On January 14, 1913, the SS Oscar was loaded with dynamite, black powder, and coal when Captain Alexander McDonald realized two things at once: the weather off Entrance Island was too rough to continue, and there was a fire near his ship's boilers. He turned the vessel around and ran it aground at Execution Point on Protection Island. He and his five crewmen scrambled off the ship, climbed down a mineshaft, and waited. The explosion destroyed the mine's surface works, fractured rock down to the working levels, flooded the tunnels, shattered windows across Nanaimo, propelled debris into town, and stopped the post office clock at 1:55. The island blacksmith, Dan Grey, lost an eye. Somehow, no one died. Protection Island's history is like that - dramatic, improbable, and surprisingly survivable.
The island's darkest chapter begins in the winter of 1852-53, when a Scottish shepherd named Peter Brown was killed near present-day Nanaimo. Two men - one from the Cowichan Nation, the other Snuneymuxw - were tracked down near Chase River and tried aboard the steamship SS Beaver on January 17, 1853. They were hanged the same day on the southernmost point of the island. The place became known as Execution Point, a name it carried for over a century before being renamed Gallows Point in 1960 - a change that softened the language without changing the history. The Gallows Point Lightkeeper's Cottage, built around 1912 and listed in the Canadian Register of Historic Places, still stands on the point. It was abandoned around 1980 when the lighthouse was automated.
The SS Oscar explosion was spectacular but not fatal. What happened five years later was neither. On September 10, 1918, the hoisting cable lowering miners into the Protection Island mine frayed and snapped. The cab carrying sixteen men plunged into the shaft. All sixteen died. Their bodies were so badly mangled that identification required sorting through clothing and personal effects. The investigation determined that salt water in the island's marine air had corroded the cable, weakening it to the breaking point. It was one of many mining disasters in the Nanaimo region - a cost paid in human lives for the coal that built the city across the harbour.
Today, Protection Island is home to about 350 year-round residents who live in a world without paved roads. Some get around by golf cart, a few by car, most on foot. Groceries arrive from the community dock via wheelbarrow. Access to the island is by private boat or a small, privately operated ferry that departs from Maffeo Sutton Park in downtown Nanaimo and docks at the Dinghy Dock Pub - which holds the distinction of being Canada's only floating pub. Some residents commute to Nanaimo by kayak or rowboat, a crossing of about 1.5 kilometers across the inner harbour. The island was originally named Douglas Island after James Douglas, the first Governor of the Colony of Vancouver Island, and was renamed Protection Island in 1960.
Every park on Protection Island has a pirate-themed name, courtesy of the developer Frank Ney - the same flamboyant mayor who launched Nanaimo's bathtub races and frequently appeared in public dressed as a pirate. Pirates Park, Captain Flint Park, Captain Morgan Park, Captain Hook Park, Ben Gunn Park, Blackbeard Park, Hidden Treasure Park, Long John Silver Park, and Gallows Point Light Park give the island's green spaces the feel of a literary treasure map. It is a peculiar branding choice for an island whose actual history includes hangings, explosions, and mining deaths - but that is Nanaimo's way. The city and its islands have always found lightness amid heavy history, naming parks after fictional buccaneers on the same ground where real violence once occurred.
Protection Island is at 49.180°N, 123.920°W in Nanaimo Harbour, approximately 1.5 km northeast of downtown Nanaimo. From altitude, the island is clearly visible as a developed residential island in the harbour, smaller than Newcastle Island to its north. Gallows Point is the southernmost tip. The ferry route from Maffeo Sutton Park to the Dinghy Dock Pub is a short crossing visible from above. Nanaimo Harbour Water Aerodrome (CAM9) is nearby in the inner harbour. Nanaimo Airport (CYCD) is approximately 15 km south.