Qualla: Ruxton Island

Ruxton Island: Introduction

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

Ten people live on Ruxton Island year-round. The island has been surveyed into close to two hundred private lots. That gap - between the number of owners and the number of residents - is the whole character of the place: a low sandstone ridge in the southern Gulf Islands with roughly seven permanent cabins, another hundred and ten that fill up in July and empty again in September, and twelve kilometres of trails connecting them through second-growth forest. It sits southeast of De Courcy Island across a channel called Ruxton Passage, one of six islands in the De Courcy group. Three times in the last hundred and forty years, somebody has looked at this quiet island and seen a fortune in it. Three times they have been wrong in interesting ways.

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Ruxton Island: The Coal That Was Never There

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 a...

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Ruxton Island: A Cult Held the Deed

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 cam...

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Ruxton Island: The Reef at Herring Bay

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 wate...

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Ruxton Island: Frank Ney's Subdivision

Wed, 16 Sep 2026 00:00:00 GMT

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 ...

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