, because the next chance was a week away. A dock, a store, and a hotel do not sound like much until you consider that they were the only ones for many miles of shoreline.

The settlement changed shape with the coast's economy. As the salmon fishery industrialized, Irvines Landing became a fish-processing centre, with the smell and racket that implies: boats offloading, ice moving, the cannery rhythm that governed whole Pacific communities through the first half of the twentieth century. Then the fishery contracted, the roads and ferries arrived, the Union steamers stopped running, and Pender Harbour discovered a second career. Sheltered anchorage that once meant survival now means recreation. Today the landing serves yachts and summer visitors, and the harbour that the shíshálh named for its shelter is full of vessels ducking in for exactly the reason the name describes, just with different motives.

Irvines Landing today is a quiet point at the mouth of a busy-looking harbour, a dock and a handful of buildings among the Douglas firs. The original hotel is gone. Most of what happened here survives in two locally written books, Bright Seas, Pioneer Spirits and Women of Pender Harbour, and in the oral memory of families who have been in the harbour for four and five generations. It is a useful place to stand and reconsider what a frontier actually looked like on this coast. Not a wave of settlers pushing west, but a Latvian, a Cape Verdean, a Madeiran, and an Englishman, arriving separately by sea into a harbour the shíshálh had been sheltering in for thousands of years, and making a store out of it.