Vancouver Island's recorded European history begins in 1778, when Captain James Cook landed at Nootka Sound during his third voyage and claimed the territory for Britain. A decade later, fur trader John Meares built a single-building trading post near the village of Yuquot at the entrance to Nootka Sound. Spain had other ideas. In 1789, Commandant Esteban Jose Martinez built a fort at the same location and seized British ships, nearly triggering a war. The confrontation -- the Nootka Crisis -- produced three conventions between 1790 and 1794 before Spain finally dismantled its fort and withdrew. But it was not until 1843, more than sixty years after Cook's landing, that Britain established a permanent settlement. James Douglas of the Hudson's Bay Company selected a site at the Songhees settlement of Camosack, 200 meters from what is now Victoria's Empress Hotel. The fort he built there, originally named Fort Albert, would become Fort Victoria.

When Richard Blanshard arrived in 1849 as the colony's first governor, he found a territory where the Hudson's Bay Company controlled everything and he controlled nothing. There was no civil service, no police, no independent economy. Within a year, Blanshard gave up and sailed home. Douglas replaced him in 1851, now holding both the Company's authority and the Crown's. He raised a militia, encouraged settlement, and established coal mining at Fort Nanaimo and Fort Rupert. He negotiated fourteen treaties with First Nations -- the Douglas Treaties -- that required nations to surrender title to their lands in exchange for one-time cash payments of a few shillings each. By the mid-1850s, the colony's non-Indigenous population had reached about 500. But Douglas's dual role bred resentment, and when gold was discovered on the Thompson River in 1857, everything changed.

Almost overnight, twenty-five thousand or more prospectors flooded into the mainland interior. Victoria transformed from a quiet trading post into a tent city of speculators and merchants. Douglas, who had no legal authority over the mainland, stationed a gunboat at the mouth of the Fraser River and began collecting licenses from passing boats -- an improvisation that combined audacity with effective governance. London responded by creating a second Crown colony, British Columbia, on the mainland in 1858, and offered Douglas its governorship on the condition that he sever ties with the Hudson's Bay Company. He accepted, along with a knighthood, and governed both colonies from Victoria for the next six years. The Cariboo Gold Rush brought a second boom, and reformers like Amor De Cosmos pushed relentlessly for representative government and union of the two colonies.

Douglas retired in 1864, replaced by Arthur Edward Kennedy, a career colonial administrator free of HBC connections. Kennedy reformed the civil service, introduced public education through the Common Schools Act of 1865, and pushed for amalgamation with the mainland colony. But the island's economy was collapsing, and the assembly could not agree on how to raise revenue. In 1866, the Imperial Parliament merged the two colonies into a united Colony of British Columbia. Victoria became the capital in 1868. Five years later, the united colony joined Canadian Confederation on July 20, 1871, and Victoria was named the capital of the new province of British Columbia. The Hudson's Bay Company's seven-shilling experiment had produced a province.