Geographic Portrait
of Vancouver Island
The Douglas Treaties
Land Surveying
in the 19th Century
Toponymy
Geographic Portrait of Vancouver Island
Vancouver Island lies between latitudes 48°19’ and 50°53’ north, and between longitudes 123°16’ and 128°26’ west. It measures 460 kilometres from Point Gonzales at its southeastern tip to Cape Scott at the northwestern extremity. At its widest, between Chatham Point and Cape Cook, it is 137 kilometres. With its accompanying islands it has a land area of 34,400 square kilometres, making it the largest island on the Pacific Coast of the Americas. Of comparable area are Denmark, Taiwan, Sicily, Switzerland, and Costa Rica.
The Pacific Ocean and the prevailing westerly winds moderate the climate. The 2,438-metre-high Olympic Mountains provide a protective rain shadow for the southeastern part of the island. The result is a variety of microclimates, generally much warmer and wetter than comparable latitudes across the continent. The climate of Victoria is mild and dry during the summer. In contrast, annual rainfall at Zeballos near the northwestern end can exceed 650 millimetres, almost ten times that of Victoria.
Vancouver Island, like the rest of British Columbia, was formed by the arrival of a series of terranes. For eons, the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate has been moving northeast under the Pacific to meet the North American plate. As the former plate slid beneath the latter, or subducted, its highest layers were scraped off to accumulate in a complex geology, called accreted terranes. Several periods of glaciation then ground down those terranes, bringing further complexity. As the most recent glaciers receded they left the characteristic fjords of the mainland and Vancouver Island’s western coastline. They also deposited zones of gravel, sand, and clay, the residues from the abrasive processes of the moving ice. [See The Land of Heart’s Delight, Fig. 105.]
The Coastal Trough, running from Puget Sound to the channels of the Alaskan Panhandle, separates the Vancouver Island geological region from the rest of the province. Islands large and small, and isolated reefs and rocks above and just below the surface liberally litter much of this trough. This creates a maze of archipelagos and narrow channels full of hazards to shipping. One local author, Jack Hodgins, aptly called this coast, “The ragged green edge of the World.”(1) The Inside Passage, a navigable waterway nearly 2,000 kilometres long and largely protected from the ferocity of the open ocean, takes advantage of the trough.
Much of the interior of Vancouver Island is mountainous and rugged, with more than fifty peaks higher than 6,000 feet (1,829 metres), including four over 7,000 (2,134 metres).(2) Although the last glaciation ended 12,000 years ago, some fourteen-and-a-half square kilometres of perennial ice and snow remain.(3) Many of the peaks in the interior have craggy pinnacles or razorback ridges at their summits, evidence that they were not covered by the last glaciation. The Brooks Peninsula on the west coast also remained ice free as a refugium.
Along the eastern coast and at both extremities lie extensive plains and wide, fertile river valleys. Fjords and complex inlets deeply indent the western coastline. Two of these, Alberni Inlet and Quatsino Sound, cut across the island to within 24 and 11 kilometres of the eastern coast. The Aboriginal peoples used these features for their “oolichan trails” or trading routes across the mountainous, forested interior. These inlets, or sounds, also provide ocean-going vessels with some of the finest protected anchorages along the Pacific Northwest coast.
Moist Pacific winds produce luxuriant vegetation on all but the highest elevations, and until the era of industrial logging, dense climax temperate rainforest draped Vancouver Island. Stands of giant Douglas fir, western red and yellow cedar, spruce, and hemlock flourished everywhere but in the southeastern corner.
James Douglas came to southern Vancouver Island in 1842, seeking a place to build a new fur-trading post, which would become the fort, then the city, of Victoria. [See The Land of Heart’s Delight, Figs. 39 and 40.] He described it to a friend: “The place itself appears a perfect ‘Eden’ in the midst of the dreary wilderness of the Northwest coast and so different is its general aspect, from the wooded rugged regions around, that one might be pardoned for supposing it had dropped from the clouds into its present position.” (4)
Footnotes:
1 Hodgins, Jack, A Passion for Narrative, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993. p. 261.
2 For a detailed review of the rugged heart of the island, see also: Elms, Lindsay, Beyond Nootka: A Historical Perspective of Vancouver Island Mountains, Courtenay, BC: Misthorn Press, 1996. See also members.shaw.ca/beyondnootka/articles/island6000.html.
3 In 2005, according to the Western Canadian Cryospheric Network.
4 Glazebrook, George Parkin de Twenebroker, ed., The Hargrave Correspondence, 1821–1843, Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1938. p. 420.
Vancouver Island lies between latitudes 48°19’ and 50°53’ north, and between longitudes 123°16’ and 128°26’ west. It measures 460 kilometres from Point Gonzales at its southeastern tip to Cape Scott at the northwestern extremity. At its widest, between Chatham Point and Cape Cook, it is 137 kilometres. With its accompanying islands it has a land area of 34,400 square kilometres, making it the largest island on the Pacific Coast of the Americas. Of comparable area are Denmark, Taiwan, Sicily, Switzerland, and Costa Rica.
The Pacific Ocean and the prevailing westerly winds moderate the climate. The 2,438-metre-high Olympic Mountains provide a protective rain shadow for the southeastern part of the island. The result is a variety of microclimates, generally much warmer and wetter than comparable latitudes across the continent. The climate of Victoria is mild and dry during the summer. In contrast, annual rainfall at Zeballos near the northwestern end can exceed 650 millimetres, almost ten times that of Victoria.
Vancouver Island, like the rest of British Columbia, was formed by the arrival of a series of terranes. For eons, the Juan de Fuca tectonic plate has been moving northeast under the Pacific to meet the North American plate. As the former plate slid beneath the latter, or subducted, its highest layers were scraped off to accumulate in a complex geology, called accreted terranes. Several periods of glaciation then ground down those terranes, bringing further complexity. As the most recent glaciers receded they left the characteristic fjords of the mainland and Vancouver Island’s western coastline. They also deposited zones of gravel, sand, and clay, the residues from the abrasive processes of the moving ice. [See The Land of Heart’s Delight, Fig. 105.]
The Coastal Trough, running from Puget Sound to the channels of the Alaskan Panhandle, separates the Vancouver Island geological region from the rest of the province. Islands large and small, and isolated reefs and rocks above and just below the surface liberally litter much of this trough. This creates a maze of archipelagos and narrow channels full of hazards to shipping. One local author, Jack Hodgins, aptly called this coast, “The ragged green edge of the World.”(1) The Inside Passage, a navigable waterway nearly 2,000 kilometres long and largely protected from the ferocity of the open ocean, takes advantage of the trough.
Much of the interior of Vancouver Island is mountainous and rugged, with more than fifty peaks higher than 6,000 feet (1,829 metres), including four over 7,000 (2,134 metres).(2) Although the last glaciation ended 12,000 years ago, some fourteen-and-a-half square kilometres of perennial ice and snow remain.(3) Many of the peaks in the interior have craggy pinnacles or razorback ridges at their summits, evidence that they were not covered by the last glaciation. The Brooks Peninsula on the west coast also remained ice free as a refugium.
Along the eastern coast and at both extremities lie extensive plains and wide, fertile river valleys. Fjords and complex inlets deeply indent the western coastline. Two of these, Alberni Inlet and Quatsino Sound, cut across the island to within 24 and 11 kilometres of the eastern coast. The Aboriginal peoples used these features for their “oolichan trails” or trading routes across the mountainous, forested interior. These inlets, or sounds, also provide ocean-going vessels with some of the finest protected anchorages along the Pacific Northwest coast.
Moist Pacific winds produce luxuriant vegetation on all but the highest elevations, and until the era of industrial logging, dense climax temperate rainforest draped Vancouver Island. Stands of giant Douglas fir, western red and yellow cedar, spruce, and hemlock flourished everywhere but in the southeastern corner.
James Douglas came to southern Vancouver Island in 1842, seeking a place to build a new fur-trading post, which would become the fort, then the city, of Victoria. [See The Land of Heart’s Delight, Figs. 39 and 40.] He described it to a friend: “The place itself appears a perfect ‘Eden’ in the midst of the dreary wilderness of the Northwest coast and so different is its general aspect, from the wooded rugged regions around, that one might be pardoned for supposing it had dropped from the clouds into its present position.” (4)
Footnotes:
1 Hodgins, Jack, A Passion for Narrative, Toronto: McClelland & Stewart, 1993. p. 261.
2 For a detailed review of the rugged heart of the island, see also: Elms, Lindsay, Beyond Nootka: A Historical Perspective of Vancouver Island Mountains, Courtenay, BC: Misthorn Press, 1996. See also members.shaw.ca/beyondnootka/articles/island6000.html.
3 In 2005, according to the Western Canadian Cryospheric Network.
4 Glazebrook, George Parkin de Twenebroker, ed., The Hargrave Correspondence, 1821–1843, Toronto: The Champlain Society, 1938. p. 420.
The Douglas or Fort Victoria Treaties
In 1850 James Douglas, acting in his multiple roles as agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Puget’s Sound Agricultural Company, and as the representative of the Crown, negotiated and “signed” nine documents with representatives of the Aboriginal clans resident around Fort Victoria. These documents transferred title over traditional tribal lands by purchase. Two years later he reached similar agreements with people surrounding Fort Rupert and on the Saanich Peninsula, and in 1854, one at Nanaimo. These fourteen documents became known as the Douglas or Fort Victoria Treaties. [See The Land of Heart’s Delight, Fig. 45.]
The treaties, based on wording used in New Zealand, all had a similar structure with slight changes reflecting separate negotiations. Each included a written description of the tract of land, referenced to identifiable landmarks or to neighbouring traditional tribal boundaries, followed by the promise that the land would be properly surveyed afterward. While these descriptions have led to some ambiguity, the Supreme Court of Canada has declared that the treaties conferred legal title, and also validated the concept of Aboriginal title to lands not covered by treaty.
Each treaty negotiation took place not on site but at the fort. When describing the property boundaries, Douglas seems to have used Lewes’s 1842 Ground Plan, extended by later knowledge. The Songhees and other tribal elders would have had little difficulty comprehending the map itself, just as Tetacus had readily understood the Spanish chart in 1792. The nature of the real estate transaction would have been far more obscure for them, because their concept of land title differed radically from Douglas’s. Ownership of the land itself was communal, with groups of people entitled to specific uses of it, sometimes simultaneously. Douglas, in turn, had problems in ascertaining who had the right to sign over the specific traditional territories.
The lands described in each treaty, except for occupied villages and enclosed fields under cultivation, became “the Entire property of the White people forever.” In return, the tribes received a one-time payment in the form of blankets according to the number of “men with beards,” presumed to represent households resident in the area to be transferred. In exchange for 32,000 acres (13,000 hectares) in South Saanich, the company provided blankets with a total retail value of less than £110—valuing the land at less than seven shillings for a hundred acres. This was the same land the new colony was offering to prospective British settlers at one pound per acre—different by a factor of three hundred. In reality, the cost to the company was even less; the retail value used in the negotiation reflected a 300 per cent mark-up on the “department price” or book value of those blankets.
Nonetheless, Douglas felt he was being both magnanimous and pragmatic when he included the provision that the signing tribes would retain hunting and fishing rights to the lands, as long as those lands remained unoccupied by the newcomers. His reasoning behind this was “equally as a measure of justice, and from a regard to the future peace of the colony.” He had been instructed by his superiors to strike a hard bargain and to follow the policy already adopted in New Zealand, limiting the excepted areas to “fields they had cultivated or built houses on by 1846 …. All other land was to be regarded as waste and therefore available for colonization.”
In 1850 James Douglas, acting in his multiple roles as agent of the Hudson’s Bay Company and the Puget’s Sound Agricultural Company, and as the representative of the Crown, negotiated and “signed” nine documents with representatives of the Aboriginal clans resident around Fort Victoria. These documents transferred title over traditional tribal lands by purchase. Two years later he reached similar agreements with people surrounding Fort Rupert and on the Saanich Peninsula, and in 1854, one at Nanaimo. These fourteen documents became known as the Douglas or Fort Victoria Treaties. [See The Land of Heart’s Delight, Fig. 45.]
The treaties, based on wording used in New Zealand, all had a similar structure with slight changes reflecting separate negotiations. Each included a written description of the tract of land, referenced to identifiable landmarks or to neighbouring traditional tribal boundaries, followed by the promise that the land would be properly surveyed afterward. While these descriptions have led to some ambiguity, the Supreme Court of Canada has declared that the treaties conferred legal title, and also validated the concept of Aboriginal title to lands not covered by treaty.
Each treaty negotiation took place not on site but at the fort. When describing the property boundaries, Douglas seems to have used Lewes’s 1842 Ground Plan, extended by later knowledge. The Songhees and other tribal elders would have had little difficulty comprehending the map itself, just as Tetacus had readily understood the Spanish chart in 1792. The nature of the real estate transaction would have been far more obscure for them, because their concept of land title differed radically from Douglas’s. Ownership of the land itself was communal, with groups of people entitled to specific uses of it, sometimes simultaneously. Douglas, in turn, had problems in ascertaining who had the right to sign over the specific traditional territories.
The lands described in each treaty, except for occupied villages and enclosed fields under cultivation, became “the Entire property of the White people forever.” In return, the tribes received a one-time payment in the form of blankets according to the number of “men with beards,” presumed to represent households resident in the area to be transferred. In exchange for 32,000 acres (13,000 hectares) in South Saanich, the company provided blankets with a total retail value of less than £110—valuing the land at less than seven shillings for a hundred acres. This was the same land the new colony was offering to prospective British settlers at one pound per acre—different by a factor of three hundred. In reality, the cost to the company was even less; the retail value used in the negotiation reflected a 300 per cent mark-up on the “department price” or book value of those blankets.
Nonetheless, Douglas felt he was being both magnanimous and pragmatic when he included the provision that the signing tribes would retain hunting and fishing rights to the lands, as long as those lands remained unoccupied by the newcomers. His reasoning behind this was “equally as a measure of justice, and from a regard to the future peace of the colony.” He had been instructed by his superiors to strike a hard bargain and to follow the policy already adopted in New Zealand, limiting the excepted areas to “fields they had cultivated or built houses on by 1846 …. All other land was to be regarded as waste and therefore available for colonization.”
Land Survey in the 19th Century
In 1849, Hudson’s Bay Company officials in London appointed Captain Walther Colquhoun Grant as their first surveyor for the new colony of Vancouver Island. They recognized that “The want of surveys and local information has been much felt, persons intending to emigrate being materially desirous to see a plan of the locality in which they are to settle.” Unfortunately, they demonstrated little idea of the magnitude of the task of producing such a plan. So, just how, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, might a survey of the interior of a large, remote island best be tackled?
Stage 1 Reconnaissance — in the office and the field
Stage 2 Triangulation control network
Stage 3 Adding topographic detail
Stage 4 Cadastral, or property, surveys
Stage 5 Revising and updating
Stage 1: Reconnaissance — in the office and the field
First, surveyors should review all existing maps of the place, examining, comparing, and evaluating them for reliability. They should do the same for journals kept by explorers, traders, and other travellers to the area. This desk study should compile a composite map indicating areas that lacked adequate geographical knowledge — in the case of Vancouver Island, virtually the whole interior and much of the coastline. [See The Land of Heart’s Delight, Fig. 41.]
Then, surveyors on the ground would need to mount a series of exploratory journeys, drawing sketch maps and keeping detailed notes about such aspects as travel routes, water features, prominent hills, and local populations—their numbers, attitude to strangers, language, clan affiliations, etc. Time permitting, the surveyors should also report on vegetation, suitability of soils for agriculture, fresh water, minerals, availability of fish and game, local guides, and casual labourers. In unknown territory, or one perhaps hostile to intruders, this reconnaissance phase could be hazardous to the surveyors.
Stage 2: Triangulation control network
Next would come a triangulation scheme: field surveyors select and then visit a network of intervisible points on the ground, usually on prominent hills, whose coordinates (positions) they measure and calculate using trigonometry. In order to provide an accurate scale to this control network, they need to carefully measure one or more base lines.
The points all need to have their elevation measured and referred to a datum such as a tide gauge — a device used for recording the height of the tide as it passes through its various cycles. The resultant data will be used for determining “Mean Sea Level” or the value “zero” for relief or elevations shown on topographic maps, or “Chart Datum” in the case of water depths shown on hydrographic charts.
In addition, astronomical measurements would ensure the accurate, geodetic alignment of the network with true north and the curved surface of the globe.
Triangulation networks take the form of a hierarchy of accuracy and density, the lower orders being adjusted or fitted to the higher. Each point is marked on the ground and carefully described so that it can be found and used again for later phases of the survey. For Vancouver Island, and in the days before helicopters, this phase involved serious mountaineering, tree clearing, and laborious treks packing equipment and supplies.
An illustration of the results of these activities can be seen on a copy of the 1912 map, South Western Districts (of bc), probably annotated in 1938. [See The Land of Heart’s Delight, Fig. 107.] It shows local primary and secondary triangulation schemes. A chain of first-order, or geodetic, stations starting at Mount Bruce on Saltspring Island extends eastward, straddling the international boundary. Along the east coast of Vancouver Island a separate second-order network links Discovery Island, off Ten Mile Point, with Mount Washington. John L. Rannie of the Geological Survey of Canada, who became the Dominion Geodesist in 1947, established the former system. Geodetic topographers of the surveyor general’s staff, led by the specialist Frank Swannell, spent the summer seasons of 1937 and ’38 observing the latter. The Dominion and the provincial mapping organizations cooperated effectively in this work. Logistical difficulties related to accessing, identifying, and measuring these networks, coupled with the scarcity of skilled observers and the lack of precision theodolites, had combined to impede such fundamental survey work until the mid-1930s.
Stage 3: Adding topographic detail
Once a triangulation framework is established, cartographic draftsmen can measure and draw in the detail—“draping” upon the network such features as rivers, lakes, mountains, and other topography, roads, trails, and villages, all in their correct cartographic position, and add the place names. This phase can be done piecemeal. The resultant document is a topographic map.
Mapping with the plane table
Before the advent of photogrammetry from stereo aerial photos, the usual method of surveying in the field was by plane table.
Probably developed in the early sixteenth century, plane tabling is a most useful method of topographic mapping at medium scales (between 1:10,000 and 1:100,000) in open country, and is an excellent training tool.
The process, as introduced to Canada by Major Robert Chapman, [see The Land of Heart’s Delight, Fig. 119] first established a control network of triangulation stations, or “trig points,” distributed about the terrain to be surveyed. These points were marked with beacons, to make them visible from all sides. The surveyor would calculate their coordinates and relative heights, and then plot them, at scale, onto sheets of stable cartridge paper attached to flat drawing boards called “plane tables.” These could be mounted on tripods to be carried into and around the area to be surveyed.
In the field the surveyor would set up his plane table, accurately adjust it to be horizontal using a bubble level, then locate his ground position on it by resection, drawing intersecting rays from whichever of the trig points were visible. For this, he would use an alidade, a straightedge equipped with sights or a telescope. At the same time he would orient the plane table to align it with the surrounding trig points, and determine his location.
With the alidade, the surveyor would then draw rays on his board from his position to significant points of detail within his view. He also drew the local contour pattern around his location, using a clinometer to measure slopes, before moving to the next set-up. As rays to points of detail intersected, their position on the map would be fixed, and the contoured area extended. He would proceed in this way, constructing the map as he went.
Later, in camp or in the office, he would complete and ink in these pencil field sheets, to be fair copied onto systematic map sheets with toponymy, conventional signs, and peripheral information. The working scale chosen for the 150 square miles (389 square kilometres) of the Saanich project was 1:48,000 (1 inch = 4,000 feet) with a contour interval of twenty feet (6.08 metres), but they were published at 1:62,500 (1 inch = almost 1 mile). Later, in areas with differing density of settlement, other scales were used.
Stage 4: Cadastral, or property surveys
The type of survey related to land ownership, property boundaries, and legal descriptions, termed “cadastre,” should follow. Cadastral descriptions and plans can relate directly to the control network or to a theoretical grid sub-divided into districts, townships, sections, and so on. As part of that work, the corners of each parcel of property, right-of-way, timber licence or mineral claim, need to be physically marked on the ground and duly recorded and registered.
All too often, as Vancouver Island underwent a succession of forms of governance, its cadastral surveys involved a mix of differing systems, by surveyors of differing ability. This hodgepodge of cadastral systems became particularly complex, creating lucrative opportunities for lawyers and title-searchers of the future.
Stage 5: Revising and updating
Map detail provides only a snapshot in time of the true picture on the ground. Even then, errors and omissions will be inevitable. Also, cultural and cadastral details will be continuously changing due to human activity such as settlement, development and improvements to infrastructure. Maps of an area will require updating to correct errors, add new information, and to reflect any man-made changes since the previous version. Mapping, therefore, becomes an on-going process. New editions will need to be published in line with the rate of change— fast developing areas will require new versions more frequently than established, relatively stable ones. Comparison of sequential editions of the same map will provide a trace through time of the changes and developments that transpired within the same geographical space.
In 1849, Hudson’s Bay Company officials in London appointed Captain Walther Colquhoun Grant as their first surveyor for the new colony of Vancouver Island. They recognized that “The want of surveys and local information has been much felt, persons intending to emigrate being materially desirous to see a plan of the locality in which they are to settle.” Unfortunately, they demonstrated little idea of the magnitude of the task of producing such a plan. So, just how, in the middle years of the nineteenth century, might a survey of the interior of a large, remote island best be tackled?
Stage 1 Reconnaissance — in the office and the field
Stage 2 Triangulation control network
Stage 3 Adding topographic detail
Stage 4 Cadastral, or property, surveys
Stage 5 Revising and updating
Stage 1: Reconnaissance — in the office and the field
First, surveyors should review all existing maps of the place, examining, comparing, and evaluating them for reliability. They should do the same for journals kept by explorers, traders, and other travellers to the area. This desk study should compile a composite map indicating areas that lacked adequate geographical knowledge — in the case of Vancouver Island, virtually the whole interior and much of the coastline. [See The Land of Heart’s Delight, Fig. 41.]
Then, surveyors on the ground would need to mount a series of exploratory journeys, drawing sketch maps and keeping detailed notes about such aspects as travel routes, water features, prominent hills, and local populations—their numbers, attitude to strangers, language, clan affiliations, etc. Time permitting, the surveyors should also report on vegetation, suitability of soils for agriculture, fresh water, minerals, availability of fish and game, local guides, and casual labourers. In unknown territory, or one perhaps hostile to intruders, this reconnaissance phase could be hazardous to the surveyors.
Stage 2: Triangulation control network
Next would come a triangulation scheme: field surveyors select and then visit a network of intervisible points on the ground, usually on prominent hills, whose coordinates (positions) they measure and calculate using trigonometry. In order to provide an accurate scale to this control network, they need to carefully measure one or more base lines.
The points all need to have their elevation measured and referred to a datum such as a tide gauge — a device used for recording the height of the tide as it passes through its various cycles. The resultant data will be used for determining “Mean Sea Level” or the value “zero” for relief or elevations shown on topographic maps, or “Chart Datum” in the case of water depths shown on hydrographic charts.
In addition, astronomical measurements would ensure the accurate, geodetic alignment of the network with true north and the curved surface of the globe.
Triangulation networks take the form of a hierarchy of accuracy and density, the lower orders being adjusted or fitted to the higher. Each point is marked on the ground and carefully described so that it can be found and used again for later phases of the survey. For Vancouver Island, and in the days before helicopters, this phase involved serious mountaineering, tree clearing, and laborious treks packing equipment and supplies.
An illustration of the results of these activities can be seen on a copy of the 1912 map, South Western Districts (of bc), probably annotated in 1938. [See The Land of Heart’s Delight, Fig. 107.] It shows local primary and secondary triangulation schemes. A chain of first-order, or geodetic, stations starting at Mount Bruce on Saltspring Island extends eastward, straddling the international boundary. Along the east coast of Vancouver Island a separate second-order network links Discovery Island, off Ten Mile Point, with Mount Washington. John L. Rannie of the Geological Survey of Canada, who became the Dominion Geodesist in 1947, established the former system. Geodetic topographers of the surveyor general’s staff, led by the specialist Frank Swannell, spent the summer seasons of 1937 and ’38 observing the latter. The Dominion and the provincial mapping organizations cooperated effectively in this work. Logistical difficulties related to accessing, identifying, and measuring these networks, coupled with the scarcity of skilled observers and the lack of precision theodolites, had combined to impede such fundamental survey work until the mid-1930s.
Stage 3: Adding topographic detail
Once a triangulation framework is established, cartographic draftsmen can measure and draw in the detail—“draping” upon the network such features as rivers, lakes, mountains, and other topography, roads, trails, and villages, all in their correct cartographic position, and add the place names. This phase can be done piecemeal. The resultant document is a topographic map.
Mapping with the plane table
Before the advent of photogrammetry from stereo aerial photos, the usual method of surveying in the field was by plane table.
Probably developed in the early sixteenth century, plane tabling is a most useful method of topographic mapping at medium scales (between 1:10,000 and 1:100,000) in open country, and is an excellent training tool.
The process, as introduced to Canada by Major Robert Chapman, [see The Land of Heart’s Delight, Fig. 119] first established a control network of triangulation stations, or “trig points,” distributed about the terrain to be surveyed. These points were marked with beacons, to make them visible from all sides. The surveyor would calculate their coordinates and relative heights, and then plot them, at scale, onto sheets of stable cartridge paper attached to flat drawing boards called “plane tables.” These could be mounted on tripods to be carried into and around the area to be surveyed.
In the field the surveyor would set up his plane table, accurately adjust it to be horizontal using a bubble level, then locate his ground position on it by resection, drawing intersecting rays from whichever of the trig points were visible. For this, he would use an alidade, a straightedge equipped with sights or a telescope. At the same time he would orient the plane table to align it with the surrounding trig points, and determine his location.
With the alidade, the surveyor would then draw rays on his board from his position to significant points of detail within his view. He also drew the local contour pattern around his location, using a clinometer to measure slopes, before moving to the next set-up. As rays to points of detail intersected, their position on the map would be fixed, and the contoured area extended. He would proceed in this way, constructing the map as he went.
Later, in camp or in the office, he would complete and ink in these pencil field sheets, to be fair copied onto systematic map sheets with toponymy, conventional signs, and peripheral information. The working scale chosen for the 150 square miles (389 square kilometres) of the Saanich project was 1:48,000 (1 inch = 4,000 feet) with a contour interval of twenty feet (6.08 metres), but they were published at 1:62,500 (1 inch = almost 1 mile). Later, in areas with differing density of settlement, other scales were used.
Stage 4: Cadastral, or property surveys
The type of survey related to land ownership, property boundaries, and legal descriptions, termed “cadastre,” should follow. Cadastral descriptions and plans can relate directly to the control network or to a theoretical grid sub-divided into districts, townships, sections, and so on. As part of that work, the corners of each parcel of property, right-of-way, timber licence or mineral claim, need to be physically marked on the ground and duly recorded and registered.
All too often, as Vancouver Island underwent a succession of forms of governance, its cadastral surveys involved a mix of differing systems, by surveyors of differing ability. This hodgepodge of cadastral systems became particularly complex, creating lucrative opportunities for lawyers and title-searchers of the future.
Stage 5: Revising and updating
Map detail provides only a snapshot in time of the true picture on the ground. Even then, errors and omissions will be inevitable. Also, cultural and cadastral details will be continuously changing due to human activity such as settlement, development and improvements to infrastructure. Maps of an area will require updating to correct errors, add new information, and to reflect any man-made changes since the previous version. Mapping, therefore, becomes an on-going process. New editions will need to be published in line with the rate of change— fast developing areas will require new versions more frequently than established, relatively stable ones. Comparison of sequential editions of the same map will provide a trace through time of the changes and developments that transpired within the same geographical space.
The Toponymy of Vancouver Island
This series of pieces within the same topic is based on a talk I presented in 2011 to the local branch of the Royal Commonwealth Society. Where appropriate, I have added references to figures in The Land of Heart’s Delight.
INTRODUCTION
Part 1 Indigenous place names still on the maps
Part 2 Names from the first European visits
Part 3 Names from the Spanish explorations
Part 4 Names from George Vancouver’s voyage
Part 5 Names from George Richards’s charting
Part 6 Naval and military toponyms
Part 7 Strathcona Park and its mountains
Part 8 Place naming by colonists
Part 9 Places given women’s names on Vancouver Island
Part 10 Gazetteers
Part 11 Modern policy for naming places
Introduction
Toponymy — the place names of a locality or territory — is, perhaps, the most contentious element of cartography. But it is also an essential component of good mapping — in the words of the BC government's policy document: "geographical names are an indispensable tool for navigation and location…." The system adopted needs to be structured and unambiguous, but also suitable for use by future generations.
For those interested in the history of a region and its communities, it is also one of the most intriguing. Vancouver Island is particularly blessed with a rich mixture of sources for its toponyms, and this wealth provides fascinating links to chapters of the island's story.
Toponymy is contentious because it reflects, more often than not, the power and authority of the namer. The place names given during one era of dominance can be forgotten or deliberately overwritten by subsequent changes in governance. Using one set of toponyms implies acceptance of the right of the namer, and dismisses the rights of those who have lived there or passed through before. Fortunately, Vancouver Island retains many toponyms from earlier eras, which find comfortable equality on today's maps.
Part 1
Indigenous place names still on the maps
Reports from early European visitors, such as the anthropologist Franz Boas, tell us that the resident populations at the time of contact knew every detail of Vancouver Island’s intricate coastline, and were acutely conscious of territorial and property rights, an important aspect of toponymy. [See Figs. 111 and 112.] Apart from a number of trading trails overland, however, those largely coastal-dwelling First Nations were less concerned or familiar with the interior of the island.
The geographical features, both natural and cultural, that did concern them were all given names. In 1792 the chief, Tetacus, was able to provide Alcalá Galiano with several Salish (or possibly, Makah) names for the Spaniard’s chart. Some were for places quite distant. While there is no evidence that, before contact, the locals used the equivalent of graphic maps, they could certainly understand the concept and the utility of cartography. Another chief, Maquinna at Nootka, actually drew a map to illustrate an overland trading route on which some of his people were about to depart. [See Fig. 38.]
Some Aboriginal toponyms remain in use today. Usually, they have been distorted because of the inadequacies of the European ear and alphabets to render them faithfully. These place names include Songhees, Esquimalt, Saanich, Cowichan, Chemainus, Nanaimo, Comox, Nimpkish, Quatsino, Clayoquot, Tahsis, Wickaninnish, Ucluelet, Nitinat, Carmanah, Sooke and Metchosin. They derive variously from the local language groups of the Coast Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw (previously Kwakiutl) and Nuu-chah-nulth peoples, and are part of the Wakashan language family. Today, Wakashan refers to the group that includes the Nuu-chah-nulth, Makah and Kwak’wala languages, among others.
One hears criticism of the early explorers such as Vancouver and Galiano that they did not adopt the local names for the places they visited and charted. But their omission is understandable. Not only was there a host of distinct local languages and dialects, difficult to comprehend and transcribe into English or Spanish, time did not permit the visitors to acquire a working knowledge of those languages — even if the contacts had been completely free of hostility.
A classic example of toponymic misunderstanding comes from Cook’s landfall on Vancouver Island’s west coast in 1778. As the ships approached, a fleet of canoes surrounded them, the paddlers gesticulating and shouting what seemed to be “Nootka! Nootka!” Cook’s officers assumed that this was the local name of the place — and the name stuck, through to the present. In fact, the locals were warning the visitors to “Come around, come around!” — into the more sheltered waters of Friendly Cove.
Vancouver Island, on a few early 19th century maps, bore the toponym “Wakash Nation” — in addition to “Quadra and Vancouver’s Island.” This derived from “Wakash!”, apparently an exclamation of greeting, approval or agreement, picked up by sea otter traders and George Vancouver’s men from the Aboriginal people of Nootka and nearby inlets. Top of page
Part 2
Names from the first European visits
Explorers and their cartographers were recording thousands of topographical features, so they needed a pragmatic system of distinguishing between them. The Spanish expeditions out of San Blas, making the first generally acknowledged visits by Europeans to the coasts of Vancouver Island, usually included priests. Among their duties was keeping track of the calendar. They could draw upon rich lists of saints and holy days to supply names for any day and place required, such as making landfall on an unknown coast. On his visit to the Nootka area in 1774, Pérez used many saint names for toponyms: Lorenzo, Margarita, Clara, Rosalía and Estevan. The only one remaining today is the last — as Estevan Point.
The next expedition to arrive was that of James Cook. The formal name that Cook gave to Nootka Sound — Saint George’s Sound — somehow became modified by a few of his officers who drew their own charts of the harbour, calling it King George’s Sound. But Nootka — or “Nuca” to the Spaniards — came into general use. Cook gave another toponym to a forested headland north of Nootka, Woody Point. Almost a century later, George Richards changed it to Cape Cook to both commemorate his hero and to reduce ambiguity — after all, how many features along this forested coastline could answer to the name Woody Point? One nearby feature did retain the toponym given by Cook: Cape Flattery, but in a different location. The headland so named by Cook is now called Point of Arches.
Several trading ventures quickly followed Cook to Vancouver Island, intent on acquiring sea otter pelts. Officers who had sailed with Cook captained some of these, exploring and charting as they traded. Island toponyms from this era that remain current include Cape Scott, Cox Island, Queen Charlotte Sound and Strait, Brooks Bay (later also applied to the adjacent peninsula.) Another is Barkley Sound, named by Charles Barkley, the same fur trader who re-discovered and named the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Another of these traders added the toponym Friendly Cove to that of Nootka. Modern maps show the name of the infamous trader Meares for an island in Clayoquot Sound, but Richards also gave this, much later. Top of page
Part 3
Names from the Spanish explorations
The Spanish exploring expeditions, from their base at Nootka into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, provided many place names that have survived. The Quimper voyage coasted along the northern side of the strait, and some of the features they charted still bear their toponyms: Port San Juan, the Sombrio and Jordan rivers, and Bazan Bay. They named as Bahía de Cordova what is now Esquimalt Harbour, the name Cordova Bay migrating around to its present location early in the era of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The pilot with Quimper, Gonzalo López de Haro, provided two of his names to today’s chart: Point Gonzales and Haro Strait. [See Fig. 25.] Lopez Island and Sound appeared later, linked to the same man.
The following year, Eliza and his pilots extended Quimper’s exploration. After naming the Alberni canal for a military colleague, they discovered the Gran Canal de Rosario. Pantoja gave that name to what would, soon afterwards, become the Georgia Strait, but Rosario Strait remains as the northern linkage with Juan de Fuca. Pilot Narváez’s ship, Santa Saturnina, is remembered in Saturna Island. Texada, Lasqueti, Lazo, Gabriola, Porlier and San Juan (the islands) are other current toponyms from that voyage. [See Fig 30.] This San Juan toponym originates from the 1791 Carta que comprehende by the pilots of the Eliza expedition. It does not refer to a voyage-related date, but pays respect to the then viceroy of New Spain. This gentleman’s grand string of names and titles — Don Juan Vicente de Guemes Pacheco y Padilla Orcasitas y Aguayo, conde de Revillagigedo — provided several toponyms around the eastern end of Juan de Fuca and in Alaska.
The next two expeditions were simultaneous and held similar objectives. They were the schooners, called goletas, of Spaniards Alcalá Galiano and Caetano Valdés, and George Vancouver’s first season. Both groups were intent on charting the mainland shoreline, so Vancouver Island was only incidental to their missions. Both expeditions, however, sailed around the island. They met and collaborated during the voyage and at Nootka, afterwards. They each produced composite charts, using the other’s results, but with differing toponymy.
From the Spaniards’ voyage, a few of their toponyms have survived, mainly from the channels and islands northwest of the Georgia Strait: Nodales, Cortes, Redonda, Francisco and Raza. A few more remain at the north end of the island: Sutil and Mexicana Points (the names of their ships) and Goletas Channel, their exit to the Pacific. Later, British Royal Naval cartographers would reinstate several Spanish toponyms as tributes to these fellow explorers, but not necessarily in their original locations. The islands of Galiano, Valdes, Maurelle, Sonora and Quadra are examples.
The voyage of the goletas was an additional mission to the major Spanish scientific expedition led by Alejandro Malaspina. Island toponyms from survey work by the main party remain on our maps as Esperanza, Espinosa, Catala, Zeballos, Tofino and Ferrer. [See Fig. 29.] Malaspina’s own name is commemorated as a strait east of Texada Island, but this happened later.
My friend, Nick Doe, who lives on Gabriola Island, recently investigated the origins of his island’s toponym. He deduces that it was not, as had been postulated by the historian Henry Wagner, a cartographic typo for “gaviota” — Spanish for seagull —, but that it paid tribute to the naval paymaster at the time of the early Spanish voyages, Simón de Gaviola. Top of page
Part 4
Names from George Vancouver’s voyage
George Vancouver’s charting provided many of the toponyms along the continental shore, between Puget Sound and Cape Caution, in today’s gazetteer. The names of the major inlets, from Burrard to Smith’s, and most of the islands and channels of the Broughton Archipelago, are attributed to his first season. However, his boat parties only charted 275 kilometres of the northeastern shoreline of Vancouver Island, between Cape Lazo and Beaver Harbour. Along this stretch, current maps salute his ships and some of his officers: Point (later changed to “Cape”) Mudge, Discovery Passage, Menzies Bay, Chatham Point, Johnstone and Broughton Straits, were all names that he chose.
Vancouver made a gracious toponymic gesture to celebrate the mutual respect and cooperation between himself and his Spanish counterpart: “Quadra and Vancouver’s Island,” [see Fig 34], but this did not survive much beyond the first edition of his Voyage of Discovery. After lying dormant for some forty years thereafter, British interest in the island reawakened. At that time, chauvinism within the Admiralty and the Hudson’s Bay Company combined to over-rule Vancouver’s gesture by erasing his friend’s name from the toponym. Top of page
Part 5
Names from George Richards’s charting
In the second half of the nineteenth century, during the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and colonial period, the mapping and charting of Vancouver Island resumed in earnest. The Royal Navy sent a series of vessels specifically to complete the details of the coastline and surrounding waters. George Richards commanded the most important of these, charting the coast between the years 1858 and 1870.
Richards’s instructions from Admiral Washington included a paragraph referring to place names. After deploring the practice of renaming toponyms already in use, seen in the American Wilkes’s charts, he exhorted Richards to respect the right of “discoverers or first explorers to give the names & once given & established by use it must be held sacred.” Specifically, he was not to “allow the names given by the Spaniards Galiano & Valdés in 1792 and Vancouver in 1793 to be altered. And in all cases if possible add the native name with its meaning if it have any....”
While Richards largely complied with this instruction, he did change several Spanish place names, particularly of islands, but he usually managed to find other places where the Spanish name could be re-applied. In addition, several places had already been given names by the HBC and colonial administrators, most of which he respected. Richards followed another time-honoured Royal Navy custom of naming places after shipmates, officer friends, sister ships and, of course, his superiors. Increasingly, as he continued in his surveys, a local guide/interpreter helped him adopt local place names (or English approximations thereof).
Richards faced an interesting toponymic dilemma in his chart of Haro and Rosario Straits: that of Mount Douglas. Originally, HBC people had called this prominent knoll of the Victoria skyline “Cedar Hill,” since this was where, in 1843, the pickets for the fort had been harvested, but subsequently, the popular name changed. The Admiralty’s standard hydrographic instructions, however, decreed that no topographic feature less than 1000 feet high could be called a mountain, but Mount Douglas measured only 696 feet. Rather than give offence to the governor — “the father of British Columbia” — by demoting the feature to “Douglas Hill,” Richards bent the rule to retain the local usage. More compliantly, Richards reduced the neighbouring feature to “Tolmie Hill,” but later this, too, regained its status as a “Mount.” Top of page
Part 6
Naval and military toponyms
The toponymy of Vancouver Island still reflects the early emphasis on maritime exploration — by Cook, the sea otter traders, Vancouver, Malaspina, Bodega, and Richards. Our gazetteer commemorates plenty of naval officers and ships. For example, we have the Beaufort Range, flanking the Strait of Georgia at about Denman Island, after an early hydrographer — the same chap who provided the name for the scale of wind strengths. Richards also named Mount Washington after his immediate superior — our ski hill bears no relation to the US soldier-president, nor the state to our south.
Having a personal background of the army, I have searched the island map for names of soldiers and military events, and found some. The first, of course, is Alberni, after a captain of militia who came to Nootka in 1791. The Dunsmuirs named their Wellington coal mine, and now a suburb of Nanaimo, to honour the Iron Duke. The same group named their new settlement for coal miners after a famous military action of the Boer War, the relief of the siege of Ladysmith. From the same era, Mount Kitchener overlooks Johnstone Strait east of Sayward. There is a Waterloo Mountain deep in the forests, southwest of Duncan.
In Pipestem Inlet, an arm of Barkley Sound [see Fig. 72], a submerged hazard was accidentally “discovered” by a Canadian minesweeper, HMCS Armentières — named after a WWI battleground in Flanders, and the subsequent bawdy marching song — Armentières Rock now records toponymically, the ship’s misfortune and only indirectly the battlefield.
The Royal Engineers, whose Columbia Detachment did so much for the early days of the mainland colony, were not active on the island. However, when they disbanded in 1863, many of the men chose to remain. A few of them joined Robert Brown’s Vancouver Island Exploring Expeditions and left us with Leech River and the gold rush ghost Leechtown, just north of Sooke, and with Buttle Lake in Strathcona Park. Also in that park there is a Mount Colonel Foster, named for a noted mountaineer and politician Top of page
Part 7
Strathcona Park and its mountains
Another Strathcona peak provides an interesting toponymic case history. In 1896, an amateur expedition led by the Rev. William Bolton was the first to note a feature they called “Twin Peaks,” just to the west of Buttle Lake. Reginald Thomson, during his 1913 reconnaissance of the newly designated Strathcona Park, also noted the dramatic crag. On his associated map there is a penciled “Rooster’s Comb” alongside its location — for its serrated crest when viewed from the northeast or southwest.
The following summer, a topographer, W. Urquhart, was working at the base of the mountain. An accompanying photographer, wanting pictures from the summit, asked a survey assistant to climb the peak with him. They did so but had to find their way down in the dark. On learning of the reading of the altimeter they had carried, Urquhart realized that it was the highest point found so far on Vancouver Island. His anger at the risk they had taken changed to curiosity, so the following day he went up with the assistant to verify the reading. Urquhart included the toponym Rooster’s Comb on his map of that season’s work, but it is not listed in the first Geographical Gazetteer of B.C., dated 1930.
In 1937, two surveyors, Norman Stewart and Richard Bishop, discussed two related matters: the name, Rooster’s Comb, which while descriptive, seemed too mundane for such a significant peak, and that Francis Drake’s voyage of 1579 should be commemorated. Stewart had remeasured the elevation at 7,219 feet confirming that it was indeed, some 20 feet higher than Elkhorn, previously thought to be the highest point on Vancouver Island. Bishop, whose hobby it was to delve into the history of local exploration, had studied Drake’s voyage and calculated that the navigator’s landfall had been on the west side of Vancouver Island.
They proposed to George Aitken, the long-serving chief geographer of the province, that the name of Drake’s vessel, Golden Hinde, be given to the peak. Bishop also suggested that 1939, the 360th anniversary of Drake’s supposed landfall, would make an appropriate occasion for the renaming, 360 degrees being, of course, a complete circle or a circumnavigation. Aitken approved their proposal, as did W. Kaye Lamb, the provincial librarian and archivist, and a noted historian.
Aitken, the BC representative on the Geographic Board of Canada, submitted a formal proposal to the board, recommending the toponym for its “background of historical association and patriotism.” He also proposed to the prime minister that King George VI might commemorate this with a ceremony during his visit to Victoria later that year. While the board unanimously approved the mountain being renamed “Golden Hinde,” the schedule for the royal visit did not permit a formal proclamation of the name change. The souvenir edition of The Daily Colonist for Sunday, May 28, 1939 carried a full-page map of Vancouver Island showing Strathcona Park. The mountain is identified as “Rooster’s Comb 7219’“ however Golden Hinde became, and remains, the official toponym for Vancouver Island’s highest peak. [See Fig 131.] Top of page
Part 8
Place naming by colonists
Colonial surveyors Pemberton, Pearse, and some Hudson’s Bay Company employees explored inland, looking for natural resources, minerals and in particular, land suitable for farming. All of these groups added to the gazetteer, in many cases assisted by people with knowledge of the indigenous languages.
Vancouver Island’s toponymy includes some interesting Scandinavian names. There were the short-lived utopian communities established by settlers from Finland — Sointula, meaning “place of harmony” — from Denmark at Holberg Inlet and Hansen Bay, at the northernmost tip. Solander Island, off the Brooks Peninsula, commemorates the Swedish botanist who accompanied Cook on his first expedition. In Trincomalee Channel, inside Galiano Island, there is a Norway Island, this, however, is not linked to any Viking, but instead, records the surname of one of the officers of HMS Trincomalee. Top of page
Part 9
Gazetteers
In 1930, the Department of Lands published the first official Geographical Gazetteer of British Columbia, listing some 27,000 toponyms, (from Aaltanhash Inlet to Zymoetz River.) The Chief Geographer, George Aitken, had managed the project, but his was not the first gazetteer of BC to see print. In 1909 a private company in Vancouver, Provincial Publishing Co., had issued a list of 4,700 names and brief descriptions for “Cities, Towns, Post Offices, Settlements, Islands, Rivers, Lakes, Capes, Bays and Mountains of the Province.” claiming, as their source, “the maps issued by the Information Bureau of the Provincial Government.” That same year, the same company published a companion volume, the Directory of Vancouver Island and Adjacent Islands for 1909.
The 1909 gazetteer did not provide coordinates for the places listed, but Aitken’s later one, containing over five times as many names, did. Soon after his arrival in BC, Aitken had reported that the toponymy of the province was “nearly all in confusion and dispute.” He quickly set about addressing the problem, but the Great War intervened, delaying the project. On his return afterwards, he resumed compiling and rationalizing the records, including annotating his personal copy of the 1909 gazetteer.
Another book on our local toponymy had also appeared in 1909. For 13 years, from 1891, the master mariner John T. Walbran had commanded the Canadian government’s steamship Quadra, servicing lighthouses and buoys and on fisheries protection duty. Sailing the intricate BC coastline and among its myriad islands, Walbran came to know every cape, bay, and inlet.
Around 1896, the origins of local place names and the stories behind those names, started to fascinate Walbran. After he retired in 1904 to settle in Victoria, he continued to assemble a treasury of anecdotes, yarns, vignettes and gossip about local maritime history, the characters who had made it, their ships and journeys, and the places. In 1909 his former employer, the Ministry of Marine and Fisheries in Ottawa, published his monumental book British Columbia Coast Names: Their Origin and History.
In 1971, to celebrate the centennial of BC’s union with Canada, Walbran’s book was reprinted. The Shakespeare scholar and toponymic history enthusiast Dr. Philip Akrigg provided the introduction to the reprint. In 1988, he and his wife Helen published 1001 British Columbia Place Names, with a re-edition in 1997. Their book added many toponyms of the interior to their earlier work.
Recently, to acknowledge the centenary of Walbran’s book, a Vancouver journalist, Andrew Scott, published a splendid Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names. He follows Walbran’s style of recounting anecdotes and thumbnails of the people connected with the 4000 entries. In bringing Walbran up to the present day, Scott’s coverage extends well beyond Vancouver Island but he does not venture far inland. Top of page
Part 10
Places given women’s names on Vancouver Island
Vancouver Island is, of course, well endowed with royal ladies: our city of Victoria, and Queen Charlotte Sound, and there is a Queen Cove near Nootka. Pat Bay seems to have derived from Princess Patricia, the daughter of the Duke of Connaught (Canada’s 10th Governor General), who was one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters. We have a Princess Margaret Marine Park just outside Fulford Harbour. I have already mentioned Lady Smith; the town in South Africa named after the Spanish noblewoman Juana María de los Dolores de León, wife of General Smith, the governor of the Cape Colony.
The explorers and early pioneers on the island seem to have been particularly fond of naming lakes, creeks and waterfalls after their women. We have, thus commemorated: Angie, Alice, Annie, Bodil, Catherine, Cecelia, Charity, Cheryl, Christine, Della, Diane, Dinah, Dixie, Dorothy, Ellen, Elsie, Emilie, Eve, Flora, Florence, Frances, Grace, Gracie, Helen Mackenzie, Isabella, Jessie, Kathleen, Kitty Coleman, Lady, Laura, Leah, Lillian, Lois, Louise, Maggie, Mary, Marion, Maxie, May, Myra, Juliette, Nola, Pearl, Pretty Girl, Roselle, Ruth, Sadie, Sandra, Sarah, Sheila, Shelly, Stella, Sylvia, and sadly, Widow.
To my regret, I have not found commemorated by a place name the courageous young female explorer of the island, Frances Trevor — the 18-year-old bride of Captain Barkley. In June 1787, when their ship Imperial Eagle anchored in Nootka Sound, Frances Barkley became the first white woman known to have rounded the Horn and to have visited Hawaii, Alaska and the shores of Vancouver Island. Mrs. Barkley would go on to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. Isn’t it a pity that her name does not grace our gazetteer? Top of page
Part 11
Modern policy for naming places
Nowadays, the granting of geographical place names is systematic and strictly regulated. A government official, the provincial toponymist, maintains records of all current and obsolete place names throughout BC. An office at the federal level performs an equivalent duty. There is even an International Committee on Geographical Names. At each level there is a process for the nomination, approval and adoption of new toponyms. We recently witnessed an interesting cross-border campaign to create a new toponym. In 2010, His Honour, Lt. Governor Stephen Point, himself of Aboriginal descent, proclaimed “The Salish Sea” as the continuous body of water comprising the Straits of Juan De Fuca, Haro and Georgia and Puget Sound.
Despite these earnest efforts to contain the problem of establishing place names, I am sure that debates will continue — for example the long, ongoing, battle over the official “Saltspring Island” or, as insisted by the residents, “Salt Spring Island” — is it two words or three? Is “Foul Bay” spelled F-O-U-L, referring to a nautical term or, as preferred by some in the neighbourhood, F-O-W-L, indicating an abundance of ducks?
Fortunately, there is an official digital gazetteer to assist today’s researchers. Top of page
This series of pieces within the same topic is based on a talk I presented in 2011 to the local branch of the Royal Commonwealth Society. Where appropriate, I have added references to figures in The Land of Heart’s Delight.
INTRODUCTION
Part 1 Indigenous place names still on the maps
Part 2 Names from the first European visits
Part 3 Names from the Spanish explorations
Part 4 Names from George Vancouver’s voyage
Part 5 Names from George Richards’s charting
Part 6 Naval and military toponyms
Part 7 Strathcona Park and its mountains
Part 8 Place naming by colonists
Part 9 Places given women’s names on Vancouver Island
Part 10 Gazetteers
Part 11 Modern policy for naming places
Introduction
Toponymy — the place names of a locality or territory — is, perhaps, the most contentious element of cartography. But it is also an essential component of good mapping — in the words of the BC government's policy document: "geographical names are an indispensable tool for navigation and location…." The system adopted needs to be structured and unambiguous, but also suitable for use by future generations.
For those interested in the history of a region and its communities, it is also one of the most intriguing. Vancouver Island is particularly blessed with a rich mixture of sources for its toponyms, and this wealth provides fascinating links to chapters of the island's story.
Toponymy is contentious because it reflects, more often than not, the power and authority of the namer. The place names given during one era of dominance can be forgotten or deliberately overwritten by subsequent changes in governance. Using one set of toponyms implies acceptance of the right of the namer, and dismisses the rights of those who have lived there or passed through before. Fortunately, Vancouver Island retains many toponyms from earlier eras, which find comfortable equality on today's maps.
Part 1
Indigenous place names still on the maps
Reports from early European visitors, such as the anthropologist Franz Boas, tell us that the resident populations at the time of contact knew every detail of Vancouver Island’s intricate coastline, and were acutely conscious of territorial and property rights, an important aspect of toponymy. [See Figs. 111 and 112.] Apart from a number of trading trails overland, however, those largely coastal-dwelling First Nations were less concerned or familiar with the interior of the island.
The geographical features, both natural and cultural, that did concern them were all given names. In 1792 the chief, Tetacus, was able to provide Alcalá Galiano with several Salish (or possibly, Makah) names for the Spaniard’s chart. Some were for places quite distant. While there is no evidence that, before contact, the locals used the equivalent of graphic maps, they could certainly understand the concept and the utility of cartography. Another chief, Maquinna at Nootka, actually drew a map to illustrate an overland trading route on which some of his people were about to depart. [See Fig. 38.]
Some Aboriginal toponyms remain in use today. Usually, they have been distorted because of the inadequacies of the European ear and alphabets to render them faithfully. These place names include Songhees, Esquimalt, Saanich, Cowichan, Chemainus, Nanaimo, Comox, Nimpkish, Quatsino, Clayoquot, Tahsis, Wickaninnish, Ucluelet, Nitinat, Carmanah, Sooke and Metchosin. They derive variously from the local language groups of the Coast Salish, Kwakwaka’wakw (previously Kwakiutl) and Nuu-chah-nulth peoples, and are part of the Wakashan language family. Today, Wakashan refers to the group that includes the Nuu-chah-nulth, Makah and Kwak’wala languages, among others.
One hears criticism of the early explorers such as Vancouver and Galiano that they did not adopt the local names for the places they visited and charted. But their omission is understandable. Not only was there a host of distinct local languages and dialects, difficult to comprehend and transcribe into English or Spanish, time did not permit the visitors to acquire a working knowledge of those languages — even if the contacts had been completely free of hostility.
A classic example of toponymic misunderstanding comes from Cook’s landfall on Vancouver Island’s west coast in 1778. As the ships approached, a fleet of canoes surrounded them, the paddlers gesticulating and shouting what seemed to be “Nootka! Nootka!” Cook’s officers assumed that this was the local name of the place — and the name stuck, through to the present. In fact, the locals were warning the visitors to “Come around, come around!” — into the more sheltered waters of Friendly Cove.
Vancouver Island, on a few early 19th century maps, bore the toponym “Wakash Nation” — in addition to “Quadra and Vancouver’s Island.” This derived from “Wakash!”, apparently an exclamation of greeting, approval or agreement, picked up by sea otter traders and George Vancouver’s men from the Aboriginal people of Nootka and nearby inlets. Top of page
Part 2
Names from the first European visits
Explorers and their cartographers were recording thousands of topographical features, so they needed a pragmatic system of distinguishing between them. The Spanish expeditions out of San Blas, making the first generally acknowledged visits by Europeans to the coasts of Vancouver Island, usually included priests. Among their duties was keeping track of the calendar. They could draw upon rich lists of saints and holy days to supply names for any day and place required, such as making landfall on an unknown coast. On his visit to the Nootka area in 1774, Pérez used many saint names for toponyms: Lorenzo, Margarita, Clara, Rosalía and Estevan. The only one remaining today is the last — as Estevan Point.
The next expedition to arrive was that of James Cook. The formal name that Cook gave to Nootka Sound — Saint George’s Sound — somehow became modified by a few of his officers who drew their own charts of the harbour, calling it King George’s Sound. But Nootka — or “Nuca” to the Spaniards — came into general use. Cook gave another toponym to a forested headland north of Nootka, Woody Point. Almost a century later, George Richards changed it to Cape Cook to both commemorate his hero and to reduce ambiguity — after all, how many features along this forested coastline could answer to the name Woody Point? One nearby feature did retain the toponym given by Cook: Cape Flattery, but in a different location. The headland so named by Cook is now called Point of Arches.
Several trading ventures quickly followed Cook to Vancouver Island, intent on acquiring sea otter pelts. Officers who had sailed with Cook captained some of these, exploring and charting as they traded. Island toponyms from this era that remain current include Cape Scott, Cox Island, Queen Charlotte Sound and Strait, Brooks Bay (later also applied to the adjacent peninsula.) Another is Barkley Sound, named by Charles Barkley, the same fur trader who re-discovered and named the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Another of these traders added the toponym Friendly Cove to that of Nootka. Modern maps show the name of the infamous trader Meares for an island in Clayoquot Sound, but Richards also gave this, much later. Top of page
Part 3
Names from the Spanish explorations
The Spanish exploring expeditions, from their base at Nootka into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, provided many place names that have survived. The Quimper voyage coasted along the northern side of the strait, and some of the features they charted still bear their toponyms: Port San Juan, the Sombrio and Jordan rivers, and Bazan Bay. They named as Bahía de Cordova what is now Esquimalt Harbour, the name Cordova Bay migrating around to its present location early in the era of the Hudson’s Bay Company. The pilot with Quimper, Gonzalo López de Haro, provided two of his names to today’s chart: Point Gonzales and Haro Strait. [See Fig. 25.] Lopez Island and Sound appeared later, linked to the same man.
The following year, Eliza and his pilots extended Quimper’s exploration. After naming the Alberni canal for a military colleague, they discovered the Gran Canal de Rosario. Pantoja gave that name to what would, soon afterwards, become the Georgia Strait, but Rosario Strait remains as the northern linkage with Juan de Fuca. Pilot Narváez’s ship, Santa Saturnina, is remembered in Saturna Island. Texada, Lasqueti, Lazo, Gabriola, Porlier and San Juan (the islands) are other current toponyms from that voyage. [See Fig 30.] This San Juan toponym originates from the 1791 Carta que comprehende by the pilots of the Eliza expedition. It does not refer to a voyage-related date, but pays respect to the then viceroy of New Spain. This gentleman’s grand string of names and titles — Don Juan Vicente de Guemes Pacheco y Padilla Orcasitas y Aguayo, conde de Revillagigedo — provided several toponyms around the eastern end of Juan de Fuca and in Alaska.
The next two expeditions were simultaneous and held similar objectives. They were the schooners, called goletas, of Spaniards Alcalá Galiano and Caetano Valdés, and George Vancouver’s first season. Both groups were intent on charting the mainland shoreline, so Vancouver Island was only incidental to their missions. Both expeditions, however, sailed around the island. They met and collaborated during the voyage and at Nootka, afterwards. They each produced composite charts, using the other’s results, but with differing toponymy.
From the Spaniards’ voyage, a few of their toponyms have survived, mainly from the channels and islands northwest of the Georgia Strait: Nodales, Cortes, Redonda, Francisco and Raza. A few more remain at the north end of the island: Sutil and Mexicana Points (the names of their ships) and Goletas Channel, their exit to the Pacific. Later, British Royal Naval cartographers would reinstate several Spanish toponyms as tributes to these fellow explorers, but not necessarily in their original locations. The islands of Galiano, Valdes, Maurelle, Sonora and Quadra are examples.
The voyage of the goletas was an additional mission to the major Spanish scientific expedition led by Alejandro Malaspina. Island toponyms from survey work by the main party remain on our maps as Esperanza, Espinosa, Catala, Zeballos, Tofino and Ferrer. [See Fig. 29.] Malaspina’s own name is commemorated as a strait east of Texada Island, but this happened later.
My friend, Nick Doe, who lives on Gabriola Island, recently investigated the origins of his island’s toponym. He deduces that it was not, as had been postulated by the historian Henry Wagner, a cartographic typo for “gaviota” — Spanish for seagull —, but that it paid tribute to the naval paymaster at the time of the early Spanish voyages, Simón de Gaviola. Top of page
Part 4
Names from George Vancouver’s voyage
George Vancouver’s charting provided many of the toponyms along the continental shore, between Puget Sound and Cape Caution, in today’s gazetteer. The names of the major inlets, from Burrard to Smith’s, and most of the islands and channels of the Broughton Archipelago, are attributed to his first season. However, his boat parties only charted 275 kilometres of the northeastern shoreline of Vancouver Island, between Cape Lazo and Beaver Harbour. Along this stretch, current maps salute his ships and some of his officers: Point (later changed to “Cape”) Mudge, Discovery Passage, Menzies Bay, Chatham Point, Johnstone and Broughton Straits, were all names that he chose.
Vancouver made a gracious toponymic gesture to celebrate the mutual respect and cooperation between himself and his Spanish counterpart: “Quadra and Vancouver’s Island,” [see Fig 34], but this did not survive much beyond the first edition of his Voyage of Discovery. After lying dormant for some forty years thereafter, British interest in the island reawakened. At that time, chauvinism within the Admiralty and the Hudson’s Bay Company combined to over-rule Vancouver’s gesture by erasing his friend’s name from the toponym. Top of page
Part 5
Names from George Richards’s charting
In the second half of the nineteenth century, during the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) and colonial period, the mapping and charting of Vancouver Island resumed in earnest. The Royal Navy sent a series of vessels specifically to complete the details of the coastline and surrounding waters. George Richards commanded the most important of these, charting the coast between the years 1858 and 1870.
Richards’s instructions from Admiral Washington included a paragraph referring to place names. After deploring the practice of renaming toponyms already in use, seen in the American Wilkes’s charts, he exhorted Richards to respect the right of “discoverers or first explorers to give the names & once given & established by use it must be held sacred.” Specifically, he was not to “allow the names given by the Spaniards Galiano & Valdés in 1792 and Vancouver in 1793 to be altered. And in all cases if possible add the native name with its meaning if it have any....”
While Richards largely complied with this instruction, he did change several Spanish place names, particularly of islands, but he usually managed to find other places where the Spanish name could be re-applied. In addition, several places had already been given names by the HBC and colonial administrators, most of which he respected. Richards followed another time-honoured Royal Navy custom of naming places after shipmates, officer friends, sister ships and, of course, his superiors. Increasingly, as he continued in his surveys, a local guide/interpreter helped him adopt local place names (or English approximations thereof).
Richards faced an interesting toponymic dilemma in his chart of Haro and Rosario Straits: that of Mount Douglas. Originally, HBC people had called this prominent knoll of the Victoria skyline “Cedar Hill,” since this was where, in 1843, the pickets for the fort had been harvested, but subsequently, the popular name changed. The Admiralty’s standard hydrographic instructions, however, decreed that no topographic feature less than 1000 feet high could be called a mountain, but Mount Douglas measured only 696 feet. Rather than give offence to the governor — “the father of British Columbia” — by demoting the feature to “Douglas Hill,” Richards bent the rule to retain the local usage. More compliantly, Richards reduced the neighbouring feature to “Tolmie Hill,” but later this, too, regained its status as a “Mount.” Top of page
Part 6
Naval and military toponyms
The toponymy of Vancouver Island still reflects the early emphasis on maritime exploration — by Cook, the sea otter traders, Vancouver, Malaspina, Bodega, and Richards. Our gazetteer commemorates plenty of naval officers and ships. For example, we have the Beaufort Range, flanking the Strait of Georgia at about Denman Island, after an early hydrographer — the same chap who provided the name for the scale of wind strengths. Richards also named Mount Washington after his immediate superior — our ski hill bears no relation to the US soldier-president, nor the state to our south.
Having a personal background of the army, I have searched the island map for names of soldiers and military events, and found some. The first, of course, is Alberni, after a captain of militia who came to Nootka in 1791. The Dunsmuirs named their Wellington coal mine, and now a suburb of Nanaimo, to honour the Iron Duke. The same group named their new settlement for coal miners after a famous military action of the Boer War, the relief of the siege of Ladysmith. From the same era, Mount Kitchener overlooks Johnstone Strait east of Sayward. There is a Waterloo Mountain deep in the forests, southwest of Duncan.
In Pipestem Inlet, an arm of Barkley Sound [see Fig. 72], a submerged hazard was accidentally “discovered” by a Canadian minesweeper, HMCS Armentières — named after a WWI battleground in Flanders, and the subsequent bawdy marching song — Armentières Rock now records toponymically, the ship’s misfortune and only indirectly the battlefield.
The Royal Engineers, whose Columbia Detachment did so much for the early days of the mainland colony, were not active on the island. However, when they disbanded in 1863, many of the men chose to remain. A few of them joined Robert Brown’s Vancouver Island Exploring Expeditions and left us with Leech River and the gold rush ghost Leechtown, just north of Sooke, and with Buttle Lake in Strathcona Park. Also in that park there is a Mount Colonel Foster, named for a noted mountaineer and politician Top of page
Part 7
Strathcona Park and its mountains
Another Strathcona peak provides an interesting toponymic case history. In 1896, an amateur expedition led by the Rev. William Bolton was the first to note a feature they called “Twin Peaks,” just to the west of Buttle Lake. Reginald Thomson, during his 1913 reconnaissance of the newly designated Strathcona Park, also noted the dramatic crag. On his associated map there is a penciled “Rooster’s Comb” alongside its location — for its serrated crest when viewed from the northeast or southwest.
The following summer, a topographer, W. Urquhart, was working at the base of the mountain. An accompanying photographer, wanting pictures from the summit, asked a survey assistant to climb the peak with him. They did so but had to find their way down in the dark. On learning of the reading of the altimeter they had carried, Urquhart realized that it was the highest point found so far on Vancouver Island. His anger at the risk they had taken changed to curiosity, so the following day he went up with the assistant to verify the reading. Urquhart included the toponym Rooster’s Comb on his map of that season’s work, but it is not listed in the first Geographical Gazetteer of B.C., dated 1930.
In 1937, two surveyors, Norman Stewart and Richard Bishop, discussed two related matters: the name, Rooster’s Comb, which while descriptive, seemed too mundane for such a significant peak, and that Francis Drake’s voyage of 1579 should be commemorated. Stewart had remeasured the elevation at 7,219 feet confirming that it was indeed, some 20 feet higher than Elkhorn, previously thought to be the highest point on Vancouver Island. Bishop, whose hobby it was to delve into the history of local exploration, had studied Drake’s voyage and calculated that the navigator’s landfall had been on the west side of Vancouver Island.
They proposed to George Aitken, the long-serving chief geographer of the province, that the name of Drake’s vessel, Golden Hinde, be given to the peak. Bishop also suggested that 1939, the 360th anniversary of Drake’s supposed landfall, would make an appropriate occasion for the renaming, 360 degrees being, of course, a complete circle or a circumnavigation. Aitken approved their proposal, as did W. Kaye Lamb, the provincial librarian and archivist, and a noted historian.
Aitken, the BC representative on the Geographic Board of Canada, submitted a formal proposal to the board, recommending the toponym for its “background of historical association and patriotism.” He also proposed to the prime minister that King George VI might commemorate this with a ceremony during his visit to Victoria later that year. While the board unanimously approved the mountain being renamed “Golden Hinde,” the schedule for the royal visit did not permit a formal proclamation of the name change. The souvenir edition of The Daily Colonist for Sunday, May 28, 1939 carried a full-page map of Vancouver Island showing Strathcona Park. The mountain is identified as “Rooster’s Comb 7219’“ however Golden Hinde became, and remains, the official toponym for Vancouver Island’s highest peak. [See Fig 131.] Top of page
Part 8
Place naming by colonists
Colonial surveyors Pemberton, Pearse, and some Hudson’s Bay Company employees explored inland, looking for natural resources, minerals and in particular, land suitable for farming. All of these groups added to the gazetteer, in many cases assisted by people with knowledge of the indigenous languages.
Vancouver Island’s toponymy includes some interesting Scandinavian names. There were the short-lived utopian communities established by settlers from Finland — Sointula, meaning “place of harmony” — from Denmark at Holberg Inlet and Hansen Bay, at the northernmost tip. Solander Island, off the Brooks Peninsula, commemorates the Swedish botanist who accompanied Cook on his first expedition. In Trincomalee Channel, inside Galiano Island, there is a Norway Island, this, however, is not linked to any Viking, but instead, records the surname of one of the officers of HMS Trincomalee. Top of page
Part 9
Gazetteers
In 1930, the Department of Lands published the first official Geographical Gazetteer of British Columbia, listing some 27,000 toponyms, (from Aaltanhash Inlet to Zymoetz River.) The Chief Geographer, George Aitken, had managed the project, but his was not the first gazetteer of BC to see print. In 1909 a private company in Vancouver, Provincial Publishing Co., had issued a list of 4,700 names and brief descriptions for “Cities, Towns, Post Offices, Settlements, Islands, Rivers, Lakes, Capes, Bays and Mountains of the Province.” claiming, as their source, “the maps issued by the Information Bureau of the Provincial Government.” That same year, the same company published a companion volume, the Directory of Vancouver Island and Adjacent Islands for 1909.
The 1909 gazetteer did not provide coordinates for the places listed, but Aitken’s later one, containing over five times as many names, did. Soon after his arrival in BC, Aitken had reported that the toponymy of the province was “nearly all in confusion and dispute.” He quickly set about addressing the problem, but the Great War intervened, delaying the project. On his return afterwards, he resumed compiling and rationalizing the records, including annotating his personal copy of the 1909 gazetteer.
Another book on our local toponymy had also appeared in 1909. For 13 years, from 1891, the master mariner John T. Walbran had commanded the Canadian government’s steamship Quadra, servicing lighthouses and buoys and on fisheries protection duty. Sailing the intricate BC coastline and among its myriad islands, Walbran came to know every cape, bay, and inlet.
Around 1896, the origins of local place names and the stories behind those names, started to fascinate Walbran. After he retired in 1904 to settle in Victoria, he continued to assemble a treasury of anecdotes, yarns, vignettes and gossip about local maritime history, the characters who had made it, their ships and journeys, and the places. In 1909 his former employer, the Ministry of Marine and Fisheries in Ottawa, published his monumental book British Columbia Coast Names: Their Origin and History.
In 1971, to celebrate the centennial of BC’s union with Canada, Walbran’s book was reprinted. The Shakespeare scholar and toponymic history enthusiast Dr. Philip Akrigg provided the introduction to the reprint. In 1988, he and his wife Helen published 1001 British Columbia Place Names, with a re-edition in 1997. Their book added many toponyms of the interior to their earlier work.
Recently, to acknowledge the centenary of Walbran’s book, a Vancouver journalist, Andrew Scott, published a splendid Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names. He follows Walbran’s style of recounting anecdotes and thumbnails of the people connected with the 4000 entries. In bringing Walbran up to the present day, Scott’s coverage extends well beyond Vancouver Island but he does not venture far inland. Top of page
Part 10
Places given women’s names on Vancouver Island
Vancouver Island is, of course, well endowed with royal ladies: our city of Victoria, and Queen Charlotte Sound, and there is a Queen Cove near Nootka. Pat Bay seems to have derived from Princess Patricia, the daughter of the Duke of Connaught (Canada’s 10th Governor General), who was one of Queen Victoria’s granddaughters. We have a Princess Margaret Marine Park just outside Fulford Harbour. I have already mentioned Lady Smith; the town in South Africa named after the Spanish noblewoman Juana María de los Dolores de León, wife of General Smith, the governor of the Cape Colony.
The explorers and early pioneers on the island seem to have been particularly fond of naming lakes, creeks and waterfalls after their women. We have, thus commemorated: Angie, Alice, Annie, Bodil, Catherine, Cecelia, Charity, Cheryl, Christine, Della, Diane, Dinah, Dixie, Dorothy, Ellen, Elsie, Emilie, Eve, Flora, Florence, Frances, Grace, Gracie, Helen Mackenzie, Isabella, Jessie, Kathleen, Kitty Coleman, Lady, Laura, Leah, Lillian, Lois, Louise, Maggie, Mary, Marion, Maxie, May, Myra, Juliette, Nola, Pearl, Pretty Girl, Roselle, Ruth, Sadie, Sandra, Sarah, Sheila, Shelly, Stella, Sylvia, and sadly, Widow.
To my regret, I have not found commemorated by a place name the courageous young female explorer of the island, Frances Trevor — the 18-year-old bride of Captain Barkley. In June 1787, when their ship Imperial Eagle anchored in Nootka Sound, Frances Barkley became the first white woman known to have rounded the Horn and to have visited Hawaii, Alaska and the shores of Vancouver Island. Mrs. Barkley would go on to become the first woman to circumnavigate the globe. Isn’t it a pity that her name does not grace our gazetteer? Top of page
Part 11
Modern policy for naming places
Nowadays, the granting of geographical place names is systematic and strictly regulated. A government official, the provincial toponymist, maintains records of all current and obsolete place names throughout BC. An office at the federal level performs an equivalent duty. There is even an International Committee on Geographical Names. At each level there is a process for the nomination, approval and adoption of new toponyms. We recently witnessed an interesting cross-border campaign to create a new toponym. In 2010, His Honour, Lt. Governor Stephen Point, himself of Aboriginal descent, proclaimed “The Salish Sea” as the continuous body of water comprising the Straits of Juan De Fuca, Haro and Georgia and Puget Sound.
Despite these earnest efforts to contain the problem of establishing place names, I am sure that debates will continue — for example the long, ongoing, battle over the official “Saltspring Island” or, as insisted by the residents, “Salt Spring Island” — is it two words or three? Is “Foul Bay” spelled F-O-U-L, referring to a nautical term or, as preferred by some in the neighbourhood, F-O-W-L, indicating an abundance of ducks?
Fortunately, there is an official digital gazetteer to assist today’s researchers. Top of page