Victoria's site was originally inhabited by Salish
natives , and in particular by the Lekwammen, who had a string
of some ten villages in the area. From here they cultivated camas
bulbs - vital to their diet and trade - and applied their advanced
salmon-fishing methods to the shoals of migrating salmon in
net-strung reefs offshore. At the time the region must have been a
virtual paradise. Captain George Vancouver, apparently mindless of
the native presence, described his feelings on first glimpsing this
part of Vancouver Island: "The serenity of the climate, the
innumerable pleasing landscapes, and the abundant fertility that
nature puts forth, require only to be enriched by the industry of
man with villages, mansions, cottages and other buildings, to
render it the most lovely country that can be imagined." The first
step in this process began in 1842, when Victoria received some of
its earliest white visitors , when James Douglas disembarked
during a search for a new local headquarters for the Hudson's Bay
Company. One look at the natural harbour and its surroundings was
enough: this, he declared, was a "perfect Eden", a feeling only
reinforced by the friendliness of the indigenous population, who
helped him build Fort Camouson, named after an important aboriginal
landmark (the name was later changed to Fort Victoria to honour the
British queen). The aboriginal peoples from up and down the island
settled near the fort, attracted by the new trading opportunities
it offered. Soon they were joined by British pioneers, brought in
to settle the land by a Bay subsidiary, the Puget Sound
Agricultural Company, which quickly built several large company
farms as a focus for immigration. In time, the harbour became the
busiest west-coast port north of San Francisco and a major base for
the British navy's Pacific fleet, a role it still fulfils for the
bulk of Canada's present navy.
Boom time came in the 1850s following the mainland gold strikes,
when Victoria's port became an essential stopoff and supplies depot
for prospectors heading across the water and into the interior.
Military and bureaucratic personnel moved in to ensure order,
bringing Victorian morals and manners with them. Alongside there
grew a rumbustious shantytown of shops, bars and brothels, one bar
run by "Gassy" Jack Leighton, soon to become one of Vancouver's
unwitting founders.
Though the gold-rush bubble soon burst, Victoria carried on as
a military, economic and political centre, becoming capital of the
newly created British Columbia in 1866 - years before the
foundation of Vancouver. British values were cemented in stone by
the Canadian Pacific Railway, which built the Empress Hotel
in 1908 in place of a proposed railway link that never came.
Victoria's planned role as Canada's western rail terminus was
surrendered to Vancouver, and with it any chance of realistic
growth or industrial development. These days the town survives -
but survives well - almost entirely on the backs of tourists (four
million a year), the civil-service bureaucracy, and - shades of the
home country - retirees in search of a mild-weathered retreat. Its
population today is around 330,000, almost exactly double what it
was just thirty years ago.