A Chairdean Ionmhuinn Mo Chinnidh
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Summer,2009 |
Mac Gillvray paints a great picture of Victoria from this era when top hunters swaggered around town with seal whiskers in their hat bands and boozed it up at the Garrick's Head Pub
Victorian ships also took sail in the Bering Sea defying American claims to att the animals that mated in the Alaska Islands. The American Government sent destroyers to arrest the sealers and the conflict nearly erupted into war.
It finally ended in 1911 after some four million seals had been slaughtered with the signing of the North Pacific Seal Convention, the first international treaty dedicated to the preservation of a species
Mc Lean brawled his way through San Francisco's dockyards, spent ten weeks in a prison in Vladivostok and single handedly sailed a three masted ship 2,000 kilometers across the South Pacific as his crew perspired from yellow fever.
What truly distinguishes Mc Lean from other mariners, however is his place in literary history.The writer Jack London worked on a sealing vessel and heard many tales about Mc Lean, whom he cast as the brutal captain "Wolf Larson" in his 1924 novel "The Sea Wolf"
At long last the record has been set straight about one of the most notorious characters to call Victoria his home."
The McDonald property on Meadows Road, land which the family had owned for some one hundred and seventy years, adjoined the farm where their clansman, Alex Mac Lean, alias the Sea Wolf, was born. Sister Agnes Clair, daughter of Agnes McDonald, who was raised by Senator William McDonald was supervisor of all the schools run by the Sisters of Halifax. One day her St. Peter's School in Dorchester was showing the film The Sea Wolf. When told the pirate had been the family's neighbor she almost collapsed on the scene. The family evidently had not displayed his picture on the mantle!)
Don Mac Gillvray lives in Cape Breton and is a history professor at the University of Cape Breton. He has been researching Wolf Larson, Jack London's "Sea Wolf, for twenty years. The following is excerpted from a book review in the Victoria Times Colonist.
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"Mc Lean was born in 1858 in Nova Scotia and started working ships at the age of 15. He landed in Victoria in 1880, soon after British registered schooners began pelagic (open-water)hunting of northern fur seals off the coast of Vancouver Island. Within four years Mc Lean and his brother Dan-both sporting foot long mustaches-were the most successful captains in the business, capturing thousands of pelts for the British fur market.