Memoirs of a Worldly Guy
When I sailed from Honolulu to Victoria with Deny Ryan in 1954 there were a lot fewer small boats making such a passage. I was asked by the Canadian Club (it might have been the Women's Canadian Club) to talk to them about sailing across the Pacific in a small boat.
Although I was unaware of it at the time, one of the more interested members of the audience was Norman Luxton who had come down from Banff to hear my presentation. Unless they have visited his museum in Banff, most people will have never heard of Norman. There is a wooden canoe about twenty-eight feet long in an outdoor park in the city of Victoria. This is the tiny vessel that a certain gentleman claims to have sailed around the world. Amazing, but I've forgotten the man's name; give me time, I"ll think of it! Good heavens! It's over forty years since I discussed the man with Norman, however, so perhaps it's not so amazing at that!
I made a similar presentation to the Banff Chamber of Commerce and was presented with a darling little scrap of 'Attaboy' paper for my efforts. They paid big in those days!
Okay, I've got a book by Grant MacEwan called 'Fifty Mighty Men' that has a chapter about Norman Luxton. Norman was born in Winnipeg, Manitoba on November 2nd, 1876; calculated by me personally to have made him about 78 years old when he travelled to Calgary to hear me talk about sailing in the Pacific. After a few early adventures including journalism, publishing and gold mining, Norman met a Danish character called Captain F.C. Voss who apparently talked Norman into an ocean-going adventure. They had no boat at the time, so Norman solved that problem by buying, from a Siwash Indian, an old 28 foot dugout carved from a redwood cedar log. It was ancient, probably more than a hundred years old, but a hell of a bargain at eight dollars.
They constructed a small cabin to fit the canoe, added three masts and sails and christened it 'Tilikum'--the Indian word for 'Friend'. They left Victoria, B.C. on May 22nd before a small gathering of friends and after cruising slowly north along the coast as far as Nootka, set out on the Pacific, headed for the tropic isles. McEwan makes no mention of the Tuamotus, Marquesas or Tahiti, all of which they presumably bypassed to the north en route to Penrhyn atoll (now called Tongareva), arriving there with no water. By this time they had become 'bushed' and sat at opposite ends of the canoe nursing their guns and not speaking. So what else is new?
Luxton related various adventures he'd had in the Fijis including an offer to marry a chief's daughter from which he escaped by claiming his previous obligation to Voss (to sail, of course!). It's possible that some of the islanders were still eating 'long pig' (cannibalism) but I've never had that confirmed. He was washed onto a coral reef and taken for dead by his companion but revived miraculously and was taken to Suva. There he was ordered by the local doctor to book a steamship passage to Sydney. Meanwhile Voss had taken on a Tasmanian to complete his journey and encountered a storm that washed them both overboard. Norman was circumspect about Voss when I spoke to him and got the impression that Voss was slightly unstable mentally and that the Tasmanian may have gone missing for reasons other than mishap.
Voss went on from Australia through the Indian Ocean to South Africa, Brazil and eventually to London, where the Tilikum was discovered years later half-buried in a mudbank on the Thames. The owners generously agreed to give it to the city of Victoria on condition that it be displayed without charge to the public. It arrived in July of 1930 and when I saw the canoe in Thunderbird Park in Victoria I just shook my head! Surely no one would be nuts enough to circumnavigate the globe in a craft like that! That was before I went sailing---in a 28 foot boat!
Norman had many business involvements in Banff and I have little doubt that he initiated the invitation from the Banff Chamber of Commerce for me to speak to them about my sailing.
'Come back to my office with me, we'll have a drink or two!' he said following the presentation, and we went to his office on Banff Avenue and sat for several hours drinking whisky and spinning yarns.
'Would you like me to go to the vendor's for some more Scotch?' I asked him eventually, looking at the heel of the bottle we'd been working on.
'I sometimes run out of mixer,' he said disparagingly, 'but I never run out of whisky!' So saying, he reached under his desk and withdrew an unopened bottle of Johnnie Walker Black Label Scotch. He was 77 years old at the time.
Norman Luxton was a powerhouse of energy and besides his other exciting adventures he was a journalist and publisher, real estate dealer, trader with and hero to the Indians and prime mover in the construction of the King Edward Hotel in Banff.
One year earlier Eric Harvie had funded the establishment of the Norman Luxton museum which backs against the Glenbow Museum on the banks of the Bow River in Banff and serves as a fitting memorial to this outstanding Canadian.
Norman Luxton died on October 23rd, 1962 a little more than a week before his 85th birthday.
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