Canada's first boat people were the Norse who came ashore a thousand years ago in Newfoundland. They fit the refugee pattern: farmers and simple artisans, maybe a few fierce Vikings among them known for terrorizing Europe, people driven out of their homeland by population pressures and political unrest.
No one knows how they were received by the local inhabitants, the Beothuks. Probably not well. The Beothuks' response to later European arrivals, before they became extinct, was to hide from them by moving inland.
But historians know the next boat people, Jacques Cartier and his Breton mariners, who sailed into Gaspé harbour in 1534, and quickly developed a sour relationship with Iroquois chief Donnacona, ticking him off by their pushy behaviour in claiming the land for the French king and kidnapping his sons.
The primal fear of the stranger, the Other, seems edgiest when they arrive by sea.
They can be watched, coming across the blank, huge canvas of the ocean, moment by moment growing larger and more ominous on the horizon, carrying alien stuff. Hence the noisy narrative of the MV Sun Sea's progress over the Pacific into Canadian territory with its Tamil cargo.
That archetypal fear of the stranger-by-sea was inherent in the two most shameful moments of Canadian boat-people history, the stories of the Komagata Maru and the MS St. Louis.
HMCS Rainbow, Canada's first war ship, is anchor near the Komagata Maru in B.C.'s Burrard Inlet in July 1914.
Across the Pacific from British Columbia at the turn of the century was the Other of the Empire's colonial world – the “lesser breeds without the law,” Rudyard Kipling called them in his poem Recessional, composed for Queen Victoria's diamond jubilee in 1897. They were the yellow peril, the dark-skinned wogs (derived from the Golliwogg, a minstrel doll character from a children's book published in 1895), the threats from a different human order.
In May, 1914, the Japanese-owned steamship Komagata Maru, chartered out of Hong Kong, arrived at Vancouver with 376 passengers from India intent on emigrating to Canada.
“Hindu invaders now in Vancouver harbor,” read a welcoming newspaper headline, incorrectly. Almost all of them were Sikhs.
At that time, Indians, even though they were British subjects, were kept out of Canada by an order-in-council requiring them to come to Canada by continuous passage from India, service that no steamship line provided.
The order was challenged successfully in court in 1913, leading to the Komagata Maru's journey.
But the ship was kept waiting in Vancouver harbour for two months, with most of its passengers detained on board while immigration officials manoeuvred to keep them out of court. On July 20, the naval cruiser HMCS Rainbow arrived as a manifestation of intimidating state muscle and, on July 23, the Komagata Maru weighed anchor and sailed back across the Pacific to Calcutta, where 20 of its passengers were killed in a shootout with colonial police suspicious of their politics and others were jailed for refusing to return to the Punjab.
In this file photo of June 1, 1939, the ill-fated German liner St. Louis was denied entrance to Havana's harbour.— Associated Press
Twenty-five years later, the persecution and genocide of two-thirds of Europe's nine million Jews was well launched when the captain of the passenger liner MS St. Louis, carrying 907 German Jewish refugees, asked permission of the Canadian government to dock in Halifax.
The Jews were the only Other who were part of European civilization (the Gypsies were mere vagrant children and a nuisance), uncomfortably close-up, perceived as undermining the broader culture with their non-conformism and clothed with the mythological mantle of Shylocks and Christ-killers.
