Vicki Jensen, FRCGS
January 17th, 2022
Maritime historian and Vancouver author Vickie Jensen, who recently authored Deep, Dark and Dangerous: The Story of British Columbia’s World-Class Undersea Tech Industry (Harbour Publishing $36.95), has been elected as a Fellow of the Royal Canadian Geographical Society, class of 2021.
The Royal Canadian Geographical Society was founded in 1929 and is known for publishing the award-winning English language magazine, Canadian Geographic. The Society’s mandate “is to help Canadians chart a successful future by fostering a greater understanding of Canada’s geography — its diverse human and physical landscapes — as well as the changes affecting its people and the environment.” As of 2019, only 1,176 Canadians have held this prestigious title.
Vickie Jensen built her writing career around the importance of documenting and celebrating work. She is the author of Saltwater Women at Work (D&M, 1995) and co-author of Build Your Own Underwater Robot (Vancouver: Westcoast Words, 1997), and the textbook Underwater Robotics (MATE, 2010). For five decades, she and her husband, the anthropologist Jay Powell have also worked with First Nations elders to produce more than fifty schoolbooks, documenting a variety of Indigenous languages spoken on the Northwest Coast.
British Columbia’s undersea story is a vital chapter of Canadian history that has largely gone unrecognized. Deep, Dark & Dangerous seeks to change all that. Jensen interviewed forty subsea pioneers to discover how the industry has unfolded over the past five decades, and uncovered many noteworthy stories and points of interest in the process. The book features interviews with Phil Nuytten, North Vancouver inventor and deep-ocean explorer; Dennis Hurd, owner of the company Atlantis Submarines; and James McFarlane, founder of the Port Coquitlam company International Submarine Engineering (ISE), among others. 9781550179200
Vickie Jensen with with Phil Nuytten, North Vancouver inventor and deep-ocean explorer.
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