“Discovered” and mapped by white people before the advent of brand management consultants and focus groups, the geography of the West Coast abounded in strange and terrifying place names. The very name “California” came from a phantasmal Spanish novel about rampant Amazon Negresses. The Desolation Sound region, about halfway up the landward coast of Vancouver Island, confronted map-browsing visitors with a variety of features that were by turns named after whatever the first English or Spanish explorers considered inspiring (Enlightenment virtues such as discovery), devotional (diverse saints and theological debating points), important to grovel to (members of royal families, heroes, the admiralty), or dangerous enough to call for heavy hints that future colonizers shouldn’t go there. In the latter category was Devastation Narrows, joining Surge Rocks to Whirlpool Bay, and running, no joke, between Scylla Point and Charybdis Head. This exceptional concentration of scare words was the result of factors both geographical and cultural. The overall Desolation Sound region, if you zoomed out far enough, was the elbow in the five-hundred-kilometer-long sleeve of water separating Vancouver Island from the mainland. From that elbow the Queen Charlotte Strait ran wide and mostly unobstructed to the Pacific Ocean to the west. To the south, the Strait of Georgia was a similar highway of deep water to the confluence of the Strait of Juan de Fuca and Puget Sound. Tides ebbed and flowed along all of these. In less complicated waters, the direction of the water’s movement could be guessed simply by checking a tide table and then glancing at the map to note the direction of the open Pacific. But the rise and fall of the world’s largest body of water could reach Desolation Sound as readily from the west as from the south. That, combined with the exceptional number of islands, the maze of glacier-cut channels between them, and the verticality of the shores, made for movements of water that were as rapid as they were chaotic. Whirlpools, weird standing waves, undertows, bore tides, and abrupt reversals in the direction of flow were the norm.