By far the largest of the Raincoast Chronicles collections at 420 pages, Fourth Five is living proof that some things just keep getting better. Containing thirty-two inimitable stories, poems and articles, the volume expounds on such diverse matters as supernatural deer, the cannery village of Ceepeecee, fishing-fleet superstitions and the coveted recipe for donkey boiler coffee.

Writers include coast favourites Howard White, Doreen Armitage, Tom Henry, Dick Hammond, Vickie Jensen and Bus Griffiths.

As a bonus, this collection includes two longer features: one on the history of Telegraph Cove, BC, by Pat Wastell Norris and one on the frontier women of BC by Stephen Hume. The book is illustrated in characteristically extravagant fashion with drawings and archival photos.

Howard White was born in 1945 in Abbotsford, British Columbia. He was raised in a series of camps and settlements on the BC coast and never got over it. He is still to be found stuck barnacle-like to the shore at Pender Harbour, BC. He started Raincoast Chronicles and Harbour Publishing in the early 1970s and his own books include A Hard Man to Beat (bio), The Men There Were Then (poems), Spilsbury's Coast (bio), The Accidental Airline (bio), Patrick and the Backhoe (childrens`), Writing in the Rain (anthology) and The Sunshine Coast (travel). He was awarded the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History in 1989. In 2000, he completed a ten-year project, The Encyclopedia of British Columbia. He has been awarded the Order of BC, the Canadian Historical Association's Career Award for Regional History, the Stephen Leacock Medal for Humour, the Jim Douglas Publisher of the Year Award and a Honorary Doctorate of Laws Degree from the University of Victoria. In 2007, White was made an Officer of the Order of Canada. He has twice been runner-up in the Whisky Slough Putty Man Triathlon.

Howard White's profile page

Raincoast Chronicles Fourth Five: Stories and Histories of the BC Coast

The series Raincoast Chronicles is a varied account of life in many of BC’s coastal settlements. Begun in 1972 to place “BC coast character on the record”, this edition compiles the contents of issues 16 to 20.

This collection of 55 contributions defies a succinct description. The first and last items in the collection (issues 16 and 20) are Pat Wastell Norris’s “Time and Tide: A History of Telegraph Cove” and Stephen Hume’s photographic essay “Lilies and Fireweed: Frontier Women of British Columbia”. The remainder cover topics so diverse they are in danger of getting lost or overlooked in the sheer volume of anecdote, poems and recipes of BC’s coastal life. The stories, some modern, some reaching into the provincial archives, are snapshots of what life was like as the coast was settled.

Raincoast Chronicles Fourth Five

This compilation of the Raincoast Chronicles, issues 16 to 20, contains thirty-two entries of stories, articles, poems, drawings and archival photographs related to BC’s west coast history. Two longer entries tell the story of Telegraph Cove on Vancouver Island and of frontier women of BC. Articles on Rattenbury, the West Coast Trail, the effect of small pox on BC’s First Nations populations, early BC photography, the first manned deep-water test in 1966 of a Vancouver-made submersible named PiscesI, the shelling of Estevan Point in 1942, log barging on the coast from 1922-1998, superstitions related to fishing the West Coast and life in a cannery are included.