Knox — Re-enactment of Pig War recalls conflict full of posturing, not much else

EDITOR’S NOTE: Jack Knox writes for the Times-Colonist in Victoria. He used to write for a newspaper in Kamloops.

COLUMN — As historical re-enactments go, San Juan Island’s recreation of the Pig War isn’t exactly Gettysburg.

No cannons shredding the ranks with grapeshot. No massed bayonet charge with blood-curdling screams. Nobody dying dramatically, only to pop up like Lazarus and trundle down to the American Legion for a cold one at the end of the day.

This is what you get when you live on the peaceful West Coast: a battle that’s more Woodstock than Waterloo.

Which, our San Juan neighbours say, is what they’re celebrating on the July 26 weekend — an international conflict resolved without violence.

The Pig War was fought — or rather not fought — in 1859, when both Britain and the U.S. claimed San Juan Island, which sits just a few kilometres across Haro Strait from Saanich.

The flashpoint came when an American settler shot a British resident’s trespassing pig. The two sides squared off, hostilities ramping up ridiculously quickly until, like a couple of bellicose drunks bumping bellies in a bar, the U.S. Army and Royal Navy appeared ready to reignite the War of 1812.

Happily, cooler heads prevailed. The countries agreed to a joint occupation of the island by British and American forces while they sought resolution. It turned out to be a very Victoria kind of conflict: 13 years of inaction, followed by nothing happening. (Apparently it was run by the same people who are in charge of sewage treatment and the teachers’ strike). The interregnum was all very civilized, the U.S. troops hosting the boys from the British camp on Independence Day, the Brits reciprocating on Queen Victoria’s birthday.

The brouhaha finally ended when Germany’s Kaiser Wilhelm I, appointed arbitrator, ruled in the Americans’ favour in 1872, drawing the border west of San Juan Island, not east (damn, if only Vince Ready had been available). Thus ended the only war in history in which the lone casualty was barbecued, not buried.

That’s why Encampment 2014 on San Juan Island will feature black powder musketry, 30 or 40 re-enactors in period costume, and demonstrations of blacksmithing and cooperage — but nobody shooting anybody.

In that way, it’s like re-enactments of life at Colwood’s Fort Rodd Hill which, with its guns pointing to sea, waiting for an enemy that never came, was like a condom that remained forever unopened in a teenager’s wallet.

We do have small selection of 20th-century military actions we could restage on Vancouver Island:

• In June 1942, in the first foreign attack on Canadian soil since the Fenian Raids of 1871, a Japanese submarine fired up to 30 shells at the Estevan Point lighthouse on the Hequiat Peninsula. It missed.

• Also in 1942, five unarmed practice bombs were somehow dropped by a Royal Canadian Air Force plane on a training flight from the Patricia Bay Airport. One bomb plunged into a house on Haliburton Road. Three others buried themselves deep in a field. The fifth slammed through the roof and into the kitchen sink of a Cordova Bay Road home as the woman who lived there did the dishes. The Cordova Bay Blitzkrieg claimed no casualties, though records show the RCAF paid $163.01 to compensate for losses that included a sink strainer, three saucepans and a six-inch double boiler.

• In 1962, HMCS Skeena fired 16 three-inch shells into the area of Clallam Bay, Washington, across the strait from Jordan River, during a gunnery exercise. The Americans waited until 1998 to retaliate: .50-calibre machine gun fire from a pair of U.S. Navy small boats sent five hikers diving behind logs on the Juan de Fuca Marine Trail.

• On Aug. 29, 1996, HMCS Regina accidentally declared war on View Royal. The frigate was running weapons tests at CFB Esquimalt when someone launched an unarmed 20-kilogram rocket three kilometres across the harbour and straight into the shed behind Pete’s Tent and Awning, just down from the fire hall. No one was hurt.

That’s as gory as it gets. No Gettysburg in our past. No Battle of Britain. No Stalingrad. No Nanking Massacre. No real clash since the Battle at Maple Bay, a bloody mid-19th-century affair in which an alliance of Coast Salish people from the south Island repelled raiders from the north.

We should be grateful. If you must have a war, better that it end in bacon fat, not tears.

jknox@timescolonist.com

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