During the Second World War this island shipped nine hundred tonnes of TNT a month. Today it has a private golf course. James Island is 315 hectares of Coastal Douglas-fir sitting in Haro Strait about two and a half kilometres off Sidney, with sea cliffs around most of its edge and a high point 145 metres up, and for most of the twentieth century it was one of the most heavily industrialized pieces of ground in the Gulf Islands. Some eight hundred people lived here at the peak, in a village with no cars. In 1979 the whole thing — plant, cottages, village — was taken apart and removed, and what is left is a ghost town with nothing left to haunt.
The island's older name is BOḰEĆ, in SENĆOŦEN, the language of the W̱SÁNEĆ nations, and the island lies within the traditional territory of the Tsawout First Nation. Louie Pelkey, a Tsawout hereditary chief, was born here in 1860 — which is to say the island was inhabited, not empty, during the decade the colony was busy naming it after somebody else. There is a legal wrinkle worth noting. James Island falls east of the North Saanich Douglas Treaty area and south of the Hul'q'umi'num' treaty area, and is inside neither. No treaty covers it. That absence has shaped every land question raised on this island since, and it has never been resolved by anything except the passage of time and the transfer of deeds.
Settlers appear to have started calling it James Island around 1853, after James Douglas — chief factor of the Hudson's Bay Company and second governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island, a man whose name ended up on a considerable portion of this coast. Captain George Henry Richards, charting the southern British Columbia shoreline from HMS Plumper between 1857 and 1862, adopted the name officially in 1858, which is generally how a settler's habit became a fact on paper. By the early 1900s the island had found its first commercial use, and it was a leisurely one: a private hunting ground for Victoria's sporting gentlemen, among them Richard McBride, who was premier of British Columbia from 1903 to 1915.
In 1913 a dynamite plant went up on the island, and it arrived in an unusual way — the plant and many of the workers' cottages were physically moved over from Nanaimo, buildings and all. Its owner merged into Canadian Explosives Ltd, which renamed itself Canadian Industries Limited in 1927, and from the start of the Second World War the operation ran under Defence Industries Ltd, a CIL subsidiary. Production climbed to nine hundred tonnes of TNT per month. Employment peaked around eight hundred, and almost everyone lived on the island itself, in a compact village at the opposite end from the works — deliberately far from the explosives, and with no traffic, because there was nowhere to drive. Memoirs by people who grew up there describe an unusually tight community — a self-contained town on an island, making munitions for a war on the other side of the world.
The TNT plant closed in 1977. Two years later the buildings and the village were taken apart and carried off the island, leaving the site officially classified among British Columbia's ghost towns and practically indistinguishable from forest. In 1994 Craig McCaw bought the island for $19 million, intending residential development, and then spent years in litigation with ICI, the corporate successor to CIL, over the contamination that six decades of explosives manufacturing had left behind — an industrial history that had been thoroughly documented before the sale. What eventually went in instead was a private estate: a golf course, yacht moorage, a seaplane ramp, and an airstrip, on an island with no permanent residents.
The current arrangement is a set of small oddities. Land use on James Island is administered by the North Pender Island Local Trust Committee under the Islands Trust, even though North Pender is a different island entirely and James has no resident landowners; its official community plan and land use bylaws are nonetheless independent of North Pender's. Everything else falls to the Capital Regional District, represented by one elected director for the whole of Electoral Area G. The owner has reportedly run the place on strict environmental terms — no insecticides, power lines buried, electric cars and golf carts for transport — and the island is entirely within the Coastal Douglas-fir Lowland, a forest type confined to a narrow band of this coast. In 2009 it was assessed at nearly $76 million, the highest-valued property in the Capital Regional District. It went on the market in June 2012 at $75 million, drew no buyer, and was quietly withdrawn.
James Island sits at 48.603°N, 123.350°W in Haro Strait, roughly 2.4 kilometres off the east coast of the Saanich Peninsula near Sidney and about 145 kilometres from Seattle. Best viewed from 1,500 to 3,000 feet. From the air it is easy to pick out and easy to mistake for one of its neighbours, so use the shape: James is the smaller, more compact island immediately north of the long, low, hooked Sidney Island, with sea cliffs along its southern, western and eastern shores — the southern cliffs are the highest — and a single 145-metre high point. The manicured green of the golf course and the pale line of the private airstrip are visible in good light and make identification unambiguous. Victoria International (CYYJ) lies about 4 nautical miles west across the channel, which puts this squarely inside busy terminal airspace with constant floatplane traffic; Friday Harbor (KFHR) is roughly 12 nautical miles east across the international boundary in Washington. The island is entirely private property with a private strip — do not plan to land there. Expect summer morning fog in the strait, strong tidal rips off the southern cliffs, and excellent visibility on clear winter days with the Olympics to the south and Mount Baker to the east.