This Day in History, 1889: A floating cannery producing fish oil becomes a swimming bath

One of the first businesses in what became Vancouver was Spratt’s Oilery, a “floating cannery” on the Coal Harbour waterfront.

It was built around 1875 by Joseph Spratt of Victoria, who also owned a converted scow known as Spratt’s Ark. It lasted until 1884, when the large stocks of herring it had found in Burrard Inlet disappeared.

“The herring were very thick in Coal Harbour waters,” pioneer Calvert Simson told Vancouver’s first archivist, Major Matthews, in Vol. 3 of his Early Vancouver series.

“Spratt’s Oilery caught them, squeezed the oil out, and dumped the refuse back in the inlet; whether that drove all the herring away or not no one can tell positively, but they say it did; anyway they went.”

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Some accounts say one method of fishing Spratt’s Oilery employed was throwing dynamite into the water. The fish oil Spratt’s Oilery wrung out of the herring was used in industrial machinery.

It was located at the bottom of a bluff near the foot of today’s Burrard and Thurlow streets. An 1884 photo shows a complex of several buildings surrounded by forest.

Spratt’s Ark was said to be 44 metres long by 14 metres wide and was used to take goods across the Strait of Georgia. In 2004, former Vancouver Maritime Museum head James Delgado wrote it was “most likely” the “mystery wreck” that had been found in the waters off Lonsdale Quay in North Vancouver.

In 1889, one or more of the Spratt’s Oilery buildings was rebuilt into the The West End Swimming Baths on the Coal Harbour waterfront.

“ Sea Bathing ,” hyped ads in the Vancouver World and Daily News-Advertiser “West of C.P.R. Wharf.”

It was opened by W.D. Jones and W.D. Burdis, and included a boat building business, presumably in another building.