The internment of B.C.’s Japanese population during the Second World War is a matter of public record, but less well-known is how devastating this proved for maritime communities. Now a new Vancouver Maritime Museum exhibit, The Lost Fleet, probes the losses suffered up and down the B.C. coast when 1,200 Japanese-Canadian–owned fishing boats were confiscated in 1941.

Opening Friday (March 24) and running for a year, the show also explores how incidents such as the 1942 shelling of Vancouver Island’s Estevan Point Lighthouse by a Japanese submarine fuelled xenophobic sentiments during a politically charged and troubling time.