Birch Bay, WA - Salmon Canning

We got to the Cannery at 3:30, in time for a little self guided exploration and then for the 4:00 tour. We began with the cannery movie and then went to the herring reduction part of the cannery which is not part of the regular tour. What is really exciting about this cannery is that the original equipment is still in place in the actual factory where the work was done. One thing that both Gary and I noticed about the Canadian presentation of their National Historic sites is that they do not sanitize history. When they talk about the slime table, they make it look like a slime table. Fake blood, fake scales, fake ‘slime.’ Yechh-h. When they want to show how fingers could get cut off in the machinery, they make a fake finger. There are fake fish everywhere. They make it easy to imagine that you are in the fish line, slicing up this fish for canning. Very realistic in an original setting.

During WWII herring canning was extremely popular not only to feed soldiers but also to feed the civilian populations overseas in the war zones. Along with this was the reduction of herring to protein-rich oil and meal for animal feeding processes.

Using lots of equipment from modeled on the wine industry they mushed up the herring with huge augers, squeezed out the liquid in seines, baked the left-over mush until it was dry and bagged this up for animal feed. Yechh-h. As a footnote, when the factory closed in 1979, it closed. Everyone left and they locked the doors. Then, when Parks Canada took it over in 1984, there were still herring left in the machinery. 5 years - imagine the stench.

At 4:00 Gary, I and Mark, our tour guide met at the boat. No one else around. Looks like a tour for two. But Mark gave it his all. We started with a map of Canada showing the canneries at the turn of the 20th Century and the canneries now. Of the nearly 100 canneries in 1900, only 2 remain. Canning has gone the way of salting. Frozen and fresh are the most popular ways of getting salmon from the water to the table these days.

The cannery we are in, the Gulf of Georgia Cannery, which opened in 1894, closed in 1979 after having been used for salmon canning, herring canning, herring reduction and as a net loft. Parks Canada took it over in 1984 and opened it as a museum in 1994, on the centennial of its original opening.

But if we thought that this tour would be just about salmon canning, we were soon proven wrong, We first learned about fishing in turn of the century Canada, about the different types of fish caught, about fishing sustainably, about unionizing the cannery workers and the fishermen and, oh yeah, then we went to the canning line. We started at the beginning, where the salmon were taken off the ship - by hand, natch - using a large metal stake. This was called peughing the salmon. Hard, heavy work and it went on for 16 hours a day.

Then through the cutting line where they were beheaded, detailed and gutted - usually by Chinese workers. Later a machine was developed to do this, which was called in the pre-PC days, the Iron Chink. (Everyone was quite happy when a machine was developed that could do this by machine and eliminate the Chinese. that it could do the job faster than the Chinese was merely an added bonus.) We cringe today when we hear this term.

Next was the slime table where women cleaned the fish that had just been gutted. They washed the fish with ice cold water, 16 hours a day.

Then into the slicing line where the salmon was sliced by this ‘cute’ gadget into chunks wide enough to stuff into a 1 1/2 lb. can.

The cans come down from the rooms above - put into the shoot by children. Children weren’t physically able to work in the factory but they could send cans down into the can machine. The cans are in the conveyor belt in the upper left while the salmon are the pink chunks coming in from the right. At the bottom the finished filled cans are rolling on to the can sealer.

Many factories used another machine to stuff the salmon into the cans but this factory used female hand labor because a female could make it ‘look’ prettier for the more high-end buyer. Here’s a picture of women stuffing the cans - note where the kids too young to work with the cans are kept. Some of the mother’s back while others sat on the floor.

The air was taken out of the can, the lid was put on, the cans packed and then shipped all over the world.

As our guide pointed out, the factories were sexist, racist, dangerous and employed child labor.

And that was the salmon canning line. Yecch-h.

There was also a display of can labels. Here’s one from WWII.

Here’s another playing on the Mounties, a Canadian symbol.

We really enjoyed this amazing museum. We liked all the explanatory signs, detailing the entire process.

We also liked the realistic depiction of what was a messy, slimy, lousy, dangerous, poor-paying job. I learned more about salmon canning than I really wanted to know.

We also like the enthusiastic, fast-talking, perky, knowledgeable young people we met in the two museums we visited. We learned more about Canadian History in the last several days than we had in our previous 60 some years. But, that was the point.

By the way, the museum had a nice bit about fraud in restaurants, grocery stores and fish markets. We all order what we think is the fish listed on the menu or on the product list. But, without the head, tail and fins, many fish look alike and serving a less expensive fish is not uncommon. I know I’ve read stories about mislabeling fish. The best way to tell that you are getting the fish that you want is to but it with the head and tail on. If that is not practical, ask where the fish was caught. If your fish monger cannot tell you, pass on this fish.