Joe Fortes

Joe Fortes (1863-1922) was a Caribbean native of Black and Latin ancestry who was a seaman until he stopped in Vancouver and never left. For years he lived in a tent, then a cottage, near English Bay, where he guarded lives and taught half of Vancouver's white population how to swim.

Fortes appears in Ethel Wilson's The Innocent Traveller (1949), and indeed we hear as much about him as the Bay itself. At various points attention is given to his teaching methods. Much is made of how contact begins and ends with his fingertips.

"Mrs. Coffin advanced into the sea, and unhesitatingly dipped herself. "How brave! How brave! Bravo!" cried Topaz from the brink, clapping. Joe Fortes discussed the motions of swimming with Mrs. Coffin, doing so with his arms, and then so with his big legs like flexible pillars, and Mrs. Coffin took the first position. Joe Fortes respectfully supported her chin with the tips of his strong brown fingers. He dextrously and modestly raised her rear, and held it by a bit of her bathing suit. "How politely he does it!" thought Topaz, admiring Joe Fortes and Mrs. Coffin as they proceeded up and down the ocean. When Mrs. Coffin had proceeded up and down supported and exhorted by Joe Fortes for twenty minutes or so, with Topaz addressing them from the brink, she tried swimming alone. She went under several times dragged down by her bathing suit but emerged full of hope." (132)

The picture atop this post was taken in 1910, around the time Wilson came to live in Vancouver after her South African missionary parents passed away. Like The Innocent Traveller's Rose, whose deceased parents were also South African missionaries, Wilson took lessons from Fortes.