Vancouver charted future of West Coast
Member of Cook’s crew escaped captain’s fate and went on to survey and map coastal B.C.
To mark Canada’s 150th birthday, we are counting down to Canada Day with profiles of 150 noteworthy British Columbians.
George Vancouver qualifies as the province’s first snowbird, spending winters in Hawaii. His stays here were measured in months, yet those visits reshaped the political configuration of North America, redirected events from which a future province would emerge, and made possible the great urban region now associated with his name.
He was born June 22, 1757, in King’s Lynn, Norfolk, a medieval seaport about 156 kilometres northeast of London, the sixth and youngest child of John Jasper Vancouver, a minor regional official of Dutch descent, and Bridget Berners, whose ancestors included Elizabethan naval hero Sir Richard Grenville. With two elder brothers, prospects of inheritance were slim. His mother died when he was 11. At 13, he joined the Royal Navy.
In 1772, he crewed on Captain James Cook’s expedition to the South Pacific. He must have acquitted himself well. Cook took him on the next mission to the Northwest Pacific, during which Vancouver and his shipmates became the first Europeans known to have set foot on what is now B.C.
Vancouver narrowly escaped being killed by Hawaiians in 1779. They killed Cook the next day. Vancouver got home, passed officer exams and was posted as a lieutenant to warships fighting France in the West Indies. In 1789, he was paid off. But a month later, tensions were mounting between the Spanish and British empires over who would control the lucrative Northwest Coast sea otter trade.
For the British to take possession, they had to know what they possessed. Vancouver, who had spent eight years training in seamanship and hydrographic surveying under one of the greatest navigational minds in history, was an ideal candidate.
Vancouver was dispatched in 1791 to take possession of British territories formerly claimed by Spain and to chart an unknown coast from California to Alaska. He reached Vancouver Island for a famous meeting with Spanish Captain Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra in 1792 — they became warm friends — then explored and mapped coastal B.C. Historians consider this the greatest marine survey ever completed.
He sailed home in 1794, dogged by controversy over his discharge of a midshipman with aristocratic connections, retired on half pay in 1795, and died impoverished in London at the age of 40 with his 500,000-word account of the mission still unpublished. His brother, John, published it in 1798. It remains one of the most important texts in the literature of B.C.