Vancouver Island was first named for two rival captains who got along
When a Spanish commander and a British captain met at Nootka Sound in 1792, they failed to settle who owned the coast but liked each other enough to share a name: Quadra and Vancouver Island. The Spaniard's half faded, leaving the largest island on the Americas' west coast named for one man.
Long before either navy arrived, the island belonged to three broad language groups. The Kwakwakaʼwakw held the north, the Nuu-chah-nulth most of the west coast, and a range of Coast Salish nations such as the Cowichan, Saanich and Songhees the south-east. Today about 5,500 Kwakwakaʼwakw live across 17 tribes, but only around 250 people still speak their language, Kwakʼwala, and Canada banned their potlatch ceremony in 1885 before it was revived in recent decades.
Rumours of Russian fur traders sent Spanish ships north from 1774. James Cook spent a month at Nootka Sound in 1778 and claimed the land for Britain, and the trader John Meares built a post near the village of Yuquot in 1788. When Spain fortified the cove in 1789 and seized British ships, the two empires edged toward war in what became the Nootka Crisis. George Vancouver, who had sailed under Cook as a midshipman, came to negotiate with Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra. They deadlocked and referred everything home, but the friendly meetings produced the double name, though each man's account credits the other with the idea. Conventions signed through 1794 eventually saw Spain dismantle its fort and leave.
The island is 456 km long and up to 100 km wide, covering about 31,815 square kilometres, making it the world's 42nd largest island and Canada's second most populous after Montreal. Its southern tip is one of the few parts of western Canada below the 49th parallel, and the south-east is warm enough that a few spots have grown olives and lemons since the mid-1990s.
In 2021 the island had 864,864 residents, close to half of them around Greater Victoria, the provincial capital. American traders from Boston dominated the early coastal fur business so completely that local people called every trader a Boston Man.
Source: Vancouver Island
