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.

The Wilderness Profound opens a window into the life of an entire region during the last four decades of the nineteenth century. Drabble was the first surveyor, road builder and magistrate to work in much of the Gulf of Georgia-including Quadra Island, Campbell River, Comox, Courtenay, the northern Gulf Islands, and the lengthy coastline on Vancouver Island from Nanoose to Cortes Island.

Biography, 314 pp, 6 x 9
ISBN 1-55039-126-7, $22.95