Island Adventure

Glass balls, messages in bottles, and even a tsunami-tossed Harley-Davidson still in its shipping container have all drifted from Japan to Haida Gwaii’s shores over the years. Indeed, the two scimitar-shaped archipelagos on either side of the North Pacific may seem to be curving away from each other, but history and ocean currents have connected their disparate communities for centuries.

Archeological evidence suggests that humans travelled the ice-free coastlines between Northeast Asia and British Columbia 17,000 years ago, and many have speculated that Japanese shipwrecks were the origin of iron used by people in the Pacific Northwest before European contact. When Charles Melville Hays, president of the Grand Trunk Railway, dreamed of turning Prince Rupert, directly east of Haida Gwaii, into a transit hub to rival Vancouver, Japanese officials lauded his proposed route across the Pacific.

Hays and his plans died on the Titanic in 1912, but other...