Vancouver Island

• 1. Introduction

  ›

  Vancouver Island sits at the edge of the northeastern Pacific Ocean, measuring 456 kilometres long and stretching 100 kilometres at its widest point. At 32,100 square kilometres, it is the largest island along the entire western coasts of the Americas and the most populous. Nearly a million people call it home, yet much of its interior remains wild mountain country, carved by ancient volcanic forces and still shaken by some of Canada's most powerful earthquakes.

  The island carries two names in its history: one for a British naval captain who came to negotiate, and another for the Spanish commander who became his unlikely friend. That friendship produced a name, and the name eventually became a colony, then a province, then a place where olives and lemons grow in Canadian soil. How an island at the rim of the Pacific became home to both grizzly-free wilderness and a technology sector worth nearly two billion dollars annually is a story worth following.

• 2. The First Peoples

  ›

  Long before any European ship appeared on the horizon, three broad groupings of indigenous peoples had built distinct civilizations across Vancouver Island. The Kwakwakaʼwakw held the northern and northwestern shores, the Nuu-chah-nulth occupied most of the rugged west coast, and the Coast Salish spread across the southeastern island and down to the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

  The Kwakwakaʼwakw, also called the Kwakiutl in English, speak Kwakʼwala, a language of the Northern Wakashan family shared with the Haisla, Heiltsuk, and Wuikyala. The name Kwakwakaʼwakw itself means "speakers of Kwakʼwala". Today that language survives in the mouths of fewer than 250 people, less than five percent of the roughly 5,500 members of the nation. The Kwakwakaʼwakw are now organized into 17 separate tribes, with communities including Fort Rupert, Alert Bay, and Quatsino on Vancouver Island.

  The Nuu-chah-nulth hold a particular place in Pacific history. They were among the first indigenous peoples north of California to encounter Europeans, drawn into the orbit of Spanish, American, and British rivalries centred on Nootka Sound and the trade in otter pelts. Contact brought catastrophe: smallpox and other consequences reduced populations and erased some groups entirely, while others were absorbed into neighbouring nations. Their closest linguistic relatives are the Makah of Washington state's Olympic Peninsula and the Ditidaht.

  The Coast Salish peoples are the largest grouping in the south, a loose assembly of nations with distinct cultures speaking one of the Coast Salish languages. Their territory on Vancouver Island takes in most of the southern portion, from the Strait of Georgia down to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Among the distinct nations are the Cowichan of the Cowichan Valley, the Saanich of the Saanich Peninsula, the Songhees of the Victoria area, and the Snuneymuxw in the Nanaimo area.

  The Canadian federal government banned the Kwakwakaʼwakw practice of the potlatch in 1885, a ceremony central to their cultural and political life. The potlatch has since been revived in recent decades, a thread of continuity running through more than a century of suppression.

• 3. Explorers and the Nootka Crisis

  ›

  European attention turned to Vancouver Island in 1774, when reports of Russian fur traders prompted Spain to dispatch expeditions to assert its claims over the Pacific Northwest. The first was the Santiago, under Juan José Pérez Hernández. A second Spanish expedition followed in 1775 under Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra.

  Britain took notice after the third Pacific voyage of Captain James Cook, who spent a month at Nootka Sound in 1778 and claimed the island for Great Britain. Maritime fur trader John Meares arrived in 1786 and set up a trading post near the native village of Yuquot, also called Friendly Cove, at the entrance to Nootka Sound in 1788. In 1789, Esteban José Martínez arrived for Spain and established a settlement at Yuquot along with a fortification called Fort San Miguel. Spanish forces seized ships flying Portuguese flags that were sailing under British interests, bringing the two empires to the edge of war in what became known as the Nootka Crisis.

  Britain sent George Vancouver to negotiate a settlement in 1792. His counterpart was Bodega y Quadra, commandant of the Spanish post that year. Vancouver had actually sailed as a midshipman under Cook on an earlier voyage. The two commanders reached a personal warmth that their governments did not share; the negotiations ended in deadlock, with Vancouver demanding the full Spanish establishment be handed over while Bodega y Quadra argued there was nothing of substance to return. They agreed to refer the matter back to their respective governments.

  Out of that impasse came a name. Bodega y Quadra proposed that some geographical feature be named after both of them to mark their friendly meeting. Vancouver agreed, writing in his September 1792 dispatch to the British Admiralty that Bodega y Quadra had asked him to "name some port or island after us both in commemoration of our meeting and friendly intercourse." Vancouver named the landmass "The Island of Quadra and Vancouver." Interestingly, Bodega y Quadra later recorded that it was Vancouver who made the suggestion. The two countries eventually resolved their dispute through three Nootka Conventions: the first in 1790, the second in 1793, and the third in 1794. Under the final agreement, Spain dismantled its fort and departed, leaving Britain sovereign over the island.

  In 1792, the Spanish explorer Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and his crew became the first Europeans to sail all the way around Vancouver Island. By 1824, the Hudson's Bay Company had already settled on "Vancouver's Island" as its standard name in correspondence. When the Colony of Vancouver Island was formally established in 1849, Bodega y Quadra's name had already quietly disappeared.

• 4. Colony to Province

  ›

  James Douglas of the Hudson's Bay Company arrived on the island by March 1843 with a missionary, selected a site for settlement, and began construction of a fort in June of that year. The post was first called Fort Albert, then Fort Victoria. It sat at the Songhees settlement of Camosack, 200 metres northwest of what is now the Empress Hotel on Victoria's Inner Harbour.

  The 1846 Oregon Treaty between Britain and the United States fixed the 49th parallel as the international border, but made an exception to ensure Britain kept all of Vancouver Island and the southern Gulf Islands. The border dipped south around them. Three years later, in 1849, the Colony of Vancouver Island was formally established. The Hudson's Bay Company leased it from the Crown for seven shillings annually, with the obligation to encourage colonization. That same year, Captain Walter Grant became the first independent settler, starting a homestead near Sooke.

  The island's first legislative assembly convened in 1856. When prospectors flooded in for the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush in 1858, Fort Victoria became an indispensable staging post. The town was incorporated as Victoria in 1862. The Hudson's Bay lease expired in 1859 and the island returned to British control.

  The economic decline that followed the Cariboo Gold Rush of 1861-1862 pushed both the island colony and the mainland colony of British Columbia toward merging. In 1866, an act of the Imperial Parliament joined them into the United Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia. Victoria became the capital, though the legislative assembly initially sat in New Westminster on the mainland; the capital function moved back to Victoria in 1868. The united colonies joined Canada on the 20th of July 1871 through the British Columbia Terms of Union, with Victoria named capital of the new province.

  A British naval base was established at Esquimalt in 1865, eventually transferred to Canadian military control. Today it is CFB Esquimalt, home port of the Maritime Forces Pacific, with portions designated as National Historic Sites of Canada. The Parliament Buildings that stand in Victoria today were opened in 1898, replacing the earlier government structures that had been occupied in 1859.

• 5. The Living Land

  ›

  Underneath Vancouver Island lies one of the most geologically restless zones in Canada. The island's rock, mostly volcanic and sedimentary in origin, formed offshore on the Kula oceanic plate, which no longer exists. Around 55 million years ago, during the Paleogene Period, a microplate of the Kula Plate subducted beneath the North American continental margin, and a volcanic arc on its surface was pushed onto the western edge of the continent. The compression warped this material into the Insular Mountains. Much of the mountainous interior around Strathcona Park is part of the Karmutsen Formation, a sequence of tholeiitic pillow basalts and breccias.

  The remnants of the Kula Plate's successor, the Juan de Fuca Plate, are still subducting beneath the island today. This makes Vancouver Island one of Canada's most seismically active regions. The Cascadia subduction zone off the island's coast forms part of the Ring of Fire, and the area has hosted megathrust earthquakes, the most recent being the Cascadia earthquake of 1700. A more recent event, the 1946 Vancouver Island earthquake, registered 7.3 on the moment magnitude scale, the strongest earthquake ever recorded on land in Canada. Its epicentre was the Forbidden Plateau, in the eastern part of the Vancouver Island Ranges.

  The island's highest point is the Golden Hinde, at 2,195 metres, located near the centre of the island within Strathcona Provincial Park, which covers 2,500 square kilometres. The Golden Hinde sits among a group of peaks that include the only glaciers on the island, the largest being the Comox Glacier.

  Climate on the island varies dramatically from west to east. The rain shadow cast by the island's own ranges and by Washington's Olympic Peninsula creates a striking contrast: annual precipitation at Hucuktlis Lake on the west coast reaches 6,650 millimetres, making it the wettest place in North America. At Victoria Gonzales on the southeast coast, the figure drops to just 608 millimetres. The southeastern part of the island has a warm summer Mediterranean climate, and since the mid-1990s some areas have been mild enough to grow olives and lemons. Skiing remains popular at Mount Washington in the mid-island, at an elevation of 1,588 metres.

• 6. Wildlife and the Sea

  ›

  The forests of Vancouver Island belong to the temperate rainforest biome. Douglas fir, western red cedar, arbutus, and Garry oak define the southern and eastern portions, while the north and west are dominated by western hemlock, Sitka spruce, yellow cedar, and Pacific silver fir. Douglas fir was first scientifically recorded on Vancouver Island by Archibald Menzies, and some of the tallest specimens ever documented were found here.

  The island's fauna diverges from the mainland in notable ways. Mountain goats, moose, coyotes, porcupines, skunks, and chipmunks are plentiful on the mainland but entirely absent from Vancouver Island. Grizzly bears are also absent, though in 2016 a pair were spotted swimming between smaller islands off the coast near Port McNeill. Black bears are common across the island. Vancouver Island supports most of Canada's Roosevelt elk, and several species found nowhere else include the Vancouver Island marmot. The island also holds the most concentrated population of cougars in North America. The Vancouver Island wolf, a subspecies of grey wolf, lives only in the northern part of the island.

  Resident orcas live in two major groups, one in the southern waters and one in the north. A third group of transient orcas ranges more widely and avoids the resident populations. Humpback whales and grey whales pass through on seasonal migrations between feeding grounds in Alaskan waters and calving areas off California and Mexico.

  Sea otters were hunted to near-total extirpation by fur traders in the 18th and 19th centuries. An international treaty protected the remaining population in 1911, but the last sea otter near Vancouver Island was taken near Kyuquot in 1929. Between 1969 and 1972-89 sea otters were flown or shipped from Alaska to the island's west coast. That population has since grown to more than 3,000 and now ranges from Cape Scott in the north to Barkley Sound in the south.

• 7. Economy and Connections

  ›

  Victoria's technology sector includes over 800 companies with combined annual revenues of $1.95 billion, according to the Victoria Advanced Technology Council. Outside the capital, the forestry industry shapes much of the island's economy, with logging operations that have attracted significant controversy. Protests over old-growth logging in Clayoquot Sound drew international attention and became among the most prominent environmental demonstrations in Canadian history.

  Tourism has grown into a major economic force. In 2022, the Vancouver Island tourism region generated $3.2 billion in gross spending, representing approximately 18 percent of British Columbia's total overnight tourism spending. Visitors come for whale watching, surfing, scuba diving, and sport fishing around Tofino and Ucluelet, as well as for Victoria's 19th-century architecture and coastal villages such as Cowichan Bay and Chemainus.

  Getting to and from the island requires crossing water. There are no bridges or tunnels to the mainland, and the engineering barriers to building one are formidable: the Georgia Strait is both extremely deep and has a soft seabed, and the region's seismic activity makes any fixed link a prohibitive challenge. BC Ferries, Washington State Ferries, and Black Ball Transport operate the seven vehicle-ferry routes connecting the island to the mainland and to Washington state. Victoria International Airport handled nearly 1.9 million passenger movements in 2018, making it the 11th busiest airport in Canada that year. Floatplane service runs downtown-to-downtown between Victoria Inner Harbour, Nanaimo Harbour, and Vancouver Harbour.

  Passenger rail service, once operated by VIA Rail on the former Esquimalt and Nanaimo corridor, was halted in 2011 after part of the line failed to meet safety requirements. Efforts to secure funding for repairs have continued since then without resolution. The Englewood Railway, operated by Western Forest Products between Woss and Beaver Cove, ran until recently as Canada's last logging railway. A proposal to bridge the island to the mainland dates back more than a century, to a plan in the 1860s that would have used Ripple Rock in the Georgia Strait as a mid-span support.