In 1792, a longboat carrying a mixed English and Spanish crew had ventured into the apparently placid waters of what they took to be a blind inlet, only to find themselves in the grip of sudden and violent tidal surge that had overpowered their oarsmen and sent them on what amounted to a white-water rafting adventure down a chute between a craggy islet and a limb of rock protruding from a large island. They had sideswiped the former hard enough to stave in one side of the boat, which had begun shipping water and then gone under after getting caught in a whirlpool. The bodies—long since dead of hypothermia—and the wreckage had washed up on a driftwood-strewn shore some miles away, the home of a band of the sorts of people nowadays referred to, in Canada, as First Nations. To the officers of the European ship who had observed all of these goings-on through their spyglasses, they were Indians. And to the less adventurous white people who years later had read accounts of the tragedy while dragging their fingers along the course of the doomed boat on nautical charts, they were cannibals and slavers and such. More sensitive descriptions of those tribes and their cultural practices were now available, but the names on the maps had mostly stuck. The one exception was the stretch of beach where the corpses had washed up, which went down on the eighteenth-century charts as Cannibal Shore but was now called Ruination Reach.

No business owner in their right mind would want to sink a lot of capital into a resort named after that. “Devastation” was only a little less discouraging, but “Desolation” had a ring to it that a clever marketing team could make hay with. So Desolation Lodge was the name of the resort that had been built on the island, just above Surge Rocks, and within view of Scylla Point (the hazard that had punched in the longboat’s side) and Charybdis Head. It was an old logging camp, abandoned sufficiently long ago that the trees on the surrounding slopes had grown back to proportions where most tourists assumed they were looking at virgin wilderness. There wasn’t much flat land, but concrete foundations had been poured on some of the rocks within spitting distance of the shore and conjoined by a network of timbers and girders to support acres of cedar-plank platforms where docks, walkways, ramps, a helipad, a seaplane port, and other facilities had been constructed to service the lodge proper.