Stephen Nemtin is an educator, sculptor, and musician, with a passionate interest in the archaeology of Galiano Island.

Overlooking Georgeson Bay on Active Pass on Galiano Island stand five large tear-shaped rock-walled structures. These Japanese charcoal pit kilns are a testimony in stone to the Japanese settlers that came to British Columbia in the 1890s. There are also known charcoal pit kilns on Mayne, Pender, and Salt Spring islands.

The existence of charcoal goes back to the dawn of time. Wherever there was fire, charcoal would have been produced as its by-product.1Prehistoric finds, dating back to 21,000 BC, have revealed fingerprints and small figures of hardened clay in a small pit-like structure.2 About 15,000 years later, in different places around the world, people made a more conscious effort to use an earth pit as a kiln for the making of ceramics and charcoal.3

[Right] Photo showing Jim Tanaka, Sam Hirano, and Stephen Nemtin at the restored charcoal pit kiln on Galiano Island.

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The key to making charcoal is carbonizing smouldering wood in an oxygen-limited environment without flame. Don't try this at home, but if you filled your oven with wood, turned the dial to 300 degrees and left it for a number of hours, eventually you would have an oven full of charcoal (and a house full of toxic smoke).

Once charcoal is made, it can be used as a source of intense heat. Charcoal burns at temperatures from 400 to 700 degrees or more, depending on the kind of wood used and how the pit kiln or furnace was built.4

By about 3,000 BC it was realized that the high heat given off by burning charcoal could be used for melting copper, making bronze alloy, and, about 2,000 years later, for the evolutionary step of making steel.5

Sketches of pit kilns.	Sketches of a charcoal pit kiln shown from the top and from the side.

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There has been a charcoal-making industry in Japan for thousands of years and it is this technology that has made the Japanese renowned worldwide for their ceramic and sword-making arts. The first Japanese settlers brought this technology with them to British Columbia.

Stories of good fortune that explorers and settlers sent back to Japan about their adventures in North America lured new settlers to Canada. The first documented immigration from Japan to Canada was in the late 1870s, jobs available to the Japanese at this time were limited. Some immigrants came as fishermen and farmers but most found themselves involved in the logging industry as woodcutters and fallers. In the Galiano cemetery a gravestone states in Japanese that Yasomatsu Oka left Takui village in the Wakayama prefecture in 1897 at age 17 and died two years later pinned under a tree in a Galiano logging accident.6 The Wakayama prefecture is well known for its charcoal production; many of the settlers that came to British Columbia, and particularly to Steveston and the Gulf Islands, were from that area.

To make a large charcoal pit, nothing is needed but a shovel and an axe. Two men can build an efficient pit in about a week. The pit is usually dug into a slope so the earth can be used to insulate the carbonizing wood.7 The average size of a charcoal pit on Galiano Island is about 16 feet long, 14 feet wide, and 5½ feet deep. The pit is lined with a rock wall to absorb and radiate more heat; like a furnace. At the back, the wide end of the tear-shaped pit, is a small fireplace with a chimney. At about three feet on either side of this central chimney and halfway up the rock wall are two air holes that extend upward into flues allowing for more efficient adjustment of the heat. Opposite the chimney, at the front, the circular shape narrows to a three-foot passageway for loading the kiln.

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To prepare the pit for firing about six large logs, the length of the pit, are laid parallel to one another and spaced so the air is drawn between them and toward the fireplace and the chimney and flues at the back. Across this log-base is placed a base of smaller, six to eight-inch diameter, logs. Onto this base or "crib" the pit is now packed with about two or three cords of logs of relatively the same diameter, stacked vertically side-by-side to fill the pit. Once filled, the pit is first covered with an approximately 20-centimetre thick layer of branches and leaves and a final layer of soil or sand clay firmly patted down, sealing the wood into a large dome-shaped kiln.

The fire is started at the narrow front end using easily flammable material, twigs and small branches, until there is a strong fire. Once the fire is well established, and smoke starts pouring out of the chimneys, the front end is sealed, save for a small air-intake hole, and the wood begins to smoulder. The smouldering process takes three to five days; the changing colours of smoke indicate the different stages of carbonization. Controlling the air and circulation of the gases is tricky. Too much air can cause the wood to burn or to be totally consumed. If the temperature gets too high, certain kinds of charcoal can break or crumble rendering it less useful as a fuel. A smouldering charcoal pit cannot be left alone. A large tub near the pit is kept filled with water in case it is necessary to cool down the smouldering process. When the smoke becomes a translucent purple it is time to end the smouldering by covering the flues and cutting off all the oxygen. The pit then needs to cool down before the kiln is opened to reveal about half a ton to a ton of charcoal. Alder was the main wood used for making charcoal in British Columbia.

The Japanese produced charcoal in British Columbia as a fuel for the salmon-canning industry and also for use in Gulf Islands' explosives industry. Farmlands were cleared using dynamite to blow-up stumps and rocks. The gunpowder used in making dynamite is 15 percent charcoal.8 Charcoal was also used as a fuel for soap making. Isaburo Tasaka had two charcoal pits just outside Ganges on Salt Spring Island. His son Ty remembers being ten years old in 1923 when he helped his father load 200 bags of charcoal onto their fishing boat. They took it to a soap factory in Victoria where they were paid 30 cents a bag. Ty's sister Omy (Angela), remembers being eight years old in 1918 and sewing the "ears" (corners) of rice sacks filled with newly made chatcoal.9

There are as many as four known charcoal pit sites on Mayne Island, five on Galiano, two on Salt Spring, and at least two on Pender. Charcoal pits apparently existed on Saturna Island and Prevost Island as well. I recently visited a charcoal pit on Mayne Island that was 7 feet high by 18 feet wide by 20 feet long. For the Skeena canneries, there were charcoal pits located at Port Essington and Port Edward.10 Most people probably wouldn't recognize the remains of a charcoal pit, and it is likely there are others dotted around the islands and on the mainland. People have mistaken abandoned pits for Native pit houses, Scottish cairns, and garbage pits.

I've already restored one charcoal pit on private land on Galiano Island and I am in the process of restoring another one on the island, located in a public park. If you think you might know of a charcoal-pit site not mentioned here, please let me know by email to jems@axion.net or write me at 2646 West 11th Avenue, Vancouver, BC, V6K 2L6.

Acknowledgements: Mitsuo Yesaki, Mary Ohara, Angela Tasaka, Ty Tasaka, Bob and Joy Riddle, Eli Nemtin, Martha Miller, and Penny Street.