BCAA

grey whales pass on an indigo Pacific to the west. Waves curl onto the cobbled beach below. A nearby church steeple marks the one-family native village of Yuquot. Snowcapped summits fill the horizon beyond Cook Channel to the north. Silhouetted, charcoal-blue islands float in the morning sea mist; and nearer, a couple of trollers head salmonward, trailed by gulls. Directly to the east lies Bligh Island, the very place Captain James Cook landed 234 years ago, putting the British in British Columbia. And just 25 metres beyond Tiglmann's kitchen, where his wife, Joanne, fixes breakfast, stands the most iconic of maritime structures: the 14-metre-high white-and-red-roofed Nootka Light Station, one of 27 manned lighthouses on Canada's often-stormy west coast. Yet if things had been different in 2011, B.C. lighthouses like this one would have been automated last year, lightkeeper Tiglmann would have had to return to his old job and the lives of innumerable mariners would have been put in jeopardy. For more than 4,000 years, the Nuu-chanulth of Vancouver Island's northwest coast lived on the fecundity of their rainforest world: the salmon, berries, cedar and trade (Nootka Light Station) Jeremy Koreski/All Canada Photos, (insets) Daniel Wood p28-31_Lighthouse.indd 29 goods such as abalone shells and fish oils that sustained them through the generations. The Mowachaht Nation, a subgroup of the Nuu-cha-nulth, occupied an extraordinary peninsula that juts into Nootka Sound, and used this site for whaling and fishing. The Mowachaht called their home Yuquot: Where the Wind Blows From Many Directions. But on March 31, 1778, everything changed. Captain James Cook, piloting the HMS Discovery and accompanied by a midshipman named George Vancouver, and Master William Bligh – he of later Mutiny on the Bounty fame – piloting the Resolute, appeared WESTWORLD >> S P R I N G 2 0 1 2 29 1/27/12 8:28:08 AM

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