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THE FIGUREHEAD OF THE EMPRESS OF JAPAN TODAY The preceding article on tne "White Empresses" was written in time to be republished in the MUSEUM ROUND-UP in April 1974. In early October 1984, your editor met the author, Len McCann at the B.C. Museums Association Convention at the Sheraton Villa Motel in Burnaby, and asked him about the original figurehead. Mr. McCann, obviously disappointed, said that there had been none. The pieces still lie in the basement of the Maritime Museum awaiting the hand of the restorer. The museum and its conservation staff are not to be faulted. As Mr. McCann says in his article, the staff available for any restoration work is not big enough for the volume of work that it faces. To commit the Museum's resources for three years to one project would in the long run hurt the Museum more than the restoration of the figurehead would help it. The Museum staff had to set priorities and the massive restoration gave way to smaller restoration on more easily save-able items. Mr. McCann did not say so, but the restoration of the figurehead probably depends on outside help aimed at that restoration alone, leaving the present staff to cope with its present work. The moral, if one wants one, is that ..."there is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood_____" If we want to save our past, we must act while the past is still saveable. That is as true of the past of West Vancouver as it is for the dragon from the EMPRESS OF JAPAN. It is for this reason that we are constantly urging both our members and the general public to make their contribution to to the Archives of West Vancouver, and, now that we are also a Museum Society, to the museum we houe to have in the foreseeable future. THE NORTH WEST PASSAGE When Christopher Columbus discovered the Americas in 1492, and after it was realized that he had found a new land mass and not the mystical Far East, there were many efforts to circumvent the Americas to reach the east. Magellan proved that there was a route, very arduous, around the southern tip of South America. The British, the Dutch and the French sought unsuccessfully for an alternate route to the north of North America - the North-West Passage. If one does not mind stretching one's definitions, Canada found a viable North West Passage when it way was completed in offered the C.P.R. a As a result in 1891, opened an all-British built the Canadian Pacific Railway across Canada. The rail-1885, and three years later, in 1888, the British government subsidy if it would set up a mail route to the Far East, the C.P.R. had the three Empresses built in England, and route to India, China and Japan.. The route cut the time for the delivery of mail between London and Yokohama from 42 days to 28 days. But, important as this all-British route was to Great Britain, it was immeasurably more important to Vancouver. Around any port trade tends to accumulate and the spillage in Vancouver was to start the city on its way to its present greatness. Without this effective commercial North-West Passage, Vancouver might have remained for years a rather inconsequential lumber port. With it, it has become a commercial aiant.