In the spring of 1862, as smallpox moved through Victoria, the Songhees did something no colonial authority in the town thought to organize: they left. Almost the entire nation abandoned its villages and crossed to a low, wooded island three miles off Oak Bay, placing open water between themselves and the disease. It worked. The 1862 epidemic killed a devastating share of the Indigenous population of this coast, and the Songhees came through it with few deaths - one of very few First Nations to do so. The island they chose is called Discovery, a name it got four years earlier from a ship, and today it is half provincial marine park and half Songhees reserve, uninhabited, reached only by boat.
The epidemic began in Victoria and the colonial response made it worse. Colonial police, acting under Governor James Douglas's authority, used gunboats to force Indigenous people camped around the town - many already infected - out and send them home along the coast, carrying the disease with them into communities that had no defence against it. The Songhees moved first and moved together, relocating en masse to Discovery Island and holding the line there. Some of those driven from Victoria tried to reach the island; the Songhees kept them off, a decision made under circumstances no one should have to face.
The other half of the story is a doctor. John Helmcken, the Hudson's Bay Company physician at Victoria, vaccinated as many Songhees as he could reach. Quarantine and vaccine together are why the Songhees survived, and why the northern portion of the island is still Discovery Island Indian Reserve 3, under Songhees control.
Surveyors gave the island its English name in 1846, honouring HMS Discovery - George Vancouver's vessel during the 1792-1794 survey of this coastline. The Chatham Islands just to the north are named for his escort ship. It is a naming convention that tells you what the surveyors were thinking about: not the place, but the expedition that had passed it fifty years earlier.
The island's eastern tip carries a name with a sharper origin. Sea Bird Point remembers the Sea Bird, an American paddle steamer that caught fire in 1858 and was deliberately run aground here so the crew could get off alive. The ship was lost. The people were not, and the point on the chart has been quietly commemorating that trade ever since.
Sea Bird Point is where Haro Strait meets the Strait of Juan de Fuca, which is also where Canada meets the United States. That junction needed marking, and in 1886 a lighthouse went up on the point.
It was staffed for 110 years - families, not just keepers - before automation took over in 1996. The infrastructure of that long human occupation is still on the ground: two keepers' houses, a helicopter pad, a diesel generating station, a well and reservoir, a boathouse and dock. The coast guard even kept a truck out here, on an island with no road to anywhere. From the light, tidal current runs hard through the passage and the Olympic Mountains stand across the water to the south. It is one of the most heavily trafficked stretches of water on the Pacific coast, and from shore it looks like nothing much is happening at all.
In 1918 Captain E. G. Beaumont bought roughly 160 acres of Discovery Island - half of it - and settled in with his wife for what became nearly half a century. Their house overlooked Rudlin Bay and was designed on a nautical motif by Francis Rattenbury, the architect responsible for the BC Parliament Buildings and the Empress Hotel in Victoria. Well into his eighties, Beaumont would row from the island across to Ten Mile Point and go walking in the woods.
He died in 1967 and left his share of the island to the province. The park that resulted was designated in 1972: 61 hectares, undeveloped, with gravel beaches and trails running through fir and arbutus from the lighthouse to Commodore Point. Traces of the Beaumonts' house and gardens are still visible. Pandora Hill, all of 38 metres, gives the view - the Olympics, the straits, the whole southern approach to Victoria.
In 2012 a wolf swam to Discovery Island and stayed. Nobody knows quite why. The park closed while officials tried to trap him, the attempts failed, and eventually the park reopened on the understanding that this particular wolf posed no danger to people - a judgement that held for eight years.
He was named Takaya, and he became one of the more closely watched wild animals in Canada, a lone wolf living on a small island within sight of a provincial capital, taking what the shoreline provided. In January 2020 conservation officers relocated him to country near Port Renfrew, up the island's west coast. Two months later a hunter shot and killed him. The island he had to himself for eight years is quieter now, left to sea lions, seals, mink, and the year-round mildness that makes this one of the mildest corners of Canada - an annual mean of 11.5°C, snow in fewer than one year in four.
Discovery Island lies at 48.425N, 123.238W, about 3 miles east of Oak Bay at the southeastern tip of Vancouver Island. From 2,000 to 3,500 feet the island and the Chatham Islands sit together as a low cluster off Ten Mile Point, with the Sea Bird Point light on the eastern tip marking the junction of Haro Strait and the Strait of Juan de Fuca - and the Canada/US maritime border. Rudlin Bay indents the southern shore; the Olympic Mountains fill the horizon 40 nm south. Victoria International (CYYJ) is 10 nm northwest, Victoria Inner Harbour water aerodrome (CYWH) 5 nm west, and Friday Harbor (KFHR) lies east across the border in the San Juans. The island is uninhabited with no landing site. Tidal rips through the passage are visible from the air on a big exchange; expect summer morning fog banks rolling in off Juan de Fuca and clearing by midday.