![]() ![]() Lost to the sea, the submerged wreck rested quietly for decades, and - significantly - memories of the incident began to fade. The wreck appeared to stop leaking and at some point, it slipped off its resting place on the reef, rolling upside down before settling at a depth of more than 100 metres with an unknown quantity of fuel still on board. While pressure was applied to Holland-America to take responsibility, they took no action. Oil spill clean-up efforts to recover the bunker fuel were performed by the Ministry of Transport, the forerunner of today’s Transport Canada. Today, the polluter-pays principle and Canadian law require shipowners to take responsibility, but at the time, the owner and insurance company were able to walk away leaving a leaking wreck with no plan to clean up the spill.įuel continued to leak between January and May 1968, although no accurate account exists of the amount of oil that escaped from the ship’s fuel tanks. Without rules to cover the Schiedyk, the vessel was left in an ambiguous regulatory area when the oil from ship’s fuel tanks, known as bunker oil, began to leak. 4 They decided that a salvage operation wasn’t economical and the freighter was written off as a wreck, absolving the owners and insurance company of any further liability. 3Īfter the sinking, the decision whether to undertake a salvage operation rested with the ship’s owners, Holland-America, and the insurance company, Lloyd’s of London. The name nuučaan̓uł or Nuu-chah-nulth (“All Along the Mountains and Sea”) was chosen in 1978 to represent the First Nations along western Vancouver Island down to the northern edge of Washington State. 2 In this case, Cook is said to have believed nootk-a was the First Nation’s name, but it likely was the Nuu-chah-nulth word for “around” being used to instruct the Cook expedition on where they could safely navigate or to explain that they were on an island ( itchme nutka, a place you can “go around”). Nootka was an erroneous name, the product of “often clumsy misinterpretations” by early European visitors of Indigenous names according to an account by author Andrew Scott. Bligh later gained notoriety as the captain of the HMS Bounty, whose crew mutinied in the South Pacific. When British navigator and explorer Captain James Cook arrived in a cove on the southeast side of the island in 1778, he named it for William Bligh, a Master on Cook’s vessel HMS Discovery. Bligh Island lies in Nootka Sound off the West Coast of Vancouver Island. ![]()
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