The names around here all come from the same decade and the same squadron. Portland Island is named for HMS Portland, flagship of Rear-Admiral Fairfax Moresby, Commander in Chief of the Royal Navy's Pacific Station from 1850 to 1853. The admiral himself got the island to the east - Moresby Island - and the water between them is Moresby Passage. Swanson Passage runs northeast toward North Pender Island, Shute Passage southeast past Piers and Coal Islands, and Satellite Channel separates the whole arrangement from Saltspring Island to the north and west. Read a chart of the southern Gulf Islands and you are essentially reading a naval list from the middle of the nineteenth century, laid out across water that had been named in other languages for several thousand years.

Because there were other names, and other people. Midden deposits on Portland Island mark a long-abandoned First Nation village: layers of shell, charcoal and fire-cracked rock built up season after season on a shoreline that offered everything a settlement needs. Middens are patient evidence. They accumulate too slowly to be the work of a visit or a season, and their depth is a direct measure of how long people ate well in one place. The village site is gone as a village. What remains is the ground itself, and the knowledge that one of the emptiest places in the southern Gulf Islands was, for a very long time, one of the busiest.

Portland Island is reachable only by private boat or marine charter, and its anchorages carry the names the royal gift left behind. There are dinghy docks at Princess Bay and Royal Cove and a stern-tie ring at Princess Bay; paddlers land on the beaches at Princess Bay, Arbutus Point and Shell Beach. Camping is spare and marine-access-only: twenty-four backcountry sites in total, twelve at Princess Bay, six at Shell Beach and six at Arbutus Point. Facilities amount to pit toilets. Campfires are not permitted, which on a dry summer island covered in arbutus and grass is less a rule than a structural necessity.

A loop trail follows the shoreline the whole way around the island - 6.5 kilometres, about three hours at a reasonable pace, accessible from any of the three campsites. Cross-island forest trails cut the circuit down to roughly an hour for anyone who wants the shape of the place without the full perimeter, though the perimeter is the point. The walk moves constantly between shaded second-growth forest and open bluff, with the Salish Sea appearing and disappearing through the trees. There is also an artificial reef offshore, laid down during the island's years as Princess Margaret Marine Park and still dived today. Gulf Islands National Park Reserve, announced on 9 May 2003, now covers 36 square kilometres spread across sixteen islands, of which this is one - a park assembled out of fragments, which is what was left to protect.