Somebody stole a two-tonne stone bowl. Then, twenty-five years later, somebody stole it again. The bowl is one of the artifacts left on Mayne Island by the Tsartlip First Nation, who lived here long before any European chart carried the place, and it went missing in 1982 and again in 2007 - a remarkable amount of effort to expend on an object that weighs as much as a small car. It is also a fair introduction to Mayne, a 21-square-kilometre island in the southern Gulf Islands that has spent its entire recorded history being valued, taken from, renamed and passed over by people on their way somewhere else. Just over 1,300 people live here now, in the quiet after all of that.
When word of gold on the Fraser reached Vancouver Island in 1858, miners needed a place to stage from, and Mayne Island sat exactly halfway between the island and the mainland. They gathered in the bay on the north shore, waited for weather, and then rowed across the Strait of Georgia toward the diggings. The bay has been Miners Bay ever since. The rush passed, but some of the people did not: the earliest homesteaders registered land claims around Miners Bay in 1859, and by 1891 the Mayne Island subdistrict counted 197 residents. Through the late nineteenth century this was the commercial and social centre of the whole Gulf Islands group, and the Springwater Lodge, built in 1892 and still open, is the oldest continuously operated hotel in British Columbia. The Fall Fair is still held in the old Agricultural Hall.
George Vancouver camped at Georgina Point in 1794 and his crew left behind a coin and a knife, which settlers turned up more than a century later. The naming came in 1857, when Captain George Richards surveyed these waters aboard HMS Plumper and attached the name of his lieutenant, Richard Charles Mayne - whose father had been the first commissioner of the London Metropolitan Police - to the island. Mayne's own journals of his travels in British Columbia remain a significant source for the colony's early history. Active Pass, the narrow curving channel between Mayne and Galiano, took its name from the USCS Active, the first steam vessel through it. A lighthouse went up at Georgina Point in 1885 to mark the entrance. Killer whales, harbour seals and seabirds work that water, and so, all day long, do the ferries.
From the turn of the twentieth century until 1942, a Japanese-Canadian community was woven into the economic and social life of Mayne Island, with close ties across the Gulf Islands and a serious stake in ventures such as greenhouse farming. Washiji Oya and his wife Yo Oya held title to a 159-acre property here between 1905 and 1908; Yo Oya is recognised as the first Japanese woman known to have immigrated to Canada and the first to give birth to Japanese-Canadian children in the country. In 1942 the government interned the island's Japanese Canadians, sending them to camps such as New Denver or to the sugar beet fields of southern Alberta. The BC Security Commission took their homes, land and fishing boats, nominally in trust, and later sold them without their owners' consent. Restrictions on where Japanese Canadians could live were not lifted until April 1949. Almost none of the families ever came back. The Japanese Gardens near Dinner Bay are dedicated to them.
The island's high ground is Mount Parke, 255 metres up in the south-central interior, with trails through mature Douglas-fir and out onto moss-covered rock to viewpoints over Active Pass and half the southern Gulf Islands. The edges are where Mayne spends its charm. Bennett Bay has a sandy swimming beach and an easy loop out to Campbell Point, where remnant old-growth still stands within the Gulf Islands National Park Reserve. St. John Point, at the southeastern tip, offers a shoreline circuit past arbutus-lined bluffs with Navy Channel, Plumper Sound, North Pender and Saturna laid out beyond. Edith Point on the north side protects rocky bluffs and sensitive shoreline. Several of these places exist because families gave the land away. Hitchhiking is normal here, and the island has built formal car stops along the main roads to make it easier.
Mayne Island sits at 48.8450 N, 123.2808 W in the southern Gulf Islands, midway between Vancouver Island and the Lower Mainland. From 2,000 to 3,500 feet AGL the shape reads clearly: a bent, wooded island with Mount Parke (255 m / 837 ft) as the obvious high point, Active Pass cutting a narrow curved channel along its northwest side toward Galiano Island, and Georgina Point light marking the pass entrance. Expect BC Ferries traffic in Active Pass more or less continuously - it is the main Vancouver-to-Victoria route - and Village Bay's terminal on the southwest shore. Miners Bay, Bennett Bay and Dinner Bay are all easily identified. There is no airstrip; scheduled floatplanes call from Vancouver. Ganges Water Aerodrome (CAX6) on Salt Spring Island is roughly 8 nm west, Victoria International (CYYJ) about 13 nm southwest, and Vancouver International (CYVR) about 21 nm northeast. Watch for floatplane traffic at low level and note the US border close by to the southeast; summer visibility is usually excellent, with fog common in Active Pass in autumn.