Daily Archives: October 1, 2009

Indian Fort at Cadboro Bay, 1849

The Royal BC Museum was ahead of the curve in putting significant parts of its collection.  One thing I like is their small but relevant collection of maps and charts.  The 1849 chart inset to the left shows an “Indian Fort” in Cadboro Bay, for example.  There is a good selection of Admiralty Charts from the mid 19th Century, Pemberton’s 1861 map of Victoria (the “Bay” in this section is the real “James Bay”, now landfill under the Empress Hotel , where the bridge shows is now the causeway), and a 1911 map showing the Economic geography of Haida Gwaii (which interestingly includes Sea Otter as part of the fauna “on the west coast” since that species is thought to have been extirpated much earlier).  It is always surprising and sobering to see just how quickly remote areas were divided up and labelled according to their perceived economic value in a way that borders on propaganda, but there is realism too check out the instructions to family men.  Now the bad news: the price of being first is often not being very good.  I suspect when these went online bandwidth was a realy problem.  Each chart is split up into 100kb segments and it is not possible to download the entire thing at once.  The full size images must exist, so how about a quick project at the RBCM to make them downloadable in their entirety?  Same goes for the picture archives.