To All Appearances A Lady is wholly fictional and is not intended to be a history, or a portrait of persons living or dead.
This book was written with the aid of a grant from the Canada Council. It also owes a great deal to the assistance of my family, friends, and colleagues. My gratitude first to Michael for his support during the inevitable moments of discouragement. Also to Capts. C.C. Wilson, Hill Wilson, and Rod Trail, all B.C. Coastal Pilots. Special thanks to Capt. Trail for his reading of the manuscript. Maywell Wickheim helped form my plan of the Rose; and Roxana Argast rocked the baby. Denise Bukowski was a friend and generous agent, and Ed Carson, my editor, thought like a poet when it mattered. I shall never forget his “silent edit.” I also owe a debt of thanks to my parents; and to Giselle Coffey, Liz and Colin Gorrie, Richard Marks, P.K. Page and Arthur Irwin, Constance Rooke, and Robin Skelton. The Maritime Museum of British Columbia was an important source, as was (and foremostly) the British Columbia Provincial Archives. My heartfelt thanks for the patience of the Archives librarians.
The poems in Chapter Nine are adapted from “A ‘Prison’ for Chinese Immigrants,” The Asianadian, Vol. 2, No. 4, Spring 1980 by David Chuenyan Lai. I found “Praise and Prayer,” by R.L. Stevenson, in Collected Poems, edited by Janet Adam Smith (Rupert Hart-Davis: London 1950). I have also quoted from the “Constitution, By-Laws and Rules of the Order of the Workingmen’s Protective Association,” (M’Millan & Son, Victoria 1898), and have drawn upon “The Lepers of D’Arcy Island,” by Ernest Hall and John Nelson (Dominion Medical Monthly, Vol. XI, No. 6, 1898). Other sources that should be mentioned are two unpublished M.A. theses: “The Human Geography of Southeastern Vancouver Island, 1842–1891,” by Patrick Donald Floyd, Dept. of Geography, University of Victoria, December 1969; and “The Context of Economic Change and Continuity In An Urban Overseas Chinese Community,” by Charles P. Sedgwick, Dept. of Anthropology, University of Victoria, April 1973. I used an anecdote found in “A Victorian Tapestry,” Sound Heritage, Vol. VII, No. 3, Provincial Archives, Victoria, 1978; and found In A Sea of Sterile Mountains, The Chinese in British Columbia, by James Morton (J.J. Douglas, Vancouver 1974), invaluable. Clippers for the Record, by Marny Matheson (Spectrum Publications: Melbourne 1984) added to my information on Thermopylae, as did Thermopylae and The Age of Clippers by John Crosse (Historian Publishers, Vancouver 1968). More information on sailing ships came from Life On The Ocean, by George Little (George Clark & Son: Aberdeen 1847); and Pacific Yachting’s Cruising Guide to the West Coast of Vancouver Island, by Don Watmough (Maclean Hunter Ltd.: Vancouver 1984) provided important detail. The Arrow War, An Anglo-Chinese Confusion 1856–1860, by Douglas Hurd (Collins, London 1967) gave me a great deal of background on that period in China.
The epigraph from Yeh Ming-chen can be found in the Harvard Journal of Asiatic Studies, Vol. 6, 1941, pg. 37; that from Boethius is in The Consolation of Philosophy, translated by Richard Green (Bobbs-Merrill Co. Inc., 1962).