Things in History You Should Know: Great Vancouver

As originally published in the Meliorist.

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Britain, you may have heard, once had an impressive naval fleet and when the Europeans were taking a break from warring (which wasn’t often; they really liked a good war), Britain often put that fleet of theirs towards the purposes of filling out those maddeningly blank portions of the map. With any luck, they’d get more land. And if there’s anything Europeans loved more than warring, it was land.

George Vancouver was born in 1757 of Dutch, wealthy, but certainly not noble stock. Vancouver managed to score a coveted spot as a midshipman on James Cook’s second outing on the HMS Resolution at the age of fourteen. This is like Captain Kirk deciding that yes, he would love for you to be an officer on the Enterprise and he won’t even make you wear a red shirt and beam down to the planet’s surface.

He carried on in the navy afterwards, doing nothing really exciting. This changed after the Nootka Crisis, a little spat between Spain and Great Britain over who got to have Nootka Sound. (What, the people who lived there? Don’t be ridiculous.) Spain eventually gave up its claim over it, averting war and preventing everyone from having a good time, and so Vancouver was sent off in 1872 in his old ship, the Discovery, to go poke about in the area and do some exploring.

He did it without pissing off either the Spanish or the various native groups he came across, with the exception of an altercation up Alaska way. The bit with the Spanish is perhaps most extraordinary when you consider that they were about ready to come to blows over the region but a few short years prior.

This becomes especially clear when you look at his dealings with Bodega y Quadra, Spanish commander at Nootka Sound. He not only partied with Vancouver and his men, but he fully cooperated with his explorations. When Vancouver discovered that the area was on an impressively sized island, they were happy to write it into the charts as Quadra and Vancouver Island. I think we can all appreciate the truncation of the name in the decades afterwards.

In addition to getting along with whatever foreigners he came across, Vancouver mapped the hell out of the west coast, venturing into the Burrard Inlet and what have you. Somehow, he missed the Fraser and Columbia Rivers, despite finding a heck of a lot of other smaller rivers, but we shan’t hold that against him.

But alas, for all his accomplishments during that voyage, Vancouver managed to piss off some folk on his vessel. Important folks. Like the cousin of William Pitt, the frickin’ prime minister of Great Britain.

Thomas Pitt managed to score a berth on the Discovery despite Vancouver having a full roster of midshipmen thanks to his swanky family connections and Vancouver’s reluctance to piss off anyone of that family. Most lads who had the fortune or misfortune to get signed up with the British Navy had more sense than to fall asleep whilst on watch, break shit, do a little under the table trade with the natives and attempt to get a native girl to put out in exchange for broken barrel hoop. To be fair, being flogged a few times, placed in irons and sent back home with his tail presumably in between his legs would rankle any lad.

Vancouver and Pitt managed to get home in the same year, 1795, the former beating out the latter. Upon his own arrival, the latter set out to destroy the former, as any contrite fellow would do. This included challenging him to a duel. When Vancouver brushed him off, Pitt took the perfectly sensible action of stalking then assaulting him on the streets of London. Vancouver was legally prohibited from fighting back, but happily, he had his brother with him and said brother happily defended him until Pitt was restrained.

Years and years of traversing the world’s oceans, braving storm and scurvy on a filth-ridden wooden vessel crammed with men who haven’t bathed since time immemorial, isn’t typically good for one’s constitution. Thus it was that poor George Vancouver, his reputation in tatters, found himself on his deathbed in 1798, aged merely 41 years. It might have comforted him to know that Pitt, the little twerp, outlived him by but six years.

As for the Canadian city which bears his name? The area was once again visited by a European in 1808, in the person of Simon Fraser who managed to both find that damned river and cross the whole continent overland. Actual settlement by Europeans within what are now Vancouver city limits didn’t begin until the 1860s, thanks to the Coast Salish peoples who already lived there.

And the city itself wasn’t incorporated until 1886, after those fat cats in Ottawa decided it would be a lovely terminus point for the Canadian Pacific Railway. It had actually been known as Granville and popularly Gastown before that, but the name was changed in order to avoid association for the drunken debauchery for which Gastown was known. ‘Vancouver’ was deemed acceptable because of the nearby and better-known Vancouver Island.

Now it hosts sporting events. Huzzah.