Qualla: Discovery Island (British Columbia)

Discovery Island (British Columbia): Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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.

Discovery Island (British Columbia): Three Miles of Open Water

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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...

Discovery Island (British Columbia): Named for a Ship, and a Fire

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

Discovery Island (British Columbia): The Light at the Junction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 to...

Discovery Island (British Columbia): The Captain's Garden

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 f...

Discovery Island (British Columbia): Takaya

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 fo...