With more than 100 remarkably detailed paintings, Voyages to the New World and Beyond (D&M $55) by artist and former seaman Gordon Miller depicts 500 years of sailing voyages to new worlds from the mid-15th to 19th centuries with scholarly respect and astonishing clarity. 978-1-55365-573-2

Miller also illustrated The Journal of Etienne Mercier (Vidacom Publications 2016) $19.95 written by David Bouchard. 978-1-988182-10-0

Pacific Voyages: The Story of Sail in the Great Ocean
by Gordon Miller (D&M $59.95)

Review by Graham Chandler (BCBW 2023)

In Victoria’s Maritime Museum of BC there sits a vintage 38-foot Nuu-chah-nulth whaling canoe that looks decidedly non-traditional. She has a deck, a keel, a cockpit, a cabin, three masts, higher gunwales, and a Chinook name meaning “friend”: Tilikum. The story behind her starts one night in the spring of 1901 at a Vancouver waterfront bar where an enterprising young journalist named Norman Luxton was sniffing out potential stories.

There Luxton met an adventurous sailor named John Voss, who was looking for work. Just three years earlier, the legendary Joshua Slocum had circumnavigated the globe in a small sailboat; and over beers Voss and Luxton made a sizeable bet—do the same but in a smaller boat. Voss pulled it off in Tilikum and made history.

It’s a swashbuckling story capping off what Gordon Miller sums up as his book’s broader theme: “…the story of the European discovery, charting, exploitation and occupation of the Pacific Ocean, mostly in small wooden ships, with only wind and human muscle for power.”
It starts with Ferdinand Magellan more than 500 years ago, whose ship Victoria was the first to circumnavigate the world. His armada of five small armed ships set sail from Spain on September 20, 1519 aiming for what were then called the Spice
Islands.

But before we go much further, be advised this volume is far from being just a history book. Miller brings its stories alive with descriptions so vivid you can almost feel, see and smell the often-unbelievable conditions the intrepid sailors endured on so many of those voyages.

Like Magellan’s story, where mid-trip, their food had run out and the crews resorted to “eating a mixture of biscuit crumbs and rat droppings, then ate the rats, until they too were gone,” writes Miller. “They caught the occasional shark, but were finally reduced to eating sawdust, and boiling and chewing leather chaffing gear from the rigging just to put something in their stomachs.” When the armada finally limped back into harbour nearly three years later, Magellan was dead and Victoria was the only surviving ship. And of the original 250 sailors, only a weakened 18 were left.

Gordan Miller includes both the well-known and the lesser-known. Many readers will be familiar with names like James Cook, Charles Darwin, or the mutiny on the Bounty saga. But likely not others, like France’s La Pérouse in 1786 who was anxious to capture some of the prestige Cook had gained for Britain. His expedition surveyed unmapped areas of the northwest coast, Kamchatka, and Australia, and anthropological data on Indigenous populations—achievements Miller calls “considerable…precise and beautiful charts and drawings, and extensive observations….”

Another of the lesser-known Pacific sailing adventures is the sad but entertaining War of Jenkins’ Ear, declared by the British against Spain in October 1739. Under it, the plan was to dispatch a fleet of six men-of-war ships and a company of 500 soldiers to the Pacific “to take, burn, sink, or otherwise destroy the ships and vessels belonging to Spain.” One Commodore George Anson was given the job to prepare and lead the force. He dutifully proceeded to Portsmouth only to find a navy utterly unprepared for war. To top up his crew numbers, Anson engaged press gangs to kidnap farm boys, scour local jails, and draft old, sick and crippled soldiers. Of those unsuitable 259 so recruited, the average age was 55, all were disabled in some way, and nearly all died from disease or injury before they even reached the Pacific. Miller calls it “one of the most terrible and costly voyages in British maritime history.”

Nonetheless, four years later, after vanquishing the Spanish, Anson returned a hero with three treasure-laden ships. But at what cost? Just 188 original members were aboard as nearly 1,400 had died, mostly from disease and starvation. It didn’t matter to the “higher-ups”: Anson was appointed First Lord of the Admiralty.

Closer to home, readers will enjoy the extensive coverage of the BC coast including: Nootka Sound, Juan de Fuca and Georgia Straits, Hastings Mill, Friendly Cove (where the first ship on the northwest coast was built), and much, much more.

The 19th century saw a new era in commercial sailboats: the clippers, known for their speed alone. Miller uses a prime example to illustrate: Thermopylae, said to be the loveliest and one of the fastest. She made the nearly 15,000 mile passage from Gravesend to Melbourne in 60 days, a time no steamship could hope to match, and a record never equalled under sail. It was said that “she could do seven knots in a breeze that wouldn’t extinguish a candle.”

But as the old saying goes, all good things must come to an end. Sailing cargo ships were no exception. As steamships improved, sailing ships were lost in the spray. They could keep to sea as long as there was food and water, while the steamer could keep going only as long as her coal lasted. Even though the wind was always free, the last commercial square-rigger to visit BC was Pamir, towed out of Vancouver on January 5, 1946.

Not only is Vancouver-based Miller skilled at detailed research and making history more than an academic pursuit, he’s a distinguished maritime artist and illustrator as well as experienced west coast sailor and museum designer. His paintings grace collections in the US and Canada; and no less than 60 adorn this tome.

Along the way, he leaves readers a few challenges like, what is a flute, a pinnace, a bergentina, or a galliot? Look these up for your next cocktail party. He includes a 23-page appendix with drawings to scale as well as detailed text on each. And wraps it up with a solid bibliography.

It’s a masterful volume equally at home on your coffee table or library reference stacks.

“The Pacific is perhaps, upon the whole, no more boisterous than other oceans, though I feel quite safe in saying that it is not more pacific except in name.” So summed Joshua Slocum. 9781771623476

Graham Chandler is a Vancouver-based freelance writer with over 700 published works, many with anthropological and heritage themes. He holds a PhD in archaeology from the University of London, UK.

Review of the author's work by BC Studies:
Voyages: to the New World and Beyond

[BCBW 2017]