Richard Somerset Mackie is a respected historian and award-winning author known for his meticulous research and engaging writing style. He was educated in Scotland, France, and Canada, and holds a doctorate in Canadian history from the University of British Columbia. He has taught at Malaspina University College in Nanaimo, the University of Victoria, North Island College in Campbell River, and the University of Washington (Seattle). He lives in Victoria with his wife Cathy Richardson and their three children. Island Timber is his fourth book. His biography Hamilton Mack Laing: Hunter-Naturalist (Sono Nis Press, 1985) was runner-up for the Lieutenant-Governor's Medal for Historical Writing.

Hamilton Mack Laing
Hunter-Naturalist

Hamilton Mack Laing was a long-lived, widely published, notable Canadian naturalist. Laing's naturalist beliefs were common to his era: animal management was part of healthy environmental work. This biography explores a man and a philosophy of conservation that insisted the naturalist be a good man with a gun.

Biography, 234 pp, 6 x 9, b/w photos
ISBN 0-919203-74-4, cloth, $25.00

Island Timber

Richard Somerset Mackie charts the history of the largest logging concern on coastal British Columbia—the Comox Logging Company—from the turn of the twentieth century to the devastating Sayward fire of 1938. This story of the heroic age of coastal logging is rich with stories, humour, and pithy sidebars on coastal legends like Big Jack McKenzie, "Greasy" McQuinn, "Promise Bob" Filberg, "Highpockets" Hughie Cliffe, Boomstick Thompson, and Sailor Lehtonen. Dozens of stunning photos and maps that have never before appeared in print.

The Wilderness Profound
Victorian Life on the Gulf of Georgia

Revised and updated with new information. In July 1862, George Fawcett Drabble, a prosperous farmer in the English Midlands, impulsively boarded the Silistria, a China Clipper ship bound for the gold colony of British Columbia. Dressed in a top hat and a silk suit, twenty-nine-year-old Drabble had gone to Liverpool to say farewell to his friends, but at the last minute he boarded the vessel, saying “Wait Boys! I’m going with you!” Louisa Drabble, his wife, died soon after his sudden departure, and George Drabble stayed on Vancouver Island, settling eventually on a farm in the Comox Valley. His three young children never joined him.