Qualla: Mayne Island

Mayne Island: Introduction

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Somebody stole a two-tonne stone bowl. Then, twenty-five years later, somebody stole it again. The bowl is one of the artifacts left on Mayne Island by the Tsartlip First Nation, who lived here long before any European chart carried the place, and it went missing in 1982 and again in 2007 - a remarkable amount of effort to expend on an object that weighs as much as a small car. It is also a fair introduction to Mayne, a 21-square-kilometre island in the southern Gulf Islands that has spent its entire recorded history being valued, taken from, renamed and passed over by people on their way somewhere else. Just over 1,300 people live here now, in the quiet after all of that.

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Mayne Island: Rowing to the Gold

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

When word of gold on the Fraser reached Vancouver Island in 1858, miners needed a place to stage from, and Mayne Island sat exactly halfway between the island and the mainland. They gathered in the bay on the north shore, waited for weather, and then rowed across the Strait of Ge...

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Mayne Island: Named by the Navy

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

George Vancouver camped at Georgina Point in 1794 and his crew left behind a coin and a knife, which settlers turned up more than a century later. The naming came in 1857, when Captain George Richards surveyed these waters aboard HMS Plumper and attached the name of his lieutenan...

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Mayne Island: The Gardens at Dinner Bay

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

From the turn of the twentieth century until 1942, a Japanese-Canadian community was woven into the economic and social life of Mayne Island, with close ties across the Gulf Islands and a serious stake in ventures such as greenhouse farming. Washiji Oya and his wife Yo Oya held t...

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Mayne Island: Mount Parke and the Shorelines

Thu, 17 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

The island's high ground is Mount Parke, 255 metres up in the south-central interior, with trails through mature Douglas-fir and out onto moss-covered rock to viewpoints over Active Pass and half the southern Gulf Islands. The edges are where Mayne spends its charm. Bennett Bay h...

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