GALLEY BAY: A DREAM DENIED
by Erika Grundmann

That Galley Bay, at the entrance to Desolation Sound, was home to a commune in the late 1960s and early seventies is general knowledge among boaters. The entry that appears in the Waggoner Cruising Guide of 2005 states that: "At one time a hippie colony was established on the west shore. By close observation Contributing Editor Kincaid noted that among other idiosyncrasies, they practiced a clothing-optional lifestyle. He reports that some of the ladies would swim out to bargain for cigarettes. Alas, he says, they are now gone." A less idyllic picture is revealed in the book with the protective title Apple Bay, written by American musician/writer Paul Williams (better known for Das Energi), in which he describes his time as a member of the commune there in 1970. The fact that in the late thirties a similar vision of communal living and self-sufficiency was held by a group of idealists and pacifists—of which "sailor-philosopher" George Dibbern was a driving force—is less widely known.

German-born Georg Johann Dibbern had experienced life abroad and had even been interned in New Zealand during the first world war. Deported back to Germany in 1919, he married, had children and tried to settle into family life. Times were difficult with six million people unemployed. After ten years of failure to adapt to the unsettled conditions in Germany at the time, Dibbern acknowledged that he no longer fit in the country of his birth. He especially did not agree with the direction German politics were headed. His outspokenness was bound to get him into trouble. For him it was a matter of "break out or die." And break out he did.

With his motorless, 32 foot Baltic double-ender Te Rapunga, constructed of one and a half inch oak planking, in 1930 he set sail from Kiel for New Zealand in search of his own identity and of a better life. The journey, which took four years, convinced him that if people got to know individuals from different countries they would be more sympathetic toward and tolerant of others. On this premise he decided to make his Te Rapunga the means to foster international understanding and brotherhood, to build bridges of friendship.

In 1935 he put together a crew and sailed from Auckland northwards. That was the year the Nazi party in Germany decreed the swastika as the only allowable German flag. Dibbern felt, however, that a flag represented the values of the individual who raised it—and the swastika did not in any way reflect his own beliefs. Thus it was flying a flag of his own design that Te Rapunga, and her crew consisting of a daring young woman, Eileen Morris from Napier, and a cub reporter, Roy Murdock from Gisborne, arrived in Victoria, BC on July 1, 1937.

Throughout the two year voyage from New Zealand, Roy had corresponded with a cousin, Muriel Murdock, who worked at the Westinghouse office in the Marine Building just up the street from the Immigration Wharf in Vancouver, where Te Rapunga ultimately moored. Employed in the same office, Gladys Nightingale, later known as Sharie Farrell (of the legendary BC boat-building couple who were the subject of Salt on the Wind by Dan Rubin and Sailing Back in Time by Maria Coffey), had followed with great interest and envy the movements of the adventurous crew and ketch. When she finally met the skipper, the mutual attraction was immediate. Dibbern made it clear from the start that his family in Germany would always come first, but he saw no reason why they couldn't go the road together for a while. Nor did Gladys.

George had begun writing the manuscript for a book describing his four year journey from Germany to New Zealand. He was a gifted story-teller, but while his command of English allowed for eloquence in oral expression, he hated sitting still in front of typewriter where his language became as cramped as his body. He found Gladys the perfect and willing solution.

Roy had left the crew to ultimately become associate editor of The Daily Colonist in Victoria. For the winter months of 1937-38 Eileen lived aboard Te Rapunga at Enterprise Wharf in the Victoria Inner Harbour, while George rented a room in Vancouver with a view to Hollyburn mountain. Mornings he often gave talks about his philosophy of the sea—he felt that to learn how to sail was to learn how to live – at schools or service clubs; afternoons he prepared notes; and evenings he was joined by Gladys. To George's dictation, after a long day typing at the office, she typed some more. The result was the manuscript that would become Quest, the chronicle of Dibbern's search for meaning and purpose in life, of the self-recrimination alternating with the guilty exhilaration which charted that journey of self-discovery. When the first draft of Quest was completed, by the summer of 1938, it was left to gel. With a great sense of relief, George heeded the call of the Gulf Islands and Desolation Sound.

He fetched Eileen and Te Rapunga from Victoria and, with an ever-changing collection of would-be sailors, they headed north. At Pender Harbour Te Rapunga met up with two other boats – Muriel Wylie Blanchet's motor cruiser, Caprice, and Major Harry Jukes' 39 foot yawl, Ivanhoe. "Capi", as Muriel Blanchet was known, had been widowed and left with five young children. Contrary to her family's advice and urging, she refused to sell her house in Saanich on Vancouver Island. To manage financially, every summer she would rent it out to vacationing Americans and take her children cruising and exploring up the coast. Her book describing the adventures of a fiercely independent and determined woman and her family, The Curve of Time, has become a well-known coastal classic. She and George – both of them people who lived life on their own terms—had much in common.

The three boats sailed up the inland waters between Vancouver Island and the mainland. On calm, windless days, still-motorless but grateful, Te Rapunga would be lashed alongside one of the other boats and be towed. Rachel Jukes MacKenzie, then a teenager, recalls that Capi knew all the ways to get up the coast. She led them through narrow and shallow passages that challenged the Ivanhoe, seven feet at the keel. Snapshots of the time show the group of boaters rafted up together, tanning themselves on the sun-warmed rocks or all crowded onto a single boat for fun and laughter. In the bays where they stopped for the night, they separated for a little privacy, but gathered together around an evening beach fire.

As George had predicted, Gladys had become close friends with Eileen. She took her holidays from Westinghouse and joined the "gang" as they navigated up the coast. So frequently and eloquently did Dibbern extol the wondrous beauty of coastal BC, he was finally challenged with the observation "If you like it so much, why don't you stay?" Why not indeed!

In the years since he had left Germany in 1930, the idea of settling anywhere had slipped further from Dibbern's mind. Either he hadn't been permitted to stay or he couldn't see how he would survive – and he certainly was not prepared to take on any old job just to make money! But Canada seemed to offer possibilities: a sense of freedom and affordable property; a place for him to bring out his family from Germany; a safe haven for him from the long arm of the Nazi party (his flag had not gone unnoticed); a retreat for artists and writers; a refuge for friends to come and live; a place where people would share the work and give of their talents. "How many there are who need quietness and rest and our spirit of friendship to recuperate, to straighten out their thoughts. Here we could do it, and the place would send them, fresh and strong back into life again," wrote George to his mother-in-law in Germany. "We will build small cabins for friends to stay in [...] They'll give to us and we'll give to them, each what he has to give and they can have a royal time on this coast fishing, sailing, swimming, exploring. Each of them can throw in what he can afford, and so we will all live and have fun and enjoy this beauty."

The search for a suitable property preoccupied the group to the point of obsession. The dream property manifested itself in Galley Bay, available for payment of $472 back taxes. The property was on the east side of the bay (as opposed to the 1960s commune on the west) and had belonged to Axel Ragnar Hanson, a fisherman based in nearby Bliss Landing and son of the old Finn from Hangö, who was fondly referred by locals as "Pa Hanson". Drunk with the dream rather than with Pa Hanson's renowned blackberry wine, Dibbern, who rarely partook of alcohol, wrote in an unpublished manuscript "Ship without Port":

Curving round a lovely sheltered bay, it is two hundred acres of forested land, with a beautiful view of the mountains up the inlet. At the highest part there is a lake, with trout, high enough above sea level and with a strong enough overflow to give us electric power. There are good pockets of earth here and there for gardening, and in the water round about enough fish, salmon, cod, flounder and shellf ish, to give us a good supply. We are so enchanted that we cannot part from the place, but live here in a dream, building it up. In our minds we make tracks through the woods, and plant fruit trees, build a long low log cabin, nothing to mar the harmony of the landscape. Definitely there will be no radio blaring through the night, disturbing the beautiful silence.

Daily we are struck anew with the beauty of the place, the still waters, framed by dark-green shores of fir, spruce and cedar, high mountains behind, raising their snow-peaks into the sky, looking down on us in coolness and tranquillity like symbols of eternity and wisdom, little islands dotted here and there like so many scrubby heads of giants swimming in the water, with the sun turning their bristly hair golden towards evening. There are steep bluffs with red-stemmed arbutus trees which bring a new colour into the green, yellow rocks covered with moss, russet and brown-leafed shrubs and the dogwood opening its white stars amongst the dark-green firs in early summer, while the golden maple holds all the summer's glow long into the autumn.

The idea of building their own boats and going fishing, which George presented to his 14, 15 and 17 year old daughters raised in the culture of the old world and in the urban setting of Berlin, did not convince them of the merits of living in the Canadian wilderness. And there was the more immediate matter of Dibbern's having to convince the immigration authorities of his suitability as a new Canadian.

While the summer and fall months of 1938 passed blissfully coloured with optimistic visions of communal and self-sustaining life at Galley Bay, George and Eileen's visitor's permits expired. George as a German citizen and Eileen as a New Zealand citizen filed their applications for residency. Their immigration hearings took place in January 1939. The questions put to George were wide-ranging. How did he intend to make a living? Log cabins. A shared garden. Fishing. A home for people to come and stay... Aha! "Do you intend to start a cult up there?" Some, like the inquiry about the nature of his relationship (was it platonic?) with his young, female, live-aboard crew member and navigator – remember this was 1939 – were impossible to address with a simple yes or no. The final question, however, was easy for George to answer: an emphatic NO, for he would not bear arms for any country. Needless to say, neither Dibbern nor Eileen was accepted, nor was the appeal, urged by friends, successful.

Te Rapunga was permitted to stay in Canada till June. As she sailed from Vancouver, George and Eileen could not help but reflect on their vision, how they had just wanted to live simply and happily, and how they had aspired to help make others happy... but that obviously hadn't been enough.

Te Rapunga's flag was greeted in Port Angeles with light-hearted curiosity as a "pirate" flag. The Seattle Daily Times took it more seriously and depicted Dibbern as a "self-described queer bird, who doesn't care to lose his individuality" and, more importantly, as "a man without a country". This designation confirmed to Dibbern that he would have to take another stand, which he subsequently did. In San Francisco, he devised his own passport, declaring himself a friend of all peoples and a citizen of the world, which he had notarized on May 31, 1940 just before his American visitor's permit expired and he was forced to leave the United States. When he returned his New Zealand crew member to her home in January 1941, his passport, put to the test, was not recognized and he was promptly interned for the duration of WWII—the ultimate insult to what had started out years earlier as an idealistic vision of goodwill, friendship and universal acceptance.

On the other hand, sun- and fun-loving George Dibbern had never experienced a dull, gray, cold and wet, northwest coastal winter. Perhaps the Galley Bay dream that had been denied him would have collapsed, just as the commune described by Paul Williams in Apple Bay did.

© Erika Grundmann, Manson's Landing BC, July 2005