Origins of Cortes Island's Aquaculture Industry

Roy L Hales/ Cortes Currents - In the most recent of her interviews about Cortes History, Lynne Jordan, former President of the Cortes Island Museum, traces one of the Island’s foremost industries from its pre-contact beginnings up until recent times.
Lynne Jordan: “ The First Nations cultivated clam gardens on this coast for 3,000 to 5,000 years, maybe even longer. One on Quadra Island was recently dated at being around 3,500 years old.”
“In her book ‘Clam Gardens: Aboriginal Mariculture on Canada's West Coast,’ Judith Williams describes how natives would choose a small, bay/beach area and increase the amount of sand on that beach by collecting all the rocks off the beach and taking them down at low tide to the bottom of the beach and throwing them into the water. You do that for enough years and thousands of years, the rock wall builds up and gets bigger and bigger. As the rock wall grows, more sand gets trapped behind the rock wall, which increases the beach size, and that's how they cultivated and grew their clams on the beach.”
“Clams were very important because First Nations were mostly gatherers, and you could find them all year long. When other foods that they would normally gather weren't growing in the forest or the meadows, they would eat a lot of clams.”
“There are alot of those gardens around Howe Sound area, but also all around the Desolation Sound.”
“Gorge Harbour, on Cortes Island, has a number of old clam gardens around the outer edge of the beaches. If you go down to the wharf at the bottom of Robertson Road and you're on the dock, look to your left. There used to be a clam garden along the beach. It's identified mainly by what they call clam hash, broken little bits of shell that mixed with the sand. The beach is quite soft. If you look to your right, towards the Gorge Harbour Marina, you can actually see where the clam garden continued along that way too.”

“The marina has disrupted what was left of the clam garden. If you stand at the end of the wharf at a low tide and look down on that right side, you will see a rock wall there. The dock was built overtop of a clam garden.”
“That's the easiest one to pick out, but once you know what to look for, you start seeing clam gardens in many places around Cortes Island.”
Continuing on to after the settlers arrived, calms and oysters were cutivated in Squirrel Cove during the 1920s. Quadra Island’s Heriot Bay Inn had a lease.
In 1938 Harry and Teresa Daniels were cultivating oysters near the head of Von Donnop Inlet.
Lynne Jordan: “They started with seed from Japan, which is a larger oyster than the native variety.”
The Daniels “were the first to have a beach lease there, and they actually had it marked off on the beach with cement edging. It had a curb all around it. They don't do that nowadays.”
“In the 1940s Alf Layton also had a beach lease at the upper end of Von Donnop Inlet.”
“Shellfish sustained a lot of Cortes islanders for many years, particularly through the depression years. You could harvest oysters, clams, scallops, mussels, you name it. If you had a boat, you could also add in crabs, prawns, but you'd need the boat and traps to catch them, whereas the beach was open to anybody.”

More in the podcast