The Tilikum lives at the Maritime Museum in Victoria and it’s well worth the visit. At 38-feet long it looks like a flimsy thing to take out in Victoria Harbour on a windy day, let alone around the world, but in 1901 Captain John Voss and Norman Luxton, a reporter from Winnipeg, intended to do just that.
The canoe is carved from a large red cedar log and was already well used when Voss discovered it at an Indian village on the east coast of Vancouver Island. Voss writes in his memoir that he paid an old man $80 and sealed the deal with a bottle of rye. “The little drop of whisky, had made the old fellow feel pretty good, he presented me with a human skull, which he claimed was that of his father, who had built the canoe 50 years previously.”
Voss added a cabin, a cockpit for steering, three masts, and 230 sq.ft. of canvas, and on May 20, 1901, he and Luxton sailed her out of Oak Bay. Voss and Luxton’s adventures are covered from very different perspectives in Voss’s 1913 memoir Venturesome Voyages and Luxton’s book Tilikum: Luxton’s Pacific Crossing. Luxton writes that Voss was prone to drunken rages and at one point he was forced to pull his .22 on Voss and lock him in his cabin. Later, he says he made Voss sign a paper where he agreed to a judicial enquiry if anything happened to Luxton. Nothing did as Luxton left after a mishap in Fiji, but his replacement, an Australian sailor wasn’t so lucky.
Voss made it all the way to London in 1904—a voyage of 16,000 km. He returned to Victoria, became a celebrity for a short time and bought the St. Francis Hotel, opening it with a lecture about his sail around the world.
When Voss left on his voyage he had a wife Dora, two sons and a daughter. In 1903 Dora was a housekeeper at the Dominion Hotel, but by the time Voss returned she’d moved to Portland. Voss married Mary Anna Welde in 1906, but the marriage was short-lived when Mary died just four months later. Voss sold his hotel and went back to sea, this time as captain of a sealing schooner. When the sealing industry slumped he moved to Tracy, California and died there in 1922 from pneumonia.
The Francis Hotel, long since renamed the Oriental, is now a 32-unit condominium building at 550 Yates Street.
Heritage Afloat! kicks off February 17 as part of BC Heritage week. For information on events and activities visit Heritage B.C.
* Captain Voss is featured in Sensational Victoria’s Tales of the Sea chapter.