In 1887 the De Courcy group had a land rush. The reason was coal - specifically, the hope that the rich Nanaimo seams ran offshore and surfaced again under these islands. Buyers moved fast on the theory. William Flewett of London, England, took the remainder of De Courcy Island and all of Ruxton, which was known for a time as Flewett's Island. The geology did not cooperate. Only small deposits were ever found, and for several years after the rush men kept digging in a sandstone island looking for a workable vein that was not there. The rock itself is the giveaway: Ruxton is sandstone almost throughout, the soft honeycombed Gulf Islands variety that salt and wind carve into pockets and galleries along the shoreline. Handsome, useless for burning.

In the spring of 1927 an English mystic calling himself Brother XII arrived in British Columbia and founded the Aquarian Foundation at Cedar-by-the-Sea, just south of Nanaimo. Within a year he had thousands of supporters across North America sending money, and a few dozen who came to live near him - people encouraged to hand over everything they owned for the privilege. With those funds he bought land in the De Courcy Islands, and for a period Ruxton itself belonged to the Foundation. What followed on neighbouring De Courcy was ugly: a leader who grew steadily more autocratic and paranoid, followers who found themselves labouring under a man they had trusted with their savings and their lives, and finally, in 1932, a revolt, and lawsuits in Nanaimo in 1933. Brother XII vanished with the colony's gold. Ruxton's connection to all this is loose, a matter of paper and adjacency. It is still the strangest line in the island's title history.

Anyone arriving by water needs to know one thing. Herring Bay, at the northwest corner, is marked, and the approach must be made between that marker and the small islet to its east. A reef runs several hundred yards southeast from the islet. It dries out at anything but high water, and then it keeps going underwater where nobody can see it. Visiting boats hit it regularly - not occasionally, regularly - which is a fair description of most Gulf Islands hazards: entirely charted, entirely avoidable, and entirely reliable at catching people who are looking at the shoreline instead of the chart. The islet was named Long Point not long ago, in honour of Ted Long, who lived here for many years.

Halfway down the west shore is Nayler Bay, named for the family who owned the island and eventually sold it to Frank Ney - realtor, president of Nanaimo Realty, and mayor of Nanaimo through most of the years between 1968 and 1990. Ney was the man who bought Protection Island and sold it under a pirate theme, and who is still remembered on Vancouver Island for his showmanship. He carved Ruxton into 199 privately owned lots, waterfront parcels of about half an acre and interior ones of roughly two. What the subdividing did not touch is the middle of the island: a wetland of about ten acres where Canada geese nest each spring, and frogs and small waterfowl carry on year-round. Douglas fir and red cedar dominate the forest, mixed with arbutus, Garry oak, shore pine, alder, and vine maple. Otters, mink, and Douglas squirrels have the run of it for ten months a year.