This is Canada -
magnificent, beautiful and raw.
A giant of a country too vast to ever be tamed.
A place where nature rules and mankind stands in awe.
For this series, I've travelled the breadth of the land
and marvelled at its rich and varied scenery.
My journey's taken me on an unforgettable adventure.
I've followed in the footsteps of great of explorers and heroes of mine who helped shape this land.
They came to make their fortunes, trading animal furs,
and thrived by learning the skills of the native people here.
THEY LAUGH HEARTILY
But their arrival changed the lives of those people forever.
GUN SHOT
I've got one last stop on my trek across this amazing Northern Wilderness.
The last leg of my journey brings me here, to the West Coast of Canada.
This side of the Rockies, the climate, the plants,
even the wildlife, are really quite different to the rest of Canada.
In fact, it almost feels like a separate country.
That posed a unique set of challenges
for the First Nations who inhabited this land,
and that's what I want to explore in this programme.
So I'm going to soak up this landscape,
find out what life was like here before the fur trade arrived
and learn ancient bushcraft skills
with some of the descendents of those First Nations people.
Boy, that's hot!
After travelling across Canada from east to west,
I've arrived at the far west coast of British Columbia -
Vancouver Island.
The capital, Victoria, bears all the signs of 21st-century life.
But, just 200 years ago, this area was cut off from the rest of Canada
and immune from so-called progress until fur trader David Thompson
crossed the Rockies and opened a workable land route across the country.
I really want to know how people lived here,
in this last part of Canada to be explored by Europeans,
and how much, if any, of that old way of life remains.
In terms of the exploration of Canada,
the West Coast really was the last piece in the jigsaw.
Once explorers like David Thompson and others had surveyed routes across the Rockies,
Canada was fully open for business as a trading nation.
It wasn't long until railroads crossed the continent,
allowing hordes of settlers and entrepreneurs to head here
in the hope of finding new and lucrative lives on the West Coast.
That was to have a dramatic impact on the First Nations who lived here.
They had already established a unique culture,
sandwiched as they were between the bountiful forests of the west and the Pacific Ocean.
They reaped a rich harvest from both
that enabled them to spend virtually all winter
in a period of spiritual celebration.
These celebrations had been taking place,
unseen by outsiders, for centuries.
This coastal area had been separated from the rest of Canada
by the Rockies - the vast mountain area standing guard
like a giant "no entry" sign.
Fur traders in search of beaver
found their way blocked time and time again.
But once a viable trade route had been opened,
Europeans raced across the land to the Pacific coast,
bringing with them trade items which would change life here forever.
And what those traders found on the other side of the Rockies was like a whole new world.
So what did they find when they reached the west coast?
Well, they didn't find beaver pelts.
Instead, they turned their attention to the fur from sea otters
but there were other things
that really quickened the entrepreneurial pulse.
They saw in the autumn the estuaries were virtually choked silver
with a seemingly limitless supply of salmon.
And when the lumber men encountered the giant western red cedars
growing in the temperate rainforest, they thought they'd hit the jackpot.
Many of the trees here are 800 years old, some even older.
That takes them back to the days of King John,
long before any Europeans set foot on this coast.
Trees inspire me, I have to say. I think they're magnificent.
And they have very little choice in where their seed falls.
Where the seed falls, the tree grows,
and there it has to stand and weather the storms of time,
nature and change. These trees, what have they looked down upon?
At the beginning of this tree's life,
the local people here would come into the forest to harvest timber
and harvest bark using stone tools and antler wedges
and today it's a different story.
There's the hasty tool of the modern age, the chainsaw.
I would really like to have the opportunity to hear what a tree
would have to say in commentary about us.
When I was a child, I grew up under the shade of a red cedar,
a western red cedar,
and in the autumn some of the old leaves would fall.
I'd collect those and I'd light a simple fire and burn the leaves.
I loved the smell of the cedar, it's a very special tree.
It has a real presence, it stands out amongst other trees in my mind,
so to come here, it's like knowing one lone individual to see the whole tribe. It's fantastic.
They really are magnificent. It's like being in a cathedral.
This is a truly wonderful place. I couldn't feel more at home.
In fact, there's even an island here with my name on it - Meares Island.
Sadly, it's not named after one of my ancestors,
but it is a unique and special place.
Nowhere else on my journey across Canada have I seen anywhere as magical as this.
Its serene beauty combines with an immense majesty
that just takes your breath away.
What's interesting is the flora here.
This is a temperate rainforest and it's absolutely glorious.
I love these environments,
I think mostly because it's a whole eco system.
We've got mosses and lichens and fungi, it's fascinating.
But the sheer majesty of the trees,
they make you feel so small, so insignificant.
This coast has to be not only one of the most tantalising
but also one of the most seductive places on earth.
The warm Pacific air rises over the mountains,
shrouding them in mist, and releases its moisture as rain,
producing lush forests of not only cedar,
but also hemlock and Douglas fir.
They dominate the landscape, proud and steadfast.
Nature at its most magnificent.
But it's the mighty cedar which has been the life-blood for the First Nations here,
providing the material to build their homes,
canoes and even their clothes.
Giselle Martin is my guide to the area
and to the skills of the people here.
She's a member of the Nuu Chah Nulth people
and is as passionate about trees as I am.
Believe it or not, this trunk can actually be woven if you know how.
Giselle, what are you looking for in the bark?
Well, I look for a tree that has beautiful straight bark,
so really nice grain like this,
about as big as you can hug is a good size.
I only take one or two hand widths of bark.
I don't take too much of it cos I don't want to leave a huge scar.
I want it to be able to recuperate. And so what's the process?
Well, when we go out to gather bark,
we always say a prayer to the tree to thank it
and explain what we're gonna do.
Giselle's family have been stripping bark for generations
and I really admire the respect she has for the trees.
Beautiful, that's really great.
And then, once you get enough,
you can actually just shove your hand right under it.
BARK CREAKS AWAY FROM TREE
It's a great sound, isn't it?
Now we gotta pull it! That's the fun part!
'All over Meares island there are hundreds of trees bearing evidence
'of how they have been stripped over the centuries -
'scarred, but still growing tall and strong.'
Well, that's quite tricky, isn't it?
How about if I take it from here and swing down on it? Yeah, let's do that.
Wee-ah!
'You really don't want to know how long it took to pull a strip off!'
In the early spring sometimes it isn't as hard to separate.
'While Giselle takes the back off the bark
'to reveal the soft fibres for weaving,
'I'm busy working on a two-foot section to make something which would have been very familiar
'to the First Nations of the area.'
What I've done is I've just made a makeshift cooking pot.
If you were out here and you needed to boil some food,
you can take the bark by folding it like that.
I've taken the outer bark off, off just the ends,
leaving it in the central section, and then I've thinned it
so that I can fold it up like that and tie it.
And now I can put that down
and put hot rocks in it to boil water in there.
A very similar method to this was used to make canoe bailers.
They put a handle across and there's the means for bailing a canoe.
'Well, you never know when a canoe bailer will come in handy,
'so I might as well finish the job.'
A few mosquitoes about.
'I'm starting by softening up some fibres on a long cedar branch
'to make a flexible withy.'
No rush, it's important to do these jobs right.
So that's all my binding material ready to go.
Next job is to make the handle
and for that I've got this piece of alder and I'll trim that to length.
First I need to measure it.
What I'm doing is trimming the ends so that they are pretty.
And now it's the same for the other end.
Then I can take a little blade of grass to give me the dimensions of the slot that I made.
Got my mark there on the grass.
As the alder wood oxidises, it goes this orange colour
but after a few days that will fade.
So I have to cut a slot in the end of the bark
to accommodate the handle...
..like so. That's good.
Now...
..this is where the withy has an advantage
over some of the other materials I could use, is its great strength.
I can really lash it tightly.
And as this dries, it'll go as hard as wire.
You can see how tough it is, even now.
So that's one end completed.
Now, at the other end, I need to do the same thing.
Lovely materials to work with -
the bark and the withies.
Well, there we go, it's finished.
You can see that, now it's got the handle on, it's got real strength
and this design was used as a canoe bailer.
But, of course, like any basket, it can be pressed to other uses.
It may be even a basket like this was used as cradles for children.
Just made on a larger scale with a bigger piece of bark.
Fantastic. And it's exactly that kind of resourcefulness
and the use of the cedar that enabled people to live here
with such ease for thousands of years.
But while the native people relied on the cedar for their survival,
others have also seen a value in the trees.
The logging industry has been big and valuable business
all over British Columbia since the late 1700s.
Europeans, who came with the fur trade,
discovered the superior qualities of the timber for ships' masts.
Over the next 100 years, forestry grew,
supplying timber all over the world.
Today, forest products still make up half of British Columbia's exports.
But, as you might expect, it's a controversial issue.
Back on Meares Island, this tree,
known locally as the hanging tree,
has a special story to tell.
So, Giselle, how old is this tree?
Nobody knows because it is hollow on the inside.
But everyone estimates somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000.
It must be every bit of that. It's a magnificent, magnificent tree.
And it's got quite a recent history as well, hasn't it?
It does. In 1984, Meares Island was going to be clear-cut logged
and we had one of the first logging protests in Canada here.
Our people declared Meares Island a tribal park
and we took the government to court over the issue
and in their own courts the Canadian government can't prove they own this land
because we never signed treaties with them.
The court case went on for about ten years.
In 1993, they initiated the treaty process with us,
so we put the Meares Island court case on hold and it's been on hold ever since.
We're still in treaty negotiations today.
So this area is still not under protection? It's not protected, no.
It's just caught up in red tape.
This kind of forest is so rare in the world
and, though this tree is huge, it's not just a tree, it's covered in life.
There are bugs in this tree that probably have never been discovered by scientists.
We're surrounded by lichens and mosses and medicines
that pharmaceutical companies would love to know about.
And the cedar tree, for our people traditionally, has been the tree of life.
We got all of our housing, our totem poles, our canoes out of it.
The bark made our clothing, our mats, our sails, blankets.
So it is really important.
Giselle's people, the Nuu Chah Nulth,
are a group that incorporates 15 different indigenous nations.
Nuu Chah Nulth means "along the mountains and sea".
Giselle begins making a little basket with the bark we stripped on Meares Island.
It's great to watch her working the cedar this traditional way.
I think it's very difficult for people outside of Canada
to understand the complexities of the tribal connections
because there's kind of a simple view of how things were.
Yeah, I've often heard different ideas, you know, that people here
were hunters and gatherers, but we did also have a lot of gardens.
We managed our land and resources very, very carefully.
There isn't an inch of land here that was no man's land.
It was all tended by humans for thousands of years.
There's just a huge variety of plants and animals
and food and materials that we can utilise here.
We have so much that we can get from the ocean and the mountains
and the forests and the rivers.
Well, is this starting to look like something or what?
GISELLE LAUGHS
Shouldn't take too much longer.
Wow, that's looking great. Look at that!
Beautiful work.
It's really great to meet Giselle.
She's got both the youth and determination to keep those traditional skills alive.
All over the world, as elders pass away,
so old knowledge dies with them.
But I am heartened because I know that in many communities
there are other individuals, like her,
working hard to keep that flame burning.
I want to know who she's inherited her knowledge and interest in her culture from,
so she's taking me to meet her father, Joe, a wood carver.
This is my dad, Joe.
How you doing? Nice to meet you. How you doing?
Can you still smell the cedar?
The cedar, I don't smell it any more. I've been working on it too long.
If I've been away for some time, I will begin to smell it again, yeah.
It's so aromatic in here. It's a beautiful smell.
Do you collect timber from the forest?
Most of the wood that I do get for carving canoes or totem poles,
I usually go into the forest myself. How did you learn to do all this?
Well, my father was a fisherman, hunter, trapper, canoe builder.
So, on all of those things, he just let me learn on my own speed.
One of the skills passed on to Joe is the art of using steam
to bend the soft but strong cedar into boxes.
These boxes are unique to the area and have been used for centuries.
The special qualities of cedar makes it pliable when heated
and then sets rock hard as it cools.
So this is a box that you've bent with steam? It is, yes.
God, that's amazing. You've got down almost to one growth ring.
That's astonishing.
Of course, in the early days, they didn't have metal either.
No. No they didn't, they just had stone, bone and fire. It's incredible, isn't it? Yeah.
Beautiful.
These bent corners of wood started off flat.
The First Nations would cut grooves in the wood.
Then they'd heat the plank over steam pits on the beach
and, when it softened, they'd bend it to make the corners.
This was a way of making incredibly strong and hardy boxes
with the most primitive of tools.
But in the old days, these were tremendously important?
They were, they were used for many things, like carrying water.
Before we had metal pots, they would cook in these things.
Then finally the larger ones like this, when I pass on, you put me inside one of those.
Wow, that's amazing! Stick me up in a tree or something.
Go back to the tree! There you go. Don't want you going deaf.
That's great. I can't hear the director now. No, OK.
SAW WHIRRS
Even Joe occasionally swaps a chisel for an electric saw to speed up a job.
Just like Joe, this carving shed is my spiritual home
and I can't wait to get stuck in
and give him a hand making a lid for the box.
Earlier on my travels,
I carved with the Algonquin people of Eastern Canada
using a crooked knife, a bit like this.
But each tool has its own traits, so I'm going very carefully.
I'm conscious here that I'm trying to take great care because I'm not familiar with the tool.
You can take wood off but you can't put it on.
It's true. You have to be careful.
You get to know a tool, don't you?
You know its idiosyncrasies.
Patience.
Tell me about the decoration there.
These are decorations we've put on these things here, they're crests that people have.
In this case, this here is the eagle and then the salmon.
The eagle here, they only take the fishes that they need to feed their young ones.
Gives a reminder to respect the other creatures here as well.
We have to leave some fish for them also.
They're about the first law and the first teaching that began
when our mothers conceived our lives
and that's first about self-respect.
My grandfather used to speak about that first law.
He'd never raise his voice, he'd always just sit there
and speak about being respectful
and how we're to be respectful,
first to ourselves and then to others.
That's why we have carvings on our tools
and totem poles in front of our houses and it was like
having your bible open in front of your face 24/7.
So we're always reminded of our roles and responsibilities in life
and how we all live under natural law.
Everyone.
I'm born and I'm gonna die one day. The natural law.
And respect to nature. Mm-hmm.
Nature will provide our needs but not our greeds, so that's why we have a lot of these things here.
The First Nations believe that all things in nature
were interconnected through the circle of life,
and this guided their hand when harvesting natural resources
so that they would take only what they needed and nothing more.
One of the most important resources of all was the whale,
and whale hunting was a very specialist and communal activity.
It took a huge amount of effort to mount a whale hunt.
The equipment was astonishing.
Specialist harpoons had to be constructed,
very often using a shell to make the blade.
The men involved in the hunting were trained from childhood to be strong,
with great degrees of endurance.
Boys were encouraged to be able to hold their breath.
They were given a fern frond and they were told to hold their breath
while they pulled off the leaves of the frond like this.
As their ability grew, so did the length of the fern.
And they trained their youth to be strong in manhood for the most important hunt - the whale hunt.
Once a whale was harpooned, the huntsmen tried to steer it back to the community,
so that it would tow their canoes -
much easier than having to paddle the heavy weight of a whale back to their community.
Once there, every part of it was used and there were celebrations.
It was the combination, not just of immense practical preparations and training,
but also of spiritual purification and ceremonies to ensure success.
Whaling canoes were the first signs of human life Europeans encountered
when they sailed to this coast in 1774 -
a full 30 years before the Rockies had been tamed
and a land route opened.
The Spanish sailors thought they were war canoes and sailed swiftly away.
Four years later, Britain's Captain James Cook arrived on the coast
while searching for the elusive Northwest Passage
and was the first to set foot ashore and to trade knives,
blankets and metal tools in return for food and sea-otter furs.
These pelts were thick and soft
and could be made into the finest fur coats.
Spain and Britain argued over the land for more than a decade
and nearly came to war over it.
The dispute was finally settled by Captain George Vancouver.
Vancouver encouraged trade with the peoples of the west coast
and even set up a trading post at Vancouver on the mainland,
which bears his name today and of course on this island,
also named after him.
Trading between the Europeans and First Nations was generally friendly
but occasionally things were less amicable.
The most famous trading disaster was that of the brigantine Boston.
It was trading in 1803 with one of the most powerful leaders in the area, Chief Maquinna.
After he'd been given a second-rate trade firearm
and he'd complained about it, he was insulted by the Captain.
The result of that was the whole crew, bar two, were massacred.
One of the men survived because he was below decks, but the other was singled out for special treatment.
His name was John Jewitt.
He was the ship's blacksmith.
Chief Maquinna was an intelligent man and he realised that having
someone who could make metal tools in his long-house
would greatly improve his standing amongst his people.
After all, metal tools in a society which was still very heavily
dependent on stone tools was a very powerful asset.
John Jewitt kept a remarkable record of his time amongst those people.
He published that after his release and it provided one of the earliest accounts of detail
of how people actually lived here.
The reason we're able to enjoy those recollections today
is that he used bushcraft to keep a diary.
Improvising ink from the juice of berries.
As I always say, bushcraft comes in handy in all sorts of ways.
Morning, Giselle. Hi!
'Among the things Jewitt described in his diaries
'are dugout canoes made from hollowed out cedar trunks.
'They are fabulous craft.'
It's a great way to travel in this land,
but there must have been a huge demand for canoes in the past.
There was.
The ocean is our highway and so everybody needed canoes.
We had small canoes for one person, two persons, seal-hunting canoes,
whaling canoes and the largest canoes we had were freight canoes.
They were over 100 feet long
and those were used for moving entire seasonal villages.
That's amazing.
So, Giselle, are there still people today with the knowledge of how to build all those canoes?
My father and two of my uncles still carve canoes today.
We're really lucky to still have that knowledge in our family
because it has been lost over a lot of the coast.
A special feature of this coastline
are the amazing totem poles.
Each one tells a story.
Many of them are hundreds of years old and well-weathered and worn,
but still incredibly striking to look at.
'It's a real privilege to get a closer look.
'This land isn't normally accessible to visitors to the area.'
Giselle, you don't normally bring people here, do you?
No, this is the village of Opitsaht. It's quite a private community,
though my uncle, who is one of our hereditary chiefs,
gave me permission to bring you here and show you this totem pole.
Wow, that's amazing. Isn't that beautiful?
This carving has been made with love and care.
Every sign has been chosen with great thought,
every symbol tells a story.
The all-powerful sun or moon symbol at the top is an important carving,
reminding people that, above all,
they should respect themselves and others.
Then the raven, symbolising all life
and the need to cherish all life.
Below that is the mythical two-headed monster
which speaks of the importance of balance in life.
And finally at the bottom is the wolf, Giselle's family crest
upholding all the laws of the land upon its shoulders.
Life changed with the arrival of the European,
but it was a slow change.
This film was made in 1914
by photographer and anthropologist Edward S Curtis.
He persuaded local people to act for his camera,
but the costumes they wore were their own clothes of the time.
So even if it was staged, the film shows how, even just 100 years ago,
the people of the area were hardly touched by the modern world.
The coastal area was so bountiful that hunting, fishing or collecting food was a relatively easy task.
This left the native people plenty of free time in the winter months
to produce unique artwork
which celebrated their love and respect for nature.
They would spend hours decorating their houses and their canoes with bright, bold designs.
They'd make elaborate costumes for their celebrations.
And they'd carve and paint incredible masks.
SINGING
These masks were also used in the West Coast's unique potlatch -
or giving ceremonies.
I've come to the cultural museum in Alert Bay
which houses an amazing potlatch collection
and asked Andrea Sanborn to explain exactly what potlatch is.
The potlatch is our traditional ceremony.
It's where we recorded births, marriages, deaths,
transfer of privileges, transfer of chieftainships -
anything that today you would go and do in a government office.
In the old days, a potlatch ceremony would last for many days,
for as long as it would take for the chief to complete the business that he felt needed to be transacted.
As the host chief,
he would send out the invitation to people to come and witness
the events that were being transacted at the potlatch
and, as a witness,
you accepted responsibility to pass on the history of those transactions.
Quite simply, it was how the culture was handed on
through the generations.
Sadly, European governors banned the ceremony in 1885
in an effort to civilise the native people.
This ruling was only overturned in 1951.
During the prohibition period, the native people here lost
much of their language, stories and traditions.
But with the potlatch's reintroduction has come a renewed interest in First Nations culture.
Potlatching today is conducted much like it was in the old days,
but it's a very condensed ceremony now due to modern life obligations of the people.
And the gifts today are much different than the gifts that were given away in the old days.
I'm so glad potlatch survives.
These marvellous masks and fantastic stories
could have been lost forever.
The potlatch was always held in the winter months
as the summer would be spent hunting and gathering foods.
When people of the region got together for their celebrations,
they would share all they had collected or preserved.
So, fisherman would bring fish to give out and berry gatherers
would bring their pickings, ensuring everyone had a varied diet.
OK.
It's one of my favourite berries - the red huckleberry.
It looks like a bilberry.
'I met up with ethno-biologist Dr Nancy Turner,
'a world authority on aboriginal plant use.'
This is really one of my all time favourite berries - the trailing wild blackberry.
'And she took me berry picking to see what we could find.'
This is a black cap or black raspberry.
'I've long been an admirer of Nancy's work.
'I've read most of her books and I've always wanted to meet her,
'so this is a great thrill for me.'
That was a pretty interesting harvest. How many berries have we got there?
That was amazing. Five or six different species of berries.
Five or six within just a few hundred feet. It's astonishing.
In fact, you know, I've crossed the continent in the making of this series and I have seen
no part of Canada with as much plant food as is available here.
It's a region of plenty, I would say.
It surprised me because you do, you think of the salmon,
and the First Nations collecting and drying the salmon,
but they were also collecting and drying the berries. Absolutely.
So the amount of food here for the First Nations was astonishing.
They practised what's often called the seasonal round,
where they started at the end of the winter time,
they would stay in their permanent villages over the winter
and that was the time when they participated in ceremonies -
their feasts, their cultural practices.
And then, around the early part of March or so, there were a lot of seafoods that were available,
halibut, spring salmon and these different shellfish.
Then, around May and into June, the berries started to ripen.
They'd start with the salmonberries and that was initiated with the call of the salmonberry bird.
They arrived from their southern migration
right at the time when the salmonberries are ripening and then,
gradually, the huckleberries ripen, the blueberries ripen,
the blackcaps, the thimbleberries,
the trailing blackberries and then, in September, the crab apples,
the high bush cranberries, the low bush cranberries.
Their preservation techniques were fascinating. They really were.
Along the coast here, they used those bent wood cedar boxes
and they used cooking rocks, they heat up red hot.
They put the berries right into the boxes
and add the red hot rocks until the berries are just coming to a boil
and then they take that berry mix
and they pour it out, mostly on a surface of skunk cabbage leaves, and you don't want to eat those,
but they make a great surface for drying berries on. That tightness,
that bond with nature, is one of the things that's common
to all of the First Nations that I've encountered in Canada.
That's for sure.
Because they're living right within it, they're part of it.
They're not above it, or separated from it.
Meeting up with Nancy here on the West Coast
was like the icing on the cake for me, and she reiterated
what I was discovering,
just how interdependent the land and the people were.
The woodland was a rich source of food for the First Nations,
but so was the sea.
'Salmon was the most important fish for the region,
'but other fish were also plentiful.'
It's a hard piece of wood, isn't it? Yeah, they are.
'Over the centuries, the First Nations refined ingenious ways
'of catching each of the different species.
'Joe and I are carving a Douglas fir knot to make a hook for catching halibut.
'As with the cedar, this wood is flexible enough to be steam bent.'
It now has a nice triangular cross section,
and I've also been checking that it's got movement through it
because it's got to be bent right round under steam.
Bit stiffer there,
maybe five minutes more.
'We don't want it to burn,
'so we're using a bulb of kelp to make a sheath
'that will protect it from the heat.'
I'll just take that, toss that in there.
It takes about 15 minutes.
Just gonna take this here out of here.
Here comes our kelp bulb. Yeah, look at that.
Look at that, shrivelled, eh?
That's pretty hot.
Oooh! Yai-yai-yai!
Very hot.
Ooh, that is really hot.
Ooh, that's hot.
You need to be part devil to do this!
Yeah! THEY BOTH LAUGH
'Joe's got asbestos hands.
'This isn't something he does for the cameras.
'This is a man who works with his hands, day in and day out.'
Oh, that's hot!
Ooo-eee!
We need asbestos fingers! There we are.
Well, that looks great.
All right? That's amazing how hot that was.
What gives that piece stiffness is, you see how it is inside of a tree?
It goes inside of a tree, and it was like this knot here, and what's inside of there,
there's all this resin in there,
and that resin was just sitting here when that tree was all very rotten
but that resin's really hard so, when that cools off,
that resin will cool off in that shape and it'll become very strong. Almost like glass.
Mm. Exactly. It's very strong.
So we take that and then add a barb on
and put a line on there,
put a piece of octopus on there and go halibut fishing. OK.
We'll try that. Let's do that.
Leaving the fish hook to harden,
I'm off to explore other resources this coast provides,
and which the native people needed for their survival.
No natural resources were ignored in this region.
There are more than 500 types of seaweed found off the coast of British Columbia,
and they all had a use, whether for food, for making floats for fishing,
for medicine and even as storage containers for fish oil.
The bull kelp is the fastest growing plant on the planet,
so supplies never ran out.
It had to happen.
This is much more typical West Coast weather, home from home.
It's when the tide goes out
that you can really get a sense of this environment.
Take a look at this, this is bull kelp.
That part of it there is basically a big float
that carries the stem of this up to the surface from a hold fast,
and they took this part of it here,
I guess you could call it the stipe,
and they tie these together to make lines strong enough to even go and catch whales with.
It really is astonishing.
And like coastal people everywhere, once the tide went out,
this intertidal zone became a really important food resource.
All around me, there's food on the logs here, there's mussels growing.
On the rocks in front of me, I've got goose barnacles,
they're still a popular food today.
But perhaps one of the most important of all the tidal resources,
in terms of food, were clams,
and I'm surrounded by the shells of clams.
The local people here did something really quite specialised
when it came to clams,
and that's only been recognised in recent years.
By moving rocks along the foreshore, they could dam off areas
and create the perfect habitat for the clams - clam gardens.
And that's exactly what I'm standing on here today.
You can see how it works.
Along this edge here of this little bay,
all these rocks have been piled up,
and that's no accident that they're there.
And what that does is it retains the silt on this side,
increasing the habitat for the clams.
Today, many of these clam gardens have vanished because of the action of bears.
Bears come along the coast and they look for shell fish,
and they turn over the rocks and eventually they fall apart.
Now, I imagine you'd expect me, in my normal fashion,
to collect some of these clams and to cook them.
But I can't because, at this time of year,
there's something called a red tide and what that is is a toxic type of plankton,
it's a dinoflagellate algae that occurs in these waters
that the clams concentrate in their bodies as they filter feed.
If I eat clams that have that inside them,
it's not destroyed by cooking and it can cause paralysis.
Local people had to be careful of this, too, and they would watch nature to give them some clues.
They were canny, they would watch the crows
and the ravens to see when they stopped picking on the food here
and, if they'd stopped eating the shellfish, it was a pretty good guide to stay off the beach.
There are also accounts of armed guards being placed on the beach
to prevent people poisoning themselves by collecting the clams at this time of year.
I've really been a bit spoiled with the weather over the last few days,
this is more like it.
This is proper West Coast weather, so a bit wet,
but it's very moody, it's very beautiful,
we've got these low mists over the cedar trees.
It's lovely, and it's easy to wax lyrical because I'm under the shade of this hemlock tree and quite dry.
In fact, that tree's old enough that it may have sheltered people who gathered clams at this garden,
and the garden is a little bit eerie because it looks as though
people walked away and left it just yesterday.
It really is strange.
One of the things that was done with the clams is that they were dried for other times of the year
and I've dried a few clams, a bit smaller than the ones here, to show you how that was done.
This is one of the ways. You take a cedar strip and just thread them on,
and you could hang that up, in a couple of days they're dry.
Hang them up in the houses, or in the sun, and there you go.
And they were eaten with fish oil, and that was considered
to be a delicacy, and, well, I'll have to try one of these.
They're probably a bit chewy now.
Chewy, but really tasty.
I quite like that.
Great thing about that is you can just have it round your neck
and eat as you go, perfect.
I'll save those for later.
With red tide in the water, I had to use packet clams,
but, actually, the real, native clams would be much larger.
One time, this area was abundant with wild salmon.
But the area was over-fished after the arrival of Europeans.
Nearly 2,000 fish factories have come and gone on Vancouver Island.
Today, much of British Columbia's salmon come from fish farms.
It wasn't just the salmon that were important.
There was also a very small fish that was harvested.
The locals call it eulachon, we know it as smelt.
And these fish were gathered in their thousands.
They could then be put into an old canoe and heated with rocks to extract their oil.
It's a very fishy oil.
Early explorers really didn't like this,
it was such a strong feature in the local diet.
But it wasn't just for domestic consumption,
this oil was incredibly valuable
and was traded deep into the interior.
One box of oil was worth four blankets.
To get it there, the local people established an extensive network of trails,
which today have largely fallen into disuse.
But it was those trails that were some of the earliest footpaths
used by explorers coming to the West Coast.
With the taste of fish in my mouth,
I think it's time Joe and I put our fish hook to the test.
BING CROSBY: # Gone fishin'
# By a shady-wady pool... #
So Joe's finished the hook, and he's put on a barb, here, of bone.
# That's old Cindy Lou goin' with me
LOUIS ARMSTRONG: # Gone fishin'
# Mm-mm-mm-mm
# Fleas are bitin' at his hide
# Get away from me Boy, you're bothering me
# Folks won't find us now because
# Mr Satch... #
Well, it doesn't seem to be our lucky day.
We had a sniff, something nipped the octopus off our line,
probably the big one that got away.
But I want to cook for Giselle and Joe to thank them for sharing so much with me.
There's only one option -
calling in at the local fishmongers on the way home.
Steaming fish in a sand pit, lined with hot rocks and cedar, is a traditional way to cook here.
All that smoke's a product of the moisture that's in the wood here on the beach.
Cedar is apt to hold quite a lot of moisture but, as it heats up,
the heat will drive the moisture from these logs.
Well, the fire's burned down nicely.
The walls have caved in on my pit a little bit.
I thought that would happen,
that's usually the case when you're making a pit in sand.
Just spread that a little bit.
But that's looking quite good.
'Obviously, if you're cooking in sand,
'you don't want your food to be covered in grains,
'so I'm using a traditional way of keeping it beach-free,
'with the help of thimbleberry leaves.'
So, I'm going to cut this into smaller pieces and wrap that into thimbleberry parcels.
I've collected here some willow bark
which I can use to tie these parcels.
It also makes it much easier to find them afterwards.
Very good heat.
'Skunk cabbage leaves, which Nancy talked about, were amazingly useful
'to the First Nations, and I'm using them now to line my ground oven.'
And the next thing
is our little parcels of halibut.
I'm leaving a little gap in the centre so I can put the stick in.
Add more thimbleberry leaves.
'I'm covering the parcels with willow branches
'which add a distinct flavour to the fish.'
And now more... skunk cabbage leaves.
If you were doing this on a regular basis, the best thing to put on the top is a mat.
And what I'm looking for
is to see that there's no steam escaping from the pit.
Just a little bit coming up through the central hole,
where it should.
And now, I'm going to put some water in there.
I'm just gonna put a litre in, that should be enough
for this job,
and that will go right to the bottom of the pit.
And I'm going to leave that for about two hours to cook.
Carefully unwrap the thimbleberry...
And there's the fish, beautifully cooked.
It's wonderful,
absolutely delicious.
That is a beautiful fish.
'Who better to share it with than Giselle, my guide to the West Coast, and her father, Joe.'
It is kind of perfumy, even. Mmm.
That's a bit of the willow. Mm. Mm-hm.
What they say in potlatch is if they put food in front of you, you got to eat it all. Oh, no!
I've got a very greedy cameraman. Oh, OK.
'They've shown me, and shared with me,
'some of the skills those early fur traders would have encountered when they first came here 200 years ago.'
This feels a fitting way to complete my journey of the West Coast, and of Canada.
I guess I should have known what a vast and powerful place Canada is
after all I've read about the explorers I've featured in this series.
Samuel Hearne,
who was the first to reach the north coast of Canada by land.
John Rae, who explored the Arctic North,
and David Thompson, who mapped a third of this immense land.
But, of course, it's only when you get on the ground
and you measure your own stride to the country
that you fully can gauge these men's achievements.
I'm going home, obviously, with a much greater appreciation for them,
not just because of the journeys they made,
or even the courage that they had to summon,
but mostly because of the respect that they demonstrated.
Respect for themselves, respect for the peoples they encountered,
and their knowledge and skills of living from this country.
Without that respect, they would never have succeeded.
I find it interesting modern Canada is born out of several cultures.
You have the First Nations, who were here to begin with.
You have the British and the French, who came in search of furs.
And out of that strange mixing pot, and not without some pain,
has come modern Canada, a country that I'll always come back to,
not just because it's so beautiful here,
but because the people here have respect and tolerance for each other,
and also for the natural world.
This is a place where people really cherish nature.