Qualla: Cadboro Bay

Cadboro Bay: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

In May 1862 two Royal Navy gunboats, HMS Grappler and HMS Forward, anchored off a sheltered beach on the eastern edge of Victoria. Ashore, several hundred Haida people had made camp after being driven out of the city, many of them already ill with smallpox. Victoria's police commissioner, Augustus Pemberton, arrived with a police force and the two warships and ordered them gone. About three hundred people were put into their canoes and sent north toward Haida Gwaii, one gunboat escorting them past Nanaimo to make sure they kept going. The beach is Cadboro Bay. Today it has a playground.

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Cadboro Bay: Sungayka

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Long before any of that, this bay was Sungayka - snow patches, in the language of the Songhees Nation - and it was a village site for something like eight thousand years. That is not a round number thrown out for effect; it is a span of continuous habitation that predates most of...

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Cadboro Bay: Seventy-One Tons and Six Guns

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The English name arrived by water. The Cadboro was a Hudson's Bay Company schooner - a small vessel of seventy-one tons, one deck, two masts, and six guns - and she was the first European ship to enter this bay. That was enough to fix the label permanently. It is a modest origin ...

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Cadboro Bay: What Happened in 1862

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The smallpox epidemic that swept the Pacific Northwest in 1862 began in Victoria, and the colonial response made it catastrophic. Thousands of Indigenous people camped in and around the city were forcibly evicted as the disease spread, a policy that did nothing to contain smallpo...

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Cadboro Bay: Octopus, Salmon, Tugboat, Sea Monster

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Cadboro-Gyro Park now occupies the land behind the beach, and it is beloved by a couple of generations of Victoria children for four large concrete climbing sculptures: an octopus, a salmon, a tugboat, and Cadborosaurus. That last one is local. Caddy, as the alleged sea serpent i...

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Cadboro Bay: Up the Hill

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The name now also covers the neighbourhood between the bay and the University of Victoria, bounded by the Uplands to the south, Ten Mile Point east, and Queenswood north, with Cadboro Bay Village at its centre. Its most consequential twentieth-century resident was Frank V. Hobbs,...

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