Museum of whale skeletons, painstakingly rebuilt over years, consumed by B.C. fire

It takes years to rebuild a whale.

Just ask Jim Borrowman, co-founder of the Whale Interpretive Centre museum that housed numerous whale skeletons on the boardwalk of Telegraph Cove on Vancouver Island.

“When we find a dead whale somewhere, especially a larger one, it’s a massive job to take that animal from a whole, complete dead whale, to get it to its point where all the bones are cleaned and re-articulated and then hung up,” said Borrowman.

In the case of Finny, a 20-metre fin whale that died in a 1999 ship strike, the body had to be towed by tugboat from Vancouver hundreds of kilometres away to a beach near Telegraph Cove.

The huge body was dragged ashore and defleshed, painstakingly cleaned and the bones then sunk in clean waters, degreased of their oils, then dried, in a process that took four years.

Finally came the two-year project of rearticulating, or reconnecting, the skeleton and hanging it to loom over the heads of museum guests, who came from around the world.

But all that work was gone in just a few hours, when a fire demolished the boardwalk, businesses, and the museum, on New Year’s Eve.

The cause is under investigation, Telegraph Cove Resort co-founder Gordie Graham said on Wednesday.

The Whale Interpretive Centre, founded in 2002, housed the largest collection of marine mammal skeletons in British Columbia and welcomed about 10,000 visitors each year.

Borrowman, 75, chairs the museum committee, while his wife, Mary, is treasurer.

They had spent more than 40 years collecting marine mammal skeletons.

Jim Borrowman said the fire caused him “total panic” when he realized the museum had been reduced to ash.

He said he valued the collection at more than $2 million, but putting a value on the effort to create the collection is difficult. Volunteers were involved in every step, he said.

“It was a huge amount of work and we were all volunteers … and nobody’s ever been paid to do anything and they just showed up because they love whales and they wanted to help,” said Borrowman.

Borrowman used to run Stubbs Island Whale Watching company on Vancouver Island before selling the business in 2011.

The collection began with a dead minke whale found in 1978. Borrowman tied it up in a bay to clean it up throughout the winter, but he later found that many bones had disappeared.

“So, I learned very quickly: If I want to keep enough bones to make a proper skeleton, put it together, I have to go to great effort to hide them,” said Borrowman, adding that people just came and took away the bones.

Federal permits are now needed to collect marine mammal bones, but in those early days people took what they wanted. All of the specimens in the museum were legally collected, Borrowman said.

The biggest and most memorable project undertaken by the museum was Finny. The whale was struck and killed by a cruise ship near Port Hardy, not far from Telegraph Cove, but the body became hung up on the ship’s bulbous bow and was pushed all the way to Vancouver.

Borrowman said Mary got permission from Fisheries and Oceans Canada to retrieve the body and she contacted the Coast Guard to arrange a tugboat to drag the 60-tonne body back north for defleshing.

“By the late fall of ’99, I started sinking the bones underwater in a place where there was no mud and silt, so I could make sure we didn’t lose any,” said Borrowman.

“We put all the small bones in little plastic barrels, etc., and so after it was down for over a year, (there were) all the bits of meat left on the bones, and there’s a lot of oil inside the bones of whales that helps with their buoyancy.

“So we tried to clean all that out, and they looked pretty good and then we brought it out of the water, and we had to let it dry for a long time.”

Once cleaned, the bones were reconstructed over two summers with the help of a marine biology graduate working at the centre.

All told, it was a six-year project to get Finny’s skeleton hung in the museum.

It took five years to do so for the museum’s humpback whale.

Like Finny, many beloved specimens had nicknames. There was Eileen — a male Bigg’s killer whale that was incongruously named after a museum donor — as well as Stella the sea lion, Stubby the orca calf, and Arnie the grey whale.

There were also skeletons of a beluga whale, a Cuvier’s beaked whale, a Pacific white-sided-dolphin, otters, a partial skeleton of a sperm whale and blue whale jaw bones.

“These were the hanging skeletons but we had many different skulls, rib bones, vertebrae of not only marine mammals but terrestrial animals as well. Too many to name,” said Mary Borrowman.

With the donation of a site from the owners of the Telegraph Cove Resort, Gordie and Marilyn Graham, the museum was a labour of love.

“We didn’t have to pay a lease or any rent, and that allowed us to spend the last 22 years building up our collection,” said Borrowman.

Already the Borrowmans are thinking of restarting the museum.

Like rebuilding a whale, they know it will be a slow process.

“Together we will embrace the challenge for renewed strength to what lays ahead,” read an online joint statement posted by the couple.

Jim Borrowman said hundreds of people had already reached out to wish them well and offer help. “It’s been overwhelming,” he said.

Borrowman said when the museum launched it only had two whale skeletons. Now it is reduced to two specimens again, skeletons of a Risso’s dolphin and pygmy sperm whale, that were stored offsite on Salt Spring Island awaiting re-articulation.

“We’re going to do our best (to rebuild), and we’ve got tremendous support, and I plan to live to be 100 now. I was only going to plan to be 85 but I’ll wait till I’m 100 to die so we can get this built,” he said with a laugh.

This report by The Canadian Press was first published on Jan. 3, 2025.

Nono Shen, The Canadian Press