Qualla: Irvine's Landing

Irvine's Landing: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Two men bought the place in 1898, and neither of them was from anywhere near here. Steve Dames had left Riga, in what is now Latvia, and washed up on this coast the way seamen did. Joe Perry came from Cape Verde, off the west coast of Africa. Between them they acquired a small trading post at the entrance to Pender Harbour, and soon after, Perry's father-in-law joined them: Joseph Gonsalves, born on the island of Madeira in 1859, who had stowed away aboard a ship at the age of twelve and never really stopped moving. The shíshálh people call this harbour ḵalpilin, a word that means roughly coming around or detouring, describing a sheltered place you duck into when the wind and the sea outside turn hostile. Three men from three scattered corners of the Atlantic world had done exactly that.

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Irvine's Landing: The Englishman Who Got There First

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

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Irvine's Landing: Portuguese Joe

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 creat...

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Irvine's Landing: Where the Steamer Stopped

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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Irvine's Landing: Fish, Then Yachts

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 t...

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Irvine's Landing: What Is Left to See

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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