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Audio

Ranfurley Island?:
Using Rare Maps to Discover Early European Understanding
of “Salt Spring Island”

John Lutz
Professor of History, University of Victoria
9 March 2024

poster for Prof. John Lutz talk on early names for Saltspring Island
Accession Number
Date 9 March 2024
Media digital recording Audio mp3 √
duration 68 minutes

450_John-Lutz_Ranfurly-Island_Hist-Talk_9.03.2024.mp3

otter.ai

14.03.2024

no

Outline

    Saltspring Island history and personal connection.
  • Speaker shares personal journey to become a "wannabe Saltspring Islander" through property ownership and weekend visits.
    Local history, maps, and indigenous navigation.
  • George Laundry homesteaded the property in the 19 teens and grew up there, sharing his insights on the history of the Musgrave slope.
  • The Musgrave slope has a rich history, including indigenous displacement, mining, agriculture, and recent influxes of wealthy Americans and recreational property owners.
  • Speaker J Lutz discusses historical maps of British Columbia, highlighting the lack of indigenous maps and the colonial history of the region.
  • Lutz describes the location of early maps, including those in Seville, Spain, Mexico City, and various archives in Canada and the UK.
    Mapping and colonization in British Columbia.
  • Michael Landon discusses the importance of mapping in British Columbia, particularly in the context of colonialism and the displacement of indigenous people.
  • Landon highlights how maps can be a form of recording knowledge, which is closely tied to the power dynamics at play in the colonization of indigenous lands.
  • Speaker 1 describes the Spanish establishment of the first European settlement on Vancouver Island in 1789, and their efforts to carve out their territory and protect it from other Europeans.
  • Speaker 1 explains that the Spanish kept their maps under wraps to keep other Europeans out of their territory, while the British wanted to challenge them and open up the coast for colonization in 1792.
    Early Pacific Northwest exploration and mapping.
  • Speaker 1 explains that maps are power and illustrates this by showing how European explorers used maps to claim ownership of land and resources.
  • Speaker 1 highlights the cultural specificity of European map-making and navigation, contrasting it with indigenous ways of understanding and navigating the world.
  • Galliano Valdez and George Vancouver's ships encountered each other in the middle of nowhere in 1792, sharing maps and navigational knowledge despite being from different nations at war.
  • Vancouver's map shows attention to the coastline, including Haro channel, Point Roberts, and Fraser River, as he searched for the mythical straight of Annie and the secret passage to the Atlantic.
    Early European exploration of the Strait of Georgia.
  • Speaker 1 describes the lack of interest in the Strait of Georgia region among early European explorers, despite its potential for trade and resource extraction.
  • Speaker 1 cites the limited knowledge and mapping of the area by George Hanwell in 1825, highlighting the challenges of navigating the region without reliable maps.
  • Hudson's Bay Company establishes fort Langley in 1827, then fort Victoria in 1843, near the Strait of Georgia, despite little European interest in the territory until the 1846 boundary establishment.
    Early exploration and naming of Vancouver Island.
  • Key-at-second, an indigenous man from Nanaimo, tells James Douglas about coal found on the north end of Vancouver Island, leading Douglas to explore and map the area in 1852.
  • Douglas names the island Swan Island after investigating salt springs in the area, as told by indigenous people.
  • Speaker 1 misinterprets the name of a place on Vancouver Island, thinking it's called Tron Island when it's actually called Mount Waddington.
  • Speaker 1 discovers coal deposits on the island and expresses excitement about the potential for mining, considering it a “huge massive mineral wealth”.
    Early mapping of Vancouver Island.
  • Douglas uses 1792 Spanish maps to navigate Gulf Islands, despite inaccuracies.
  • MCI names Toine Island and Sansome Narrows on a map in 1852.
    Salt springs and island names in 1850s British Columbia.
  • Pemberton and Douglass are excited about finding salt on Salt Spring Island, as it's a valuable commodity for the Hudson's Bay Company's salmon fishery and export to Hawaii.
  • Charles Edward Stewart, another Hudson's Bay Company official, disputes the naming of the island, suggesting it should be called Hara Island instead.
    Map names and their origins in the Gulf Islands.
  • Speaker discusses the origins of place names on a map, including Ranfurly Island.
  • Speaker 1 discusses the origins of the names of islands in the Gulf Islands, including the possible influence of the crew of the HMS Queen Charlotte.
  • Pemberton is credited with naming Saltspring Island in 1853, after previously using different names in his correspondence with Hudson's Bay Company officials.
    Early maps of Saltspring Island, BC.
  • Speaker 1 discusses the history of Saltspring Island, BC, highlighting the importance of accurate mapping and the challenges of surveying the area (42:42-43:40).
  • A manuscript map drawn by Captain Richards of the HMS Pumper in 1858 provides a more accurate representation of Saltspring Island, with hand-colored additions made in 1862 (43:40-44:10).
  • Settlers arrive on Saltspring Island in 1859, seeking knowledge of the land and resources.
    Naming and mapping Salt Spring Island.
  • Speaker 1 explains how Admiral Bane named various features on Vancouver Island, including Mount Maxwell, Ganges Harbour, Fulford, and Burial Island, after his colleagues and superiors.
  • The speaker notes that the island's detailed survey occurred at the time of settlement, when people were moving in, and that the naming of these features reflects Admiral Bane's relationships with his colleagues and superiors.
  • John Tate, a land surveyor, created a cadastral map in 1861 showing the property boundaries of Salt Spring Island, which was previously owned by different individuals.
  • In 1864, the Surveyor General of Vancouver Island, BW Pierce, created an index map showing the government reserves in the colony, including Saltspring Island, which was reserved for the Shuswap people.
    The history of Saltspring Island, BC, and its indigenous land reserves.
  • In 1792, Saltspring Island was owned by indigenous people, but by 1877, the last piece of indigenous land was reserved and remains so today.
  • The history of mapping Saltspring Island correlates with the loss of indigenous control, with detailed maps indicating increased European settlement and displacement of indigenous people.
  • Speaker 1 discusses historical maps of British Columbia, including the origin of the name “Saltspring”.
    Indigenous names and European mapping in British Columbia.
  • Robert Dunsmuir, a coal miner brought to Nanaimo by Hudson's Bay Company, became the richest man in British Columbia and a premier and tenant governor.
  • Indigenous villages were marked with grave points on prominent coastal locations, as a way of honoring leaders and claiming territory, with some maps showing these villages from the 1790s.
  • Speaker 1 discusses the importance of recording indigenous names for places in British Columbia, citing examples from historical surveys.
  • Speaker 5 asks questions about the naming of places in the region, including the role of local guides and the challenges of language barriers.
    Naming conventions in British Columbia.
  • Speaker 1 acknowledges the complexity of changing place names in British Columbia due to the diverse indigenous cultures and languages present.
  • Speaker 1 suggests a possible approach is to give places dual names, allowing for both the indigenous and colonial names to coexist and be used interchangeably.
  • Speaker 1 explains that cartographers often name places after their colleagues as a form of tribute and continuity.
  • Speaker 8 adds that the indigenous people were not kept as a source for names due to disease and other challenges that affected their population.
    Indigenous place names and oral histories.
  • Speaker 9 is working on a project to honor indigenous place names by creating a map with QR codes that lead to a website with more information.
  • The map will include place names from the Salish Sea region, and the project is expected to be complete within a month.
  • The speaker is asking community members to help proof and approve transcripts of oral histories and interviews from the 1860s to 1970s to make them more accessible and accurate.
  • The speaker mentions that the transcripts have been machine-transcribed using an AI system called Otter, but they contain mistakes that need to be corrected, and community members can help with this process.
  • Saltspring Island residents discuss marriage into First Nations communities in the 19th century.

Unknown Speaker 0:00
No, no. Okay, that's great.

Unknown Speaker 0:04
And this map is an 1855 map by a really remarkable amateur ethnographer, who lived in Puget Sound in the 1855. And he more or less captures the First Nations fairly accurately whose territory surrounds where we are now. But apropos of my talk, you'll notice that 1855 The knowledge of Saltspring Island, and islands around here are pretty sketchy. And so that's, that's kind of where my talk is going to take us today.

Unknown Speaker 0:36
But before that, tell me how many how many people in Canada are there now? But how many people? How many?

Unknown Speaker 0:42
40 million give or take? Yeah, well, so I'm one of the 40 million Canadians who's a wannabe Saltspring Islander.

Unknown Speaker 0:49
And I've been working my way into that for a very long time. And my partner shell cool, who's sitting over here, and I in 1992, with some friends we bought some property on must be April. And in the late 90s, we started building a cabin on that property. And we've been weekenders and summer visitors ever since. And now we're empty nesters and looking at retirement not too far away. So I'm hoping more and more to kind of make myself really a Salt Spring Island or as time goes on.

Unknown Speaker 1:22
Get my passport.

Unknown Speaker 1:26
It's not the subject of my talk today. But as part of my putting down some roots here and this place, I started to work on a micro history of Musgrave landing, or at least the Southwest slope of Saltspring Island. And I started out just wanting to learn a little bit more about the property that we live on. And so I interviewed George laundry who was the owner of that property, some of you will know George, and so George spa there homesteaded that property in the teens, 19 teens and George grew up in his early years on that property. So over the last few years, and you could get this to work, that'd be a miracle. But let's go just like this. Over the last few years, I've been interviewing George and this is him on his former property. Looking over satellite channel.

Unknown Speaker 2:16
Once I got into this little local thing for myself, I started to realize that this tiny fragment of Saltspring, the mid sized island in a gigantic province. What's really the history of that little piece of land is really a microcosm of the history of British Columbia and in some ways Canada but certainly British Columbia, like the rest of British Columbia has a rich indigenous history. Under that part of the island. There's a history of displacement of indigenous people. There's history of mining on that part of the island. There's course like much of Saltspring there's a lot of agricultural history there.

Unknown Speaker 2:51
At the end of the Boer War, the turn around making 100 There's more war settlers who come and start to land the homestead land was set aside for World War One veterans.

Unknown Speaker 3:02
1930s is a big depopulation, as there is in much of rural British Columbia, the Great Depression 93 is also sees the arrival of wealthy Americans who the Kellogg family who owned a large strip of the Musgrave area, from the 1930s through until last year, when they sold that property. There's a history of steam and truck logging going on there. And then the afforestation in the 1940s and 50s, big forest fires in the 1950s. And then the 60s and 70s brings the hippies and the Adapt draft dodgers and communes and squatter communities to the to the area. And and then the 1990s springs, the other squatters, the recreational property owners, like myself, come to the island in the 1990s in the 2000s. So it's the history of British Columbia writ small. And all this to say that I'm really interested in meeting and interviewing people who have lived or worked or farmed or locked up on the Musgrave slope, or have pictures of Musgrave slope. So that's not my talk today, but I'm just a little pitch up there for people and right to the bottom, you can see it there. Probably most of you, but my email address, is there, J lutz@uvic.ca. If you don't talk to me afterwards.

Unknown Speaker 4:14
Okay, so my talk today. Finally, I've long been fascinated by historical maps, and use them extensively in my research. And I know that indigenous people who lived in this territory before Europeans had an intricate understanding of the land and sea and under the sea, in this area, and they had an inter integrate and must have had some sophisticated ways of passing navigational knowledge on to their fellows into their children. And, but if those have none of those have survived, at least in the form that these types advisor, these are navigational. You could call them a mouse navigational tools from anywhere of the eastern part of Canada. And you can see how they have created ways to

Unknown Speaker 5:00
way find their way back to a distant places by carving and wood, of course in the Arctic is a rare commodity. So by finding these drift wetted carving these rare

Unknown Speaker 5:10
tools, maps, if you like 3d maps to allow them to navigate themselves to into the intricate waterways of. So I imagine indigenous people in this territory had some kind of tools like that, but we don't, they don't survive if they did.

Unknown Speaker 5:26
It's a reflection of the colonial history of British Columbia that most of the early maps of British Columbia don't live in British Columbia. There's actually a chair up here for somebody who needs a chair and one more chair.

Unknown Speaker 5:37
They don't live in British Columbia, most of them are scattered and in other parts, so the earliest maps in British Columbia are in Seville, Spain and the naval Museum in Seville, Spain. And in Mexico City, the colonial archives there because the Spanish were the first here Europeans here for the British there first charts are, there we are, are in the Hydrographic Office in Taunton, Somerset, England, is where you'll find some of the charts that I'm referring to today. The

Unknown Speaker 6:08
Vancouver's maps and drawings are at the UK National Archives just outside of London suburb of London and Q.

Unknown Speaker 6:15
And his paintings from his expedition we find in the British Library, there are British Columbia maps and the National Archives in Washington DC. In Ottawa, this is the library and archives of Canada in Ottawa. And, of course, the Hudson's Bay Company archives in Winnipeg. And then we get closer to home we can find some of these maps in the BC archives, but also in the land title and survey office in just actually make Donna Yates and Blanchard, you Victoria these days. And this is a picture of my friend, Michael Landon, some of you might know Michael, or some of you might have heard him talk here because I know he gave a talk. He's a historian and a cartographer and a former surveyor, looking at one of the manuscript charts in the land title and survey authority. So most of the maps I'm showing you today, don't get seen by many people, because they are housed in these hard to get to places they're hard to get through because either they're far away, or because the people who run them still make them hard to get to.

Unknown Speaker 7:15
And so I'm involved in a digitization project, which I'll talk a little bit about the end, which makes it easier for you for you to access some of these maps. But I don't see Dr. briny pin in the room today. But the reason why I'm here today, I think has something to do with Briony because she was doing some work for the land title and survey Authority Office

Unknown Speaker 7:38
trying to make their maps more accessible to British Columbia, and especially indigenous British Columbians. And hooked up with me who was working with the UVic University Victoria trying to digitize some of those maps. And I think that's how maybe Chris got the idea that I will come and give this talk. So there's a loop back to that.

Unknown Speaker 7:56
So let's talk about maps.

Unknown Speaker 7:59
I think about maps, I think that the thing to think about maps is to think about them as a piece of technology. It's a way for you or I or anybody to record information about places that we've been to. And we want to get back to when we want to show somebody else how to get to that spot.

Unknown Speaker 8:19
And tell them what we seen or what they might find there, where they can safely go somewhere, right. So think about a map is a piece of technology, it's a way of capturing a new place in two dimensional form, often in paper. But as we've seen, it's possible to do it in other dimensions. And, and it's you have to capture it in two dimensional form. And we're looking at a two dimensional map there. Before you can safely go and capture in in three dimensions in space before you can colonize a land, you have to kind of have a sense of where you're going, how to get there. It's safe. So when we talk about mapping in British Columbia, we're mostly talking about a process of a colonial process and a process that as Europeans become more and more familiar, and you will see this as time goes on with the maps I'm going to show. The earliest maps show total ignorance of where we are. And the later maps show very detailed knowledge. And that course of that gaining of knowledge also is not entirely correlated to the very closely related to the displacement of indigenous people and indigenous knowledge through those same periods of time.

Unknown Speaker 9:29
So, the other thing about maps is they are a form of recording knowledge and knowledge is power. And Spanish knew this in Spanish. So let's start with the Spanish 1789. The Spanish establish the first European settlement on Vancouver Island, close to Vancouver Island off the west coast of Vancouver Island friendly Cove. And they do so because they're trying to carve out their territory and protect it from other Europeans. And so they've started in Mexico. You know they crossed the

Unknown Speaker 10:00
the Isthmus of Panama, they conquered Mexico spreading up California coast. And they decided to plant if you like a fence post and frame the code and say this is the northern most boundary of our territory, you other Europeans stay away.

Unknown Speaker 10:14
So.

Unknown Speaker 10:16
So in 1790, they decided, well, we better know something about this territory. And so they send ship

Unknown Speaker 10:24
down into the streets. So one if you could poke his head in a little bit as far as Victoria, and that's all it goes. Back Back from Nicole 1791.

Unknown Speaker 10:35
They send Jose narvi is in his ship, a little tiny boat, a 40 foot boat, called the

Unknown Speaker 10:44
Santa Santa Santa Marina, which I think is worse a turn Island gets its name. And he sails into the Salish Sea. Oh, I'll come back to that. I'll come back to that. He sails into the Salish Sea.

Unknown Speaker 10:59
And so here we have, if you like.

Unknown Speaker 11:04
Right here, point oh, Gonzalez Gonzalez point. This is San Juan Island. And this is he calls this canal actually the full name that he gives this canal we call Georgia street. But he called it the L Grand Canal in the western US in Europe, there was aerial laminate.

Unknown Speaker 11:23
It gave a full full burial.

Unknown Speaker 11:27
And he sailed up as far as texts ala Island, which appears

Unknown Speaker 11:33
this map is too small, actually a little more detail. Way up there. Here we are. Here's a closer look. So on Sally's point, which is still going to always point in Victoria.

Unknown Speaker 11:46
harrow street canal de Lopez de Haro. Okay, San Juan Islands, these two names persist, he makes his way we can actually see where he goes, because he leaves us at numbers where he's done an in depth sounding, he's gone up this way. He's poked around these two islands here. And then he's headed off to the mainland.

Unknown Speaker 12:07
And he makes his way up to a little further note, the text is on a previous map. Yeah. So but the Spanish kept their maps under wraps, because they, they wanted to keep other Europeans out of the territory. And the whole idea of you know, mapping is to show people where to go what's there. So they didn't want to share that. The British, on the other hand, when they come and they're going to join us here in the states of Georgia in 1792, we'll come back to them in a minute. They wanted to challenge me, they wanted to open up the coast to tree they wanted to in you know, they're looking ahead already in 79, to two potential colonization. And so they knew that maps are power. And we'll go back here now.

Unknown Speaker 12:54
Let's do Georgia, Captain Cook over here, and Georgia, Vancouver over here. But the idea that maps are power are illustrated by the fact that each of these,

Unknown Speaker 13:06
these portraits,

Unknown Speaker 13:09
the maps are there with them, this their signal contribution to the world is to capture the world in two dimensions and allow other British and then other Americans and later any folks to come to the Pacific Northwest.

Unknown Speaker 13:23
And, and maps and charts, if you think of maps and charts are normal to us now. But let's just kind of distance ourselves from that idea for a second. A map or a chart that we're used to, is our way of looking at the Earth from the sky. And maps and charts are being drawn in the 1790s. And before that, by people who have never been into the sky, they've never been able to look down at the world from the top and see it as we see as you know, as as a chart or map. So maps are imaginary projections of the world, from an invisible spot in the sky. And Europeans mastered this idea. And then they also developed a system of gridding off their land into

Unknown Speaker 14:10
into rectangles, which would allow them to manage and control and ultimately sell land in very efficient manners. And this is something we take for granted now. But it's a very, if you like culturally specific, very idiosyncratic way of thinking seeking the world, and also relating to the world. And of course, it's totally different in the way that indigenous peoples saw the world. They relate to the world, they didn't see the world as something you viewed from from the sky, they probably saw it as something you viewed from the side of from a canoe or from a vessel, or at most from a neighboring Hill.

Unknown Speaker 14:43
And the idea of dividing the world into these little tiny grids would have seemed very foreign. And we get a sense of that. We get a sense of that from the Inuit navigational tools that I showed you a few slides ago. But here again, is a navigational chart from the Marshall Islands from the

Unknown Speaker 15:00
seems century around the same time as as quadra, or RV as this chart. But this is a way of representing the islands and the currents and the tides and the world, a navigational tool, which I don't understand. But what I understand about it is it suggests that it's a totally different way of thinking about navigation, thinking about space, thinking about the world. And our method that we take for granted is culturally specific, and EU Socratic to us and not universal. And it's surprising in some ways, puzzling to First Nations.

Unknown Speaker 15:37
So back to this map. So, this is the map

Unknown Speaker 15:42
that was first started by Norway is in 1791, actually is the year and then the following year, he was followed by two Spanish captains, Galliano and Valdez who followed his route. As far as text data, which somebody saw here, somewhere above there, above there, there we are.

Unknown Speaker 16:04
But Galliano Valdez went even further, they headed up north and they actually circumnavigated the island and brought us back to Nootka, I think is over here.

Unknown Speaker 16:14
Is that right? That's right. Yep. Okay.

Unknown Speaker 16:18
And so

Unknown Speaker 16:20
Galliano, Juan Valdez, so they're hanging out right around here in the summer of 1792.

Unknown Speaker 16:27
Just opposite point, Roberts is here. They call this point that GM and Gara. And I'm here a point, this would be broad in that in today's thinking, and while they're there and sending out their survey boats in the survey, they they see another rowboat Come on 1792 They're in the middle of nowhere in the middle of it, haven't seen Europeans or for weeks or months, and a rowboat comes by. And it's it's, it's from one of George Vancouver ships. It turns out that George Vancouver is also doing the same survey at the same time, and the same historical moment. And his ships are anchored just down here at the moment, and he'd send out survey boats going north. And so Britain and Spain had been at war with each other for most of the last two centuries on off and most of the last few centuries. But this was a brief moment of peace between the nations and Vancouver and is in two ships the discovery of the Chatham and he is CO Captain Brenton, get together with Galliano Valdez, and they agreed to share maps to share their navigational knowledge. Why is Vancouver there? A Vancouver is mostly their partner to challenge the Spanish claim that they own the seat, but also because there's still the belief that it's possible to find the mysterious that kind of mythical straight of Annie and this mythical passage that would take mariners from the west coast of the Pacific across the top of North America back to the Atlantic. This was the if you like the Holy Grail of navigators in the 18th century, they wanted to find the secret passage, which was refuted and other people had reported existed so Vancouver's here doing his own maps. There is a close up of that, but this is Vancouver's map from the same voyage and so just orient to get one Zoe's point,

Unknown Speaker 18:18
canal de HARO, Haro channel over here at Point Roberts,

Unknown Speaker 18:24
birch Bay, Fraser River. And it's a little blurry from your perspective. But it's it's clear that he's paid a lot of attention to this coastline here. He is not interested in this coastline at all. Because he is looking for this passage across North America. And so he's got literally zero interest in what's on this side of the Strait of Georgia. He calls it the Gulf of Georgia.

Unknown Speaker 18:52
And so what he does is just copies of Spanish maps. And so Vancouver's map of Saltspring Island territory, which would be right in here somewhere. This is that same kind of kind of wacky world that does the Spanish had kind of imagined and not only kind of cursory seen, but I think what this tells us is that this this knowledge, this lack of knowledge of this whole area, this whole terra incognita, if you like is unknown world to the Europeans. It was unknown to them.

Unknown Speaker 19:29
But what we can derive from that is it still totally owned, occupied used by the indigenous people who have no interference and, and,

Unknown Speaker 19:38
in fact, so little connection with these Europeans they might have in passing seen them sail by they probably heard that they had sailed by, but that's all in the 1790s the influence that these

Unknown Speaker 19:51
foreigners would have.

Unknown Speaker 19:55
And it takes another generation before Europeans come back to this territory as Europeans

Unknown Speaker 20:00
As I said, really at the time had no no interest in in this this territory this land. So it's another generation another 30 years before another European boat pokes his way into the streets of Georgia straight. And in 1825, a man called think his first name was George George Hanwell

Unknown Speaker 20:22
was the first of the Hudson's Bay Company ships to visit the Strait of Georgia. And he's a turns out we look his diaries, a very timid man who is very afraid because there are no reliable maps, he's very afraid that a ship is going to hit a rock and sink. And so he plays it safe as we possibly can. He sneaks his way up, I'll come back to this map, maybe in a second. The entrance is straight one a few good would be down here somewhere. He finds his way along the coast up to birch Bay, and point Roberts. And you can see a few soundings along the way.

Unknown Speaker 20:58
But his name, he gets the point Roberts here, and he noticed there's a sandwich village there, he kind of draws a profile. He does a little bit of surveying of the Fraser River here, challenges of getting in. And that's all it he doesn't even have Vancouver's map at hand. He's not even doesn't even have as good a map as Vancouver. He's making things up as he goes along.

Unknown Speaker 21:22
So he leaves us this rather de sultry map that tells us almost nothing in 1825. But again, we get a sense that Europeans a aren't much interested and be on the they've left this territory and indigenous people are living their lives and in in their world the way they always have.

Unknown Speaker 21:44
Now 1877 8027 Things changed a little bit in the Salish Sea, because Hudson's Bay Company establishes a fort at Fort Langley, Fort Langley, British Columbia, establish a post on the Fraser River. And so you would think well, okay, now Europeans are showing some interest in the territory. Now, you would imagine that they would maybe send a boat over to explore the kind of west side of the state of Georgia, the east side of Vancouver Island, but no, no, not much interested.

Unknown Speaker 22:15
Established fort Langley in 1827. And

Unknown Speaker 22:19
no sign that they've sent anybody across the street to the other side of the Strait of Georgia. until 1840, when the Hudson's Bay Company now is looking to establish a new post to replace their Fort Vancouver on the Columbia River, they need a new headquarters, which they think is going to be north of where the American boundary is going to be set. So they're looking for a new headquarters. They explore Sooke Harbour and explore swam on harbor Victoria Harbour Puget Sound, ultimately they decide Victoria Harbour is the place and in 1843, they established fort Victoria. Okay, Wow, geez. So they're close by the close to Salzburg Island, a surely they will, in the next few years, they'll learn something about the territory they're in. That's what you think.

Unknown Speaker 23:09
That's the husband baby version as a makeup

Unknown Speaker 23:14
1846 that the boundary was established, and the boundary was established in 1846. So they anticipated that boundary, they actually didn't think it would, they expected the boundary to be on the Columbia River down. Down below here. They were happily surprised to find that it was the 49th parallel.

Unknown Speaker 23:35
And so but by the end, they had already prepared by moving their headquarters. So this is an 1848 map. So they've been in Victoria now for five years how to Fort and if you look at and we go to the next slide is a little closer up. This is a cutaway of the Victoria area. And you know, not too bad news for Victoria point, Gonzales, Esquimalt Harbour.

Unknown Speaker 24:00
They've got some cat, cat bro Bay, and a cat Ruby, the world stops, it's like kind of dragons be there. At the end again, Ruby's like nothing now north of there. And this is kind of the bigger map here. And you see, they're still using the Spanish kind of wacky world here in 1848. So they've been in Victoria already for four or five years. And

Unknown Speaker 24:24
I mean, in part, if there's no trade reason for them to go exploring, they don't go exploring. And also they're afraid. They're a few white men in a world that's dominated by indigenous people, and as welcoming as indigenous people can and we're in certain cases, if you just people also didn't take much to strangers and often kind of, you know, captured them, enslaved them, and sometimes took off their heads in those days. And so there was a perhaps a reason not to go poking your nose where you're not welcome. So 1848 and the world would have probably stayed this way for a while longer except for a

Unknown Speaker 25:00
In 1850, to a SNA nine McMahon, a man from the nine most Nanaimo, indigenous man named ki at second, render that properly. He's at Fort Victoria, here in Fort Victoria. And he says he watches the blacksmith working away. He's making chisels or whatever. He's making them the blacksmith shop. And he notices that they're using coal to run the forge. And guess he asked about the coal and they say, well, we used to bring this coal all the way from London. You know, now we've got a little bit of coal up on the north end of the island to Fort Rupert, and can't get his name right again.

Unknown Speaker 25:37
Key at second says, well, we've got this in the normal. We've got this, this rock, you're you're so fussed about a number.

Unknown Speaker 25:45
Well, as soon as

Unknown Speaker 25:48
James Douglas hears this, he hops in a canoe and heads to check this out. So he actually takes this journey and he leaves us some out 18 of his 1852 journey. And this is the first time that Saltspring Island appears on any charter any map and so he's leaving for Victoria goes this past couch and head into this terra incognita land, a stops and Cowichan Bay and meets and spoke speaks with a cow it's college and people stops in at

Unknown Speaker 26:18
the

Unknown Speaker 26:21
where am I here chumminess And then makes his way up to and then I'm on Newcastle. They called it something like when Foose, see if I get their name, see if I can kind of capture this name. They called it when to who sent Island, presumably an indigenous name. Anyway, Douglas makes his way up there in 1852. And, presumably, I assume because of other information on his way back, he stops and investigates some salt springs that he's been told about presumably by indigenous people right around there. And he calls the island Swan island. So how does he get this name? This is this is not a British name. This is not a name of you know, he's not named after his boss or his friend. Presumably. He's here in Cowichan Bay, and he says he's looking out from couch and babies looking at Saltspring island. He says what do you call that place? And they say something like Tron and he thinks

Unknown Speaker 27:19
it's Tron Island. Well, in fact, they were referring to him mount twang the the mountain itself, right, they weren't telling him about the whole, the whole island.

Unknown Speaker 27:30
And

Unknown Speaker 27:33
the meaning of this word is some kind of some different versions of what the word means. Fluke in history of early

Unknown Speaker 27:42
Saltspring Island suggests that the island the word Tron is a very is an adaptation of a collagen word, which means facing the sea. But David Rosen has done a more careful ethnographic work renders, that name is something closer to something like one or two when, and it means land that goes right down to the water. And if you've seen mount twon well, from the ferry, or from anywhere, you can see it's a very sharp steep slope down to the water. So if that was the zooms, I guess, that it means that's an island when they were just saying that city for that? Cause it Schwann

Unknown Speaker 28:19
and this is an example. There's so many examples of European explorers, you know, kind of getting those kinds of making those kinds of mistakes. Apparently the name Canada was a name kind of mistakenly given when when

Unknown Speaker 28:33
we're gonna put to this but the label of Champlain the last, you know, the Algonquin, what do you call that land to the, to the west, and he said, a Canada. And so he just called the whole country Canada. So I mean, it's that kind of mistake, I think is baked into our maps and our language in Canada.

Unknown Speaker 28:50
In any event, Douglas makes his way back and he writes a report back to his officials back in Hudson's Bay Company, and he can't repress his joy and I'm going to read to you what he wrote. He says,

Unknown Speaker 29:06
the reports concerning the existence of coal in that place where I rejoiced to say, not unfounded, as the end is pointed out three beds, one of those men's beds measured 57 inches in depth of clean coal, and it was impossible to repress the feeling of exultation and beholding so huge a massive mineral wealth, so singularly brought to light by the hand of nature, as if for the purpose of inviting human enterprise. At a time when coal is the Greek desert or atom. In the Pacific, the desert or atom is a word we don't use often enough in our world, if the most desirable thing.

Unknown Speaker 29:43
He says there's every reason to believe from the appearance of the country and its geological phenomena that Vancouver Island about when to how you say an inlet is one vast Caulfield, in effect conjecture, be correct. The progress of the country will be rapid and prosperous.

Unknown Speaker 29:59
And remember

Unknown Speaker 30:00
So this is 1852 this is just the dawn of the steam ship Ah right coal is a suddenly a really valuable and important commodity.

Unknown Speaker 30:09
And it's a important commodity economically it was saved the colony which was kind of struggling. So that's one thing, but it's a strategic, the Royal Navy to have a source of coal in this part of the Pacific is a really important strategic manner as well.

Unknown Speaker 30:26
So,

Unknown Speaker 30:28
Douglas writes further, when he gets back, he says,

Unknown Speaker 30:32
respecting kind of the knowledge of the area, he says, The coast is Well Julie delineated on our maps as far as the promontory noon couch and head, which still has that name today.

Unknown Speaker 30:44
But from that point, all resemblance to the coast ceases the multitude of islands swarming the arrow and called arrow, ar l. archipelago, which extends as far as and terminate at Calla discounsel, which is here tonight,

Unknown Speaker 31:02
being laid down as they are laid down says on the maps as an integral portion of Vancouver Island, whereas the true line of the coast runs from 15 to 20 miles west of the position as laid down on our maps.

Unknown Speaker 31:15
So, in 1852, Douglas is still using the 1792 maps that the Spanish left him to know what this world is like this kind of world of

Unknown Speaker 31:27
what we now call the Gulf Islands.

Unknown Speaker 31:31
Well, in the meantime,

Unknown Speaker 31:33
well, so the following year at 53, the British map publishing firm John Aerosmith and CO publish a version of this map. So this is essentially the same map but that was a manuscript map and this is a published now so you see, the cancel Khaled accounts or when she says, between between couch and head and they're the maps are garbage. You said

Unknown Speaker 31:58
they show the coast 20 miles further to the west than they should be. This is a better map and is a little bit better. But it's not much better. If you compare what we now know. I mean, there's no Fulford harbour, there's no Ganges harbour, there is no Brooklyn Bay. This is really a very quick sketch of a guy who is paddling fast in a canoe and looking over the canoe and trying to draw something from his from from the viewpoint of his of his paddling.

Unknown Speaker 32:26
Well,

Unknown Speaker 32:28
now, so he gets back in I think he was there. The first week of August of 1852. He immediately sends his right hand man, Joseph Mackay and his surveyor Joseph Pemberton. It says, Get up there to Nanaimo and take out a claim and, you know,

Unknown Speaker 32:49
preserve this for the Hudson's Bay Company.

Unknown Speaker 32:53
So

Unknown Speaker 32:56
so they leave Cordova Bay. This is Mackay and Joseph Pemberton to Hetton. And then when they left Cordova Bay at 4:30am on August 25, because when you're canoeing in these territories, you always want to catch the tide. And low tide is going north. You want to ride the tide. I was leaving 430 In the morning, that's when they left. So they took a canoe from Cordova bay here. And MCI records in his letters, they stopped on twon for lunch. So second kind of mentioned, if you like of the name, so this is done. This is only named it a few weeks before. So now now MCI is using this neat Schwann.

Unknown Speaker 33:37
And on a map that Pemberton did in 1852, this is a map more of the Victoria district. So the bulk of the map is here, but he show his couch and Bay. And this 1852 map shows Toine Island and Sansome narrows, presumably here I will not labeled and

Unknown Speaker 33:56
to obey. I guess there is change the spelling has changed the spelling of yeah, thank you. Yeah, well watch the if you watch the spelling, the spelling changes fairly often. And I wonder about that. And I think it's probably because every time they say to the Cowichan oh, we're going to Toine Island, they said oh you pronounce pronouncing it right.

Unknown Speaker 34:16
So they keep trying to get better, and they never quite managed to get it. Right. So 1852

Unknown Speaker 34:24
Oh, sorry, too fast. So

Unknown Speaker 34:28
you give it to do.

Unknown Speaker 34:30
So Pemberton writes this in 1852.

Unknown Speaker 34:36
And Douglass encourages him to go and check out the Salt Springs, but it doesn't get there in 1852. He writes in November 1853 that he made it to the Salt Springs on this island. But in November you know the it's rainy here on Salt Spring Island. I hate to tell you this, and and so the Salt Springs, the springs themselves were all flooded.

Unknown Speaker 35:00
With rainwater and so he comes back

Unknown Speaker 35:04
in

Unknown Speaker 35:05
May, it's already in the March the next year 1854.

Unknown Speaker 35:10
And he writes,

Unknown Speaker 35:13
this is Pemberton now reading, I examined the Salt Springs at Toine Island using this spelling. They are situated not far from the sea in a place well adapted for a farm where there's a small lake and stream and enough of woodland four or 500 acres of rich open Fern land sheltering hills in a good anchorage. Salt Springs are seen in three places extending half a mile bubbling from the top of elevated mountains. These mounds are of a reddish color, nothing grows on them, and they appear to be continually on the increase.

Unknown Speaker 35:44
So it's quite excited about salt darkness a sampling to go check out the salt, he's excited about the salt. Why are these guys so excited about salt? Well, the reason they're so excited about salt is because on San Juan Island and at Fort Langley, the Hudson's Bay Company is busy buying salmon from the local First Nations, putting it in barrels and salting it. And the salt costs more than the fish. And they're salting and they're sending it to Hawaii, they're sending it to what they call the Sandwich Islands in those days as a cash crop. So to be able to find your own local supply of salt is a really big deal for them. So finding the salt this is just great.

Unknown Speaker 36:21
So it's not because they want a salt spray in the spa or anything. It's because they were after the salt.

Unknown Speaker 36:29
Well, in the meantime,

Unknown Speaker 36:34
there's a competition for the name of the island from another prominent Hudson's Bay Company official Charles Edward Stewart, who was the master of the Hudson's Bay Company steamship, the beaver, the first steamship on the coast, and one of the most knowledgeable of the Hudson's Bay Company

Unknown Speaker 36:50
navigators of the local waterways.

Unknown Speaker 36:54
So

Unknown Speaker 36:57
we store these as this map, an undated map, I'm going to zoom in on it in a second but you can see over here sketch on the eastern coast of Vancouver Island from Esquimalt into Nymo through harrow street so now arrow and are always become Hara, which is actually more accurate to the Lopez to herald that it was named for.

Unknown Speaker 37:17
Let's, let's have a closer look at the south end of his map. So we're here at Victoria. This is an undated map, but I know it's after 1852 Because he shows the coal mine so Victoria is here. Chatham discovery island that's pretty good San Juan Island actually is fairly well rendered Henry island here and then we got

Unknown Speaker 37:37
a James Island and Sydney Island given names with a colon Mary Island and

Unknown Speaker 37:43
ski with Catherine Island. He's given them their own names. Hard to know what he's trying to indicate here. But you know, not too bad on the south Florida ski for to skew Yeah, up here is a new castle Nanaimo. And they call it the Castle Island when we would known as Gabriel Allah. I know you have you know not to to behead up here. But this he calls Ranfurly Island Saltspring Island. And on here he shows the Salt Springs and little anchorage right off off the Salt Spring springs here. And there's a kind of a closer look at at Ranfurly Island. And I love I love this. I love the smell.

Unknown Speaker 38:28
So where is he getting his dream strong Ranfurly Island Kiyomori Island holiday Island. And such an island is this name has persisted through almost all of these maps a Spanish name that is always almost on every map such an island, but clearly they don't have a very good sense of what's a turn Island actually looks like it's not two islands.

Unknown Speaker 38:49
And we got a little bit better definition here.

Unknown Speaker 38:56
We can find managers Hi were nothing here though a long harbor.

Unknown Speaker 39:01
But it's an improvement I thought was 1852 map for sure.

Unknown Speaker 39:06
So we're going to get these names John. Well, clearly he didn't get them from asking the local First Nations.

Unknown Speaker 39:13
And so I wanted to answer that question. So I use the tool that professional historians use in certain circumstances. I googled Ranfurly

Unknown Speaker 39:24
and what I found out from Ranfurly is that it's a series like this right? It's a small parish Ranfurly

Unknown Speaker 39:35
where are we here? Ranfurly is a small town in west central lowlands of Scotland.

Unknown Speaker 39:42
Kill Maury over here Ireland is a town on the Aran Islands in Ireland cell worthy which appears in the north arrows so we're

Unknown Speaker 39:53
so we're the think here

Unknown Speaker 39:56
is a parish in some

Unknown Speaker 40:00
are set in in in this loop with looks like

Unknown Speaker 40:03
kind of conflation of Thetis, inelegant islands which are easy to conflate from from the sea because the ship channel separating the two.

Unknown Speaker 40:13
So

Unknown Speaker 40:16
where does it get these names? A clue, no clue and the map is undated, except for the fact that going back to our original page here, oops, back

Unknown Speaker 40:26
here, year, oh, stay there. This is the date that it was registered at the Hydrographic Office in Taunton. So the third of January 1854. So map was made after call was discovered in 1852. It was made before and mailed and found its way back to England sometime before January, before a clue to the timing of the map is this island here, which go back here to the north. Can you read that?

Unknown Speaker 41:00
Somebody in the front can you read the back of ally Kamali Island to come ally island named after the ship, HMS queen, Kamali, which arrived in Victoria in June 1853.

Unknown Speaker 41:14
So, and Stewart was the person who was often invited by Royal Navy captains to be a pilot onboard their ships and I haven't confirmed this but I think Stewart was a pilot on top on the team commonly as it's heading up the coast. And so my best guess because Stewart himself wasn't born on American Ranfurly or soul worthy or any of those places that have just named, he was born in Bristol.

Unknown Speaker 41:38
So the best guests I have is that it was the crew of the Trincomalee who, for reasons of their birthplace, or their affections, kind of scattered these names around around the Gulf Islands. And Stewart did himself a favor. This is hard to see but at the end of securing the island, we have appointed Stuart, so he didn't leave himself entirely off the map.

Unknown Speaker 42:02
So as competition is it ran fairly Island is a Chuang and Swan are Saltspring Island. Well, Pemberton in 1853, same time as the Ranfurly map, presumably, he offers this sketch map and sends it to London. And for the first time we have a map in 1853, which calls this island Saltspring Island. In the meantime, he's written back and forth to

Unknown Speaker 42:27
to the Hudson's Bay Company officials sometimes calling it Toine islands, sometimes calling it Saltspring island, but he seems to have committed himself in 1853 that this is Salisbury. So that name, I think we can credit Pemberton for fixing the name of the island, at least temporarily. We're one word. Yeah, one word.

Unknown Speaker 42:47
No one get into that debate here.

Unknown Speaker 42:52
So this that same map that we saw was rendered and published by Aerosmith in 1855. So it takes a couple of years for these things to happen. But this is curious amount Toine here is now tch UA N

Unknown Speaker 43:07
and he labels Sansom narrows, this is I should say is a like a small piece of cutaway of a much larger scale now, and on the larger part of the map. He does this unique twang gives it a twang to a and gives it a different spelling. And here we have Sansom Nero is indicated. Sansom was a lieutenant first lieutenant, HMS Thetis, which took this passage in winter, January of 1853.

Unknown Speaker 43:40
When they took

Unknown Speaker 43:42
the beaver Toad

Unknown Speaker 43:45
other ships up to kind of punish the Cowichan for killing the shepherding in Victoria. So that's how we get the Sansum name.

Unknown Speaker 43:53
So um,

Unknown Speaker 43:56
so it's not until the gold rush of 1858 that we actually get some more accurate renditions because even going back to this map here of Saltspring, not very well delineated. I mean, he said, he's a surveyor cartographer by trade, but obviously doesn't have the time and energy to focus on this. And you can still see so so turn Highland looms very large here on Stuart there.

Unknown Speaker 44:20
And, you know, all of this is

Unknown Speaker 44:24
haywire, you might say.

Unknown Speaker 44:26
So it's not until the gold rush of 1858 that we get accurate hydrographic surveys of Saltspring Island, and they emerge in a series of manuscript maps. First of all, my captain Richards, who's captain of the HMS pumper, and here he is this manuscript map. So you think about a map. When you're onboard the plumper you're, you're making angles and making all kinds of sketches and then you render those finally into a finished manuscript, which you then sent to the printers and the printer prints is the publish maps and this is the manuscript map after that

Unknown Speaker 45:00
on. And you can see that this is a professional who has rendered I'll have a closer look at.

Unknown Speaker 45:07
At long harbor and, and up here we see

Unknown Speaker 45:12
his hand colored in and here I can tell he says his hand color added this in in 1862, the map that was drawn previously Saltspring settlement. So this is Fernwood, this is a walker hook. And this is Fernwood. And he's he's penciled in some of the kind of soundings depths there. And I think these are meant to be, it's hard to say. But if these are meant to be the land parcels that have been alienated, I'm not quite sure or buildings, I'm not sure what he's trying to do there.

Unknown Speaker 45:41
But here, you know, it's a beautiful rendering along harbor for the first time. Ganges harbour here with the islands in the middle, of course, very careful attention to the depths because,

Unknown Speaker 45:54
you know, there is a rock named after every Royal Navy ship in British Columbia, because they found it the hard way you

Unknown Speaker 46:03
think of a ship and there's a rock named after it. And it's, and so here's an attempt to prevent that. I think, if I'm not mistaken, the bumper ran.

Unknown Speaker 46:14
Sure.

Unknown Speaker 46:16
You kick flattery,

Unknown Speaker 46:18
unexpected rock. So this is the published version of that map.

Unknown Speaker 46:23
At 59, I think it's published. And so it for the first time, I really have detailed knowledge of Saltspring island. So

Unknown Speaker 46:34
when I say this, I mean, now settlers are really wanting to know, knowledge about the space, they're needing to know knowledge about the space. And it's not a coincidence that in 1859, the first settlers come to Saltspring Island, we have a rash of African American Zori and Portuguese, British and other settlers who first start to take up land on Saltspring Island. And so hence, you know, an essential need to know what's there where to find things, how to get back how to stake a claim. And so this is Richards

Unknown Speaker 47:10
59 version here, kind of a more detailed look and, and you can see how

Unknown Speaker 47:20
we're, oh, just back to Richards

Unknown Speaker 47:25
you did notice that he's called it Admiral Island. He's changed the name now again. So what we've had so far we've had Shawn Swan, Chuan Saltspring. Now we've got Admiral Ron Ranfurly. nearly got everyone. He's called it at Mullen. It's not my research, but other folks who have researched why he called it Admiral Ron tells me that he was trying to butter up I guess, his boss and was Admiral Baines, who is the head of the Royal Navy in the Pacific station, so Pacific Fleet of the Royal Navy, which at the time was stationed in Santiago, Chile, but will soon be moved to Victoria. And so he called the admiral island we named the highest peak, which we would call mount Maxwell. Now, when you call it Bains peak and afternoon when I think technically there is a beach peak on Mount maximum as the highest peak and

Unknown Speaker 48:17
he called Ganges harbour after the admirals flagship, HMS Ganges. He called Fulford after the captain of HMS Ganges. He called we're going after the commander and on HMS Ganges he called let's see what else is

Unknown Speaker 48:36
suddenly point was one of the

Unknown Speaker 48:39
I have this here Sunday that was related to that as well.

Unknown Speaker 48:43
Thanks. Do you happen to know who Sunday was

Unknown Speaker 48:50
a chaplain, he was a chaplain chaplain, okay. Okay. In any case,

Unknown Speaker 48:59
think there's a couple other names that come from Admiral Bane. So yeah, here we are. Six.

Unknown Speaker 49:09
Forward a page.

Unknown Speaker 49:11
So the point after the admiral secretary, Mount Bruce after the previous commander in the Pacific nation capital after a friend of Admiral Bean's, so it really kind of kind of wrapped the whole island in, you know, his relationship to his boss.

Unknown Speaker 49:29
And

Unknown Speaker 49:30
so, as I said, it's not a coincidence that the island gets its detailed survey just at the time of settlement when people are wanting to move in here. And I'll say more about this later, but if you if you look closely, here, those of you in the front row maybe can see that name for that Island area, burial island. So Musgrave rock, we call the button 1000 burial Island, here on this point here.

Unknown Speaker 50:00
See that? Yeah. You read it. Really? It's really

Unknown Speaker 50:04
great point. Yeah. Can you read this here?

Unknown Speaker 50:11
Great point. And it's not on this map. But up here, idle Island. These are all indigenous grave sites, Marielle islands, great points. They're going past cemetery after cemetery of indigenous people, and they're naming them, you know, kind of appropriately, I guess.

Unknown Speaker 50:28
So it's a sacred landscape as well. So we're wrapping up now in 1861. We have John Tate, who is a land surveyor it is, this is a different kind of map. Now, we've been looking at hydrographic surveys, naval surveys. Now, this is a cadastral map. This is a map to show property on the on the ground. And so in 1861, he's recording first of all, this guy, you know, recorded the land and then he sold it or didn't prove it up and we went to this guy. And so we have this kind of history of succession of different owners of Salt Spring, this is the this is we would call a catchy Syrah here is given a new name again, Atmos harbor, and over here, oak Bay instead of Boothbay, I guess.

Unknown Speaker 51:11
So. So

Unknown Speaker 51:15
back to kind of European conceptions of the land, they laid this grid down or results for an island. And in this grid, as you can see, in this place, even though historically there would have been indigenous villages here and here, there's no place for indigenous people in this new world.

Unknown Speaker 51:34
This is my penultimate map. It's from 1864 in 1864.

Unknown Speaker 51:43
The colony of Vancouver Island is wrestling with the Hudson's Bay Company. And previously, the Hudson's Bay Company had been given the right to manage the colony. And that right ended in 1859. And, and so the Hudson's Bay Company relationship to the land to the ownership of the island ends in 1859. But it doesn't really because the Hudson's Bay Company won't hand over the deed, to the colony, Vancouver Island, until they compensate the Hudson's Bay Company for all the expenses that the Hudson's Bay Company had put into the car. So we're in this period from 1859 to 1868, where nobody has a real leg, neither the colony of HPC has a real legal claim to the land, and it's disputed. And in the midst of all this, the the

Unknown Speaker 52:31
council assembly of Vancouver Island asked the Surveyor General who missed by now is BW appears, he said, draw us a map and show us what all the government reserves are in the colony of Vancouver Island.

Unknown Speaker 52:43
So this is the index map if you'd like the large scale map that Pierce produces, and you can see the date on it 1864 This is your signature over here, up here. map number one and down here.

Unknown Speaker 52:56
I'm going to zoom in on this Saltspring island.

Unknown Speaker 53:01
So this is mountain number two this is if you'd like the more detailed version. In fact, all Pierce has done is he's he's taken Richards map and colored it in. And over here we see couch and Lake and presumably reserved for the couch and people up here always to harbor reserved for the shininess people presumably. But down here on Saltspring island, so I'll speak Admiral Island is it's Richard COVID. There's this huge, the whole of the muscaria lobe is set aside as a government reserve. And I can only think they intended as an Indian reserve because there's no other other reason why the government would want to reserve that land it's like a not a military reserves, not a lighthouse reserves. The other kinds of reasons why you might think the government might want to make a reserve it just doesn't make sense now appears never explain this. And so the kind of feel like it's temporizing your theories may be as good or better than mine. But

Unknown Speaker 54:02
that's where we're at. So the history of mapping Saltspring has a history of Europeans gaining knowledge of this place. And as I said before, it doesn't entirely coincide with the history of indigenous people losing their control. But there's a strong correlation, no maps, no European knowledge, no European control.

Unknown Speaker 54:23
No maps tells us it's an indigenous space for maps, little European knowledge, some European interest, some European intrusion on indigenous spaces. Detailed, precise maps tells us that there was sufficient settlement specialists and technical resources to do the work. It meant there was a larger segment of population and displacement of indigenous people.

Unknown Speaker 54:45
So by 1877

Unknown Speaker 54:49
Things have changed in British Columbia. So Hudson's Bay Company is negotiating

Unknown Speaker 54:55
Vancouver Island colony about who owns this land until 1866. Went back

Unknown Speaker 55:00
Coover Island is absorbed into the larger colony of British Columbia a few years later, 1871 British Columbia is absorbed into the larger confederation of Canada in 1877. Finally, the province of British Columbia and the federal government get around to signing Indian reserves to places to Indian villages that had never been set aside, as had been promised by Douglas and others that they would set aside indigenous villages. So 1877, a joint commission in the reserve Commission was established between the province and the federal government. But by 1877, the settlers had developed my new knowledge of the landscape and highly refined survey techniques. And so it was, that was also a very precise and minute piece of land that was ultimately reserved for indigenous people on Saltspring. So, from 1792, when we started the story, when all of this territory was owned by indigenous people, by 1877, this is the last piece of indigenous land on Saltspring Island and remain so to this day.

Unknown Speaker 56:04
How many? How much of the land have they ceded?

Unknown Speaker 56:09
The treaties,

Unknown Speaker 56:11
none unsalted. Yeah, a few local around Victoria, local around the Nymo and a local around.

Unknown Speaker 56:20
So that's the end of my talk.

Unknown Speaker 56:29
I know Chris wants to say something. And I'm happy to answer questions if there are questions. But I also wanted to say that a lot of those maps that I've shown, I've been working on a project to digitize them, and they're available, you can see them, a lot of them at the land title and survey. Well, a few of the ubit website. So this is a link from called British Columbia historical maps unit website. And here, you can see that we have copied a couple of 100 500 different maps, I think 300 Indian reserve maps, some 300, other maps, early history,

Unknown Speaker 57:03
I think close to 1000, fire insurance plans at the Victoria area, a couple of 100 maps in the Hudson's Bay Company archives, and some from the National Archives and UK. So if you want to see some of these maps, not all of them are because some of them like for example, the Hydrographic Office not sharing their maps. But if you want to see some of them, they're available. The last map you showed with 1862 and I'm still adding we're alive on what was the last one is the time when did it finally become

Unknown Speaker 57:34
1906 was the date where so I I'm not an expert on this and maybe the archives knows better but I think popularly known even though it was on the maps admirals Island people called the Salzburg and in 1906, the Canadian geographical names board.

Unknown Speaker 57:52
Right, officially recognized that the popular use was Saltspring. And not Admiral one word. One word. Yes, it was.

Unknown Speaker 58:00
And they assigned that that they they changed the official name from admins to

Unknown Speaker 58:08
Newcastle Island. What did it get its name because of you guessed when England and not taking calls to Newcastle expression? Well, yes, very much. So yeah, that's exactly right. They They hoped that those mines would bring the riches that Newcastle had brought to the UK so yeah, so Newcastle.

Unknown Speaker 58:30
Guns mere seconds right.

Unknown Speaker 58:33
benefited? Yes,

Unknown Speaker 58:36
James? No.

Unknown Speaker 58:39
Robert, thank you. Robert Dunsmuir was one of the coal miners the Hudson's Bay Company brought in in Nanaimo as an employee to mine those mines in those early days of 1850 234. And he was more ambitious and more efficient and the others. Hudson's Bay Company ultimately sold out their interest in the coal mines. He got together with some of the Royal Navy officers to get some capital together, bought some mines, and he was a coal miner himself from from Scotland and knew the business and he was a Kenny Scott

Unknown Speaker 59:12
had had been a minor I guess he didn't have a lot of sympathy for his fellow workers and kind of drove

Unknown Speaker 59:18
poor working conditions. Ultimately, they become the richest man in British Columbia. And his son James became both a premier and tenant governor of British Columbia. And of course, we all have a castle at Royal Roads and Craigdarroch Castle in Victoria are both the Dunsmuir family cows castles. Yeah. Any other questions? Yeah. Let's see. We're showing that one map where it showed First Nations burial. Yes, yeah. Were there any maps that show where like, First Nations villages were first nations were using? Yes. So this was the map Yeah, resource map here, which just shows the

Unknown Speaker 59:59
missus

Unknown Speaker 1:00:00
Got incidental knowledge. And they're coming along, they're trying to find a name for this island a name for this. And there's a grave, there's a graveyard on so we'll call it great point.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:08
Haven't made a systematic study, but they're like grave points all over the coast of British Columbia because indigenous people, I think they put their, their, at least in this era, the 18th, mid 19th century, they put their games on very prominent spots, partly as a, I think, a way of honoring their leaders and their members. But also as a way of saying to other tribes, this is our territory, you're your company, you pass burial Island, you're anchoring, you know, our character.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:34
So,

Unknown Speaker 1:00:35
so the answer to your question is yes and no. I mean, if I went all the way back to the Spanish maps in 1792, there are a few indications of what we think are indigenous villages on the shore, spotty, Vancouver.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:49
He wasn't interested, he was just mapping the shore and the thing. Other surveyors.

Unknown Speaker 1:00:58
Think Richards maps sometimes show the villages, so it's spotty, but they are often

Unknown Speaker 1:01:06
some of the best sources we have for knowing when the villages were occupied. And when you were abandoned? Yeah, so I do some work on land title issues, some work and maps are gonna be important for them.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:23
walkovers and walkers? You know, I don't know. Does anybody here know Walker Walker hook? I presume he's a local settler.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:29
Yeah, I see Brian, and then I'll come to you. Yeah, well, thank you for resolving the long standing

Unknown Speaker 1:01:37
results to

Unknown Speaker 1:01:44
Canada Post, I guess it's middle of the fair and middle things over there.

Unknown Speaker 1:01:49
So tshwane, or Toine. Was, was given,

Unknown Speaker 1:01:56
given given the image and SD and maybe a few other places. So in there in the first passages of Europeans through these waters, presumably they were working with local people, local guides to take them. Why were there not more? or were there other names, where they maybe jot it down on their sketches, local local names for places, but then decided that they would assign their own European name? Do we have any other any records of some other places that might have had being where the indigenous name is, and they'll get replaced? Yeah, I know, for sure.

Unknown Speaker 1:02:39
And, you know, maybe I mentioned some passing, but George Vancouver, in his instructions, he was sent out to do surveys, right. He's a surveyor. He was told to record the indigenous names where you could, and the

Unknown Speaker 1:02:53
wasn't worth mentioning in this talk. But in 1845, there was a couple of survey ships, the HMS Harold and Fishguard, who were serving straight one, a few good British, and they like, I've seen the restrictions, they say, record indigenous names were known.

Unknown Speaker 1:03:09
But I think they sell them did have indigenous people on board. And so I think, in part

Unknown Speaker 1:03:20
you know, it was too much trouble in a way to kind of, you know, go ashore and say, what do you call this? What do you call that? And I think in fairness to them,

Unknown Speaker 1:03:29
you know, they're doing this work on her brother, you know, sketchy conditions. So you can imagine,

Unknown Speaker 1:03:37
this is I know this for sure, with Vancouver, but he would anchor his boat, you know, in a place like this. And then he would send out essentially robots in all directions with you know, 10 guys in them, right? And they're, they're doing their sketches and for them and copying indigenous people was a scary thing. They like they, they were trying to be defensive, but not provocative. So, of course, there's total language question, you know, nobody's saying, If I asked, What do you call that island? You know, you're not gonna be able to answer me if you don't speak any common language. So I think there's a lot of challenges there. But so, as a result, we ended up with an IMO snin IMO Esquimalt. You know, it's so awesome. We ended up with a scattering of indigenous names, which must have been I imagined very prominent places and and easy to find, or whatever. But by and large, and then you get somebody like Pemberton, who's who actually knows an indigenous name, maybe not the island but part of the island. And he decides

Unknown Speaker 1:04:36
there's a song spring on there. And that's, that's very rare. Let's call this Spring Island and kind of overrides it.

Unknown Speaker 1:04:44
We know

Unknown Speaker 1:04:46
James Douglas recorded I think we owe some for soup Harbor, for example. There's various names, but soup is also an indigenous first name. So and then, of course, the different first nations would have different names for for places that they share. So

Unknown Speaker 1:05:00
You know, it's a complicated simple

Unknown Speaker 1:05:03
change the grade child's 200 Why would you put your personal hearing about maybe changing everything back to the ditches? Well, I think that would be complicated in part because

Unknown Speaker 1:05:16
so if you're if you're a couch and you're looking at Mount twang when you call it Swan, but if you're in Sanik territory, you're looking at the mountain, you're calling it probably something different. And if you're, you know, Lummi, or something on San Juan Island, and you're looking up at it, you probably have a different name for it as well. Right? So there's that complication. We see this actually in Victoria, where

Unknown Speaker 1:05:38
the Santa Cabrini among Douglas calls, but

Unknown Speaker 1:05:43
the songhees safe calls is actually not totally not my Douglas. And so. So we already see this kind of confusion. So I guess my view as a Senator who comes to this territory, knowing that we have displaced indigenous people is, I think there are many places where we can actually, in some places, it makes sense to change the name. But I think, in some places, like what we've done with the Salish Sea, we haven't got rid of the name Gulf of Georgia or our streets of Juan de Fuca. But we've kind of taken the kind of indigenous view of the whole landscape and added another name to it, which kind of pulls it all together. And, you know, for a long time, the Queen Charlotte Islands were known both as Haida Gwaii, and the Queen Charlotte Islands, in announcing legally

Unknown Speaker 1:06:30
but I think if you give islands or places kind of duel names, and allow the

Unknown Speaker 1:06:38
allow that people to get used to it and allow the world to shift, then I think that works better than trying to just remake the map.

Unknown Speaker 1:06:48
Now, that's perhaps that good. Sorry, can you have a good? I just, I'm wondering, the attempt of all the mapping is for settlement, and that they are willing melee on all their names. They're very fickle, and seems to whomever sales. But why did they keep Spanish names the English? Why did they keep like Harold Strait and Galliano and Valdez?

Unknown Speaker 1:07:16
You know, cartographers, I think we're often.

Unknown Speaker 1:07:22
So it's sort of a small, highly specialized profession. And I think they often like to pay tribute to the cartographers who went before. And so I think we have lots of examples of, for example, Richards, who's doing his cartography in 1858, he starts to name things after the cartographers and the Herald in Fishguard, and etc. 45, I think it was. And so, they're, they're kind of homage thing, and honoring each other, I took some of that. But also, the other thing is actually hard work to come up with a new name for everything. If you think about it, you know, I'm sitting here, and I gotta have a name for everything I see around me, if somebody has already named that, and especially if it's already known to the community has, you know, I think Ranfurly doesn't take hold, because

Unknown Speaker 1:08:11
you know, Saltspring Antoine, were already in play. And so to introduce this new concept is to do like, suggest continuity and safety as well, because the next people sailing There will likely have, they may have an old and if the Spaniards have nailed that place. Yeah. And then the Brits have checked. And so yeah, it's actually accurate. They want to see the future sailors. That's right.

Unknown Speaker 1:08:37
That's fine if you keep changing the name, so nobody knows where they are when they go on to the next.

Unknown Speaker 1:08:42
That's a really good point.

Unknown Speaker 1:08:44
Yeah, another reason, you know, if we're going to, we want to honor the fact that this was indigenous territory, if you've got a wholesale change every name, we would all be lost, right? We wouldn't know, you know, that.

Unknown Speaker 1:08:57
The place that we used to call for for harbor is now called something else.

Unknown Speaker 1:09:02
You know, we'd be lost. So there's, there's an advantage to the continuity. And honestly, we're starting to get away from the two dimensional.

Unknown Speaker 1:09:10
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's quite handsome. I'm full of respect for those cartographers who

Unknown Speaker 1:09:18
also add about the indigenous people and why they weren't kept as a source for names and other things. Because disease has wiped them out to the extent of about 90% With died, they just didn't have personal power to be helping these busy white people don't remember they needed that certainly even have enough people around to bury their own dead. That's certainly true by the 1860s 1862 epidemic was was you know, the well one of the most serious ones that comes through here. But for sure, yeah, by that time, these are cultures that are reeling from the shock of a disease and, and other challenges introduced by him but

Unknown Speaker 1:09:57
that's I just want to show you something actually related to that.

Unknown Speaker 1:10:00
Minister to this download let's see I just want to show you some quickly in our oversight this is important and ongoing

Unknown Speaker 1:10:13
that comes up

Unknown Speaker 1:10:21
so I probably I think I mentioned earlier and I was going to show this to you Johnson

Unknown Speaker 1:10:26
that we are working on black smoke itself other people are working on this indigenous place names map so much as we might not re label everything you can certainly learn these place names so this map is going to have

Unknown Speaker 1:10:43
this up here you would click on you know you can see the English obviously you know, we know these place names, but then you'll be able to click on this isn't live yet but it's coming very soon. The Hulk Amina name and we now have pronunciation

Unknown Speaker 1:10:57
Oh great. Wow. So you know here's Ganges harbor

Unknown Speaker 1:11:05
so you know, that's a that's a great honoring thing to do and so important for us to learn these names, perhaps learn how to spell them certainly learn how to name them. The synth Jonathan want the synth Sheldon names are coming next. We've just recorded them with the elders from the sandwich. And this is you refer to the fact that you know they're not they're not always the same, right? Different places they would have had more in the South was Satish being closer to the to this end of Saltspring to the to the south end. And even you know, you can see see out there's is similar but spelt differently. Of course, the Charlton has a whole different

Unknown Speaker 1:11:45
demography. So, but anyway, there's lots to be learned from this and it's coming. It's if you're on our website.

Unknown Speaker 1:11:53
Where are we here, if you're on our website here, and you click on this button down here, it's going to take you to

Unknown Speaker 1:12:01
sorry, I'll go back. So if you're on our website, which I hope most of you have visited or will visit, you will be able to go down and click this button down here. I've lost my cursor.

Unknown Speaker 1:12:15
Over on the bottom left, yep. So you'll be able to click on that. And oh, there I am sorry, I can't see it.

Unknown Speaker 1:12:23
So it'll take you to this. And then there's all this, we've been working on this. These are QR coded to the panels that are in Ganges and at Fernwood. So if you're standing by the panels, and you hold your phone up, it's going to take you to this page on the website. And then these, as I said, the place names are under construction. So within a month or so I would say Brian, we should have them complete. And you'll be able to go and learn those names. And there's other information here oral histories, interviews we have with settler, and First Nations, people from early on in the 1860s 70s, etc. In reminiscences of that time. But the other thing I want to show you and just put another plug in for is this back on the website.

Unknown Speaker 1:13:10
When you go to audio files, okay, right here.

Unknown Speaker 1:13:16
You might have received the newsletter, if you remember from, from the archives from the, from the historical society, about this huge project that Brian is working on, I'm working on and others. And what we're looking for is people to go in and help us really, it's not transcribing it's proofing. Because all of these things to Brian have been transcribed by an AI system, it's called otter that we used. So if you go into any one of them, I don't know. It'll say you know what the transcript is, and then it'll have this sort of thing, Unknown speaker, Unknown speaker, Unknown speaker, and certainly it will have mistakes with names, place names, proper names. So a lot of you will know who these speakers are will or will know from the description who the speakers are, and we would help you with that. So what we're asking is community members to please pick some files. I'll say, plural, make a file or two, there are four to 500 of these, and they're rich. And John probably could attest to this as a researcher, Brian as well. These will be primary sources of research. So John's writing about Musgrave if you want to look up sheep, and other references to sheep farming, if you go in and do a find on these files on cheap, bang, bang, bang, bang, bang, all those words then become accessible because they're because they're no taxed. Okay, so super important. And you're welcome to come and talk to me afterwards. But if other than that you can go on our website and just connect with us and I will just ask you to pick a file and go ahead and do some proofing and if you're not computer savvy you don't want to do on our computer. What we can do now is we'll just print out the the whole interview

Unknown Speaker 1:15:00
You for you as a Word document, give it to you go ahead and just read scratch it out highlight put those names in that you know and you won't know everything but it's all it's going to be an approval process. So please help us to help others to access as part of history. Okay, great. A big hand for Saltspring are

Unknown Speaker 1:15:26
coming everyone are talking in April

Unknown Speaker 1:15:30
we have an ever exciting speaker coming a little bit tentative there's a health issue so we'll keep you posted. If you remember you'll get the newsletter and otherwise we'll be having something on Saltspring exchange so thanks again for today. Thank you thank you Jeremy

Unknown Speaker 1:15:50
trying to create narratives so that

Unknown Speaker 1:15:54
you still want them as interviews just Cooper

Unknown Speaker 1:15:57
want narratives

Unknown Speaker 1:16:00
but to Friday

Unknown Speaker 1:16:02
read as transcript

Unknown Speaker 1:16:05
so you want to create a narrative you want to go a step farther that's that's

Unknown Speaker 1:16:16
used to do some lab all the way around

Unknown Speaker 1:16:21
so I definitely

Unknown Speaker 1:16:24
one of the things

Unknown Speaker 1:16:31
encouraged people to

Unknown Speaker 1:16:35
marry First Nations women

Unknown Speaker 1:16:40
because

Unknown Speaker 1:16:43
they didn't have time to use it

Unknown Speaker 1:16:48
and so when they married I got the blessing of the chief

Unknown Speaker 1:16:54
it's legit

Unknown Speaker 1:17:00
those early days first nations were a powerhouse until 1862

Unknown Speaker 1:17:08
all over BC find centers marrying into the community as a way of

Unknown Speaker 1:17:18
time here

Unknown Speaker 1:17:24
you know I bury your daughter and

Unknown Speaker 1:17:29
then you're going to be honored to be living in Yeah, that's right. Yeah. So I

Unknown Speaker 1:17:35
wonder when it's like well yeah

Unknown Speaker 1:17:40
well, knowing what was sort of a dream not to be the chief whatever.

Unknown Speaker 1:18:07
daughters will marry

Unknown Speaker 1:18:12
Chris Marshall. Yeah, my