British Columbia, Canada's westernmost province, borders the Pacific Ocean and features numerous lakes and rivers. As such, the province has a rich maritime history, which is recounted in the Becoming BC gallery on the museum's third floor.
Click here for a full photo tour of all of the Royal British Columbia Museum's galleries as of October 2018.
Photos taken 20 October 2018
 |
| Visitors enter the museum's Becoming BC gallery via a mock-up of the stern section of Captain George Vancouver's ship, HMS Discovery, which departed Falmouth, England on 1 April 1791 on a surveying and mapping mission to the northwest coast of North America. In company with HMS Chatham, Captain Vancouver aboard Discovery spent three summers mapping the coast of what would become British Columbia. |
 |
| Although a strict disciplinarian, Captain George Vancouver cared for his crew aboard Discovery and lost only five men out of 180 during the four year, 105,000 kilometre journey. HMS Discovery was a three-masted sloop of war, measuring only 29 metres long, armed with 10 four-pounder guns and 10 swivel guns, and crewed by 99 men. |
 |
| A reconstruction of Captain Vancouver's cabin aboard HMS Discovery. In 1792, during his mapping mission to the Pacific coast, Captain Vancouver also met with Spanish commander Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra at Friendly Cover on Vancouver Island to negotiate their countries' respective claims to the Nootka territory. Although many issues remained unresolved, the two men departed on friendly terms. Captain Vancouver had first visited the British Columbia coast in 1778 as a midshipman aboard a previous ship named HMS Discovery, then captained by James Cook. Following his return from British Columbia in 1794, Vancouver spent his remaining years preparing his journals for publication, before dying in 1798. |
 |
| A display case holds artefacts from the period of British, Spanish, and Russian colonial rivalry over the Pacific Northwest coast of North America, including replica uniforms of Captain George Vancouver (right); Russian naval officer Captain Aleksey Chirikov (middle); and Spanish naval officer Captain Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra (left). The case also contains the dagger allegedly used by Native Hawaiians to kill Captain James Cook at Kealakekua Bay, Hawaii on 14 February 1779; although it is of Spanish origin and quite different from the traditional weapons used by native Hawaiians, the natives may have acquired it from Cook or with Spanish traders. |
 |
| The maritime gallery, showcasing British Columbia's nautical history, including the province's shipbuilding industry, the naval presence, coastal ferry services, and the Canadian Pacific Steamship Line's operations across the Pacific Ocean. |
 |
| Made to resemble the wood-panelled saloon of an old passenger steamship, the maritime gallery's display cases are filled with ship models, uniforms, promotional pamphlets, shipboard tableware, and other artefacts. |
 |
| A model of the 31-ton, 48-foot Provincial Motor Launch (PML) 17 in a display about the the rise of the shipbuilding and repair industry in British Columbia from the 1850s. Built in 1948 for the BC Provincial Police, PML 17 was transferred to the Royal Canadian Mounted Police in 1950. The boat was acquired by the BC Provincial Game Department in December 1959. |
 |
| A model of the Margaret Haney, one of 12 five-masted Mabel Brown-class wooden auxiliary schooners built in British Columbia shipyards under the Aid to Shipping Act (1916) during the First World War. Made of local timber, these schooners helped fill an urgent wartime need for shipping. Margaret Haney was one of six Mabel Brown-class schooners built by Cameron-Genoa Mills Shipbuilders Ltd in Victoria at a cost of $150,000 each. She measured 240 feet in length, displaced 1,470 tons, and could carry 1.5 million board feet of timber in her holds; she was powered by a Bollinder oil-fired engine driving twin propellers. The Margaret Haney was later sold to the French. |
 |
| A display on the paddlewheelers that plied the waters of British Columbia in the 19th and 20th centuries. The paddlewheelers introduced steam power to British Columbia, making low-cost transport possible on many of the province's lakes and rivers decades before the completion of the railroad system. Sidewheel steamers operated in coastal waters in the 1800s and were particularly useful in inter-city travel. Sternwheelers, cheap and easy to construct, could operate in very shallow water and yet still carry heavy cargoes. Sternwheelers provided reliable and often luxurious travel throughout British Columbia until being displaced by the railroads and highways. |
 |
| A model of the steam-driven sternwheeler Moyie, which was the last sternwheeler to operate in southeastern British Columbia, plying the waters of Lake Kootenay for 59 years, between 1898 and 1957. Prefabricated in sections by the Bertram Iron Works in Toronto, Ontario at a cost of $41,275, the ship was assembled by the Canadian Pacific Railway in Nelson, BC, where the company maintained a shipyard for its lake and riverine services. It was launched on 22 October 1898 and entered service on 7 December 1898, with capacity for 250 passengers with freight or 400 passengers without freight. Today, the Moyie has been preserved as a National Historic Site and is the world's oldest intact passenger sternwheeler, open to tourists in the village of Kaslo, BC. The ship measures 161.7 feet in length, with a beam of 30.1 feet, and displaces 834.87 gross tons. It was powered by two single-cylinder high pressure steam reciprocating engines, with a top speed of 14 mph (22 km/h). |
 |
| A display on coastal ferry services in British Columbia, including tableware from Canadian Pacific, Canadian National, and Union Line steamships, a model of the CPR steamship Princess Victoria (1902), and the brass ship's bell from the Princess Victoria. |
 |
| China and silverware used aboard Canadian Pacific Railway's Princess ships, bearing the company's red-and-white chequered house flag. |
 |
| China and silverware from the Union Steamship Company, circa 1930s-1940s. |
 |
| A collection of promotional guides and pamphlets for various coastal shipping lines that once operated along the British Columbia coast. The province's long and rugged coastline could not have been settled, nor its resources developed, without reliable sea transport. Steamship services became essential economic and social links along the coast, with many coastal ferries operating for decades; however, the advent of air travel and the construction of good road links led to the decline and cancellation of coastal steamship services by the late 1950s. |
 |
| A display on the naval presence in British Columbia. The presence of the Royal Navy on the coast of British Columbia, at first occasionally, and, after 1865 on a permanent basis, brought political and military stability and contributed to the growing body of knowledge about the region. The creation of the Royal Canadian Navy in 1910 and the Government of Canada's assumption of control over the former Royal Navy dockyard at Esquimalt, near Victoria, ensured the continuation of a permanent naval presence on Canada's west coast. |
 |
| On the left are Royal Navy wardroom dishes dating from the 1860s to the 1890s and featuring a standard pattern issued to wardrooms of Her Majesty's Ships. On the right are decanters and a silver tray from the wardroom of HMS Ganges. Mounted on the rear wall of the display is a photo of HMS Ganges, an 84-gun second-rate ship of the line built in 1821, which served as the flagship of Rear Admiral Sir Robert Lambert Baynes, Commander-in-Chief of the Pacific Station from 1857 to 1860. |
 |
| Items seen here include cap tallies from various Canadian naval vessels; a piece of oak from the hull of HMS Ganges (1821); and a memento of the 1931-23 cruise of the destroyer HMCS Skeena, listing all of the ports visited by the ship. |
 |
| A model of the Royal Canadian Navy St. Laurent-class destroyer escort HMCS Skeena (DDE 207), built by Burrard Yarrows Ltd in Vancouver, British Columbia between 1951 and 1957. St. Laurent-class vessels measured 366 feet in length and 42 feet in beam, displacing 2,263 tons as originally built. The ship's propulsion plant consisted of two-shaft English Electric geared steam turbines providing a top speed of 28.5 knots (52.8 km/h), with a range of 4,570 nautical miles (8,463 km) at 12 knots. Original armament consisted of two twin-mount 3-inch guns for use against surface and air targets; two single-mount 40mm Bofors guns; and two triple-barreled Limbo antisubmarine mortars. HMCS Skeena commissioned into the Royal Canadian Navy on 30 March 1957 with a crew of 12 officers and 237 ratings and was assigned to the Second Canadian Escort Squadron based at Esquimalt. In 1964-65, the ship was converted by the Davie Shipyard (Lauzon, Quebec) to carry a CH-124 Sea King helicopter and recommissioned into the navy with the new designation DDH 207 on 14 August 1965. Following an upgrade under the Destroyer Life Extension (DELEX) program in the late 1970s, HMCS Skeena returned to service until being decommissioned on 1 November 1993, sold in 1994, and broken up in India in 1996. |
 |
| A model of a Flower-class corvette, a small antisubmarine escort vessel based on the design of oceangoing whale catchers and built during the Second World War in large numbers to serve as convoy escorts in the North Atlantic. Flower-class corvettes measured 205 feet in length and 33 feet in beam, with a displacement of 945 tons. They were powered by a double acting triple-expansion reciprocating steam engine providing a top speed of 16 knots (30 km/h) and a range of 3,500 nautical miles (6,482 km) at 12 knots. As originally designed, the corvettes were crewed by 85 men and armed with one 4-inch gun, two Vickers .50 machine guns, two .303 Lewis machine guns, two depth charge throwers, and two depth charge rails with 40 depth charges. The simple design utilising parts and construction techniques familiar to merchant shipbuilders ensured that Flower-class corvettes could be built at many small commercial shipyards around the United Kingdom and Canada, including several in British Columbia. The Flower-class corvettes proved invaluable in the Battle of the Atlantic, providing some degree of antisubmarine protection for convoys of merchant vessels bringing war materiel from North America to the United Kingdom, filling the gap until sufficient numbers of larger, better equipped frigates and destroyers were available. |
 |
| A collection of artefacts related to Canadian Pacific Steamships Ltd and the 'world tours' popular with wealthy Europeans in the first half of the 20th century. Western Canada was a popular destination on any world tour, and Canadian Pacific trains would often stop in the Rocky Mountains before taking travellers on to the port of Vancouver to board Canadian Pacific steamships for the onward journey to Hawaii, Japan, China, or Australasia. This display includes photos, an Orient-themed fan and sun umbrella, various articles of clothing typically worn by female passengers on trans-Pacific voyages, and a model of RMS Empress of India, the first of the line's famed Empress ships. |
 |
| RMS Empress of India was built in Barrow-in-Furness, UK in 1890-91 for Canadian Pacific Steamships Ltd, and arrived at Vancouver harbour on 28 April 1891. With a contract from the British Government to carry mail between Britain and Hong Kong via Canada, Empress of India and her two sisterships, Empress of China and Empress of Japan, made regular voyages between the west coast of Canada and the Far East. Empress of India's typical routing was Hong Kong-Shanghai-Nagasaki-Kobe-Yokohama-Vancouver. In 1914, the ship was sold to the Maharajah of Gwalior for use as a hospital ship and renamed Loyalty in 1915. The 5,905-ton Empress of India measured 455.6 feet in length and 51.2 feet in beam, and was powered by steam reciprocating engines with twin propellers, giving an average speed of 16 knots. As built for Canadian Pacific Steamships, Empress of India was designed to carry 770 passengers (120 First Class, 50 Second Class, and 600 Steerage Class). The ship was sold for scrapping in Bombay in February 1923. |
British Columbia's salmon fishing industry
 |
| A diorama depicting the Aberdeen fish cannery on the Skeena River on British Columbia's north coast, which operated between 1878 and 1939. Although Hudson's Bay Company fur traders at Fort Langley first successfully harvested, salted, and exported salmon from British Columbia in the 1830s, the province's first commercial salmon cannery opened in 1871 at Annieville on the Fraser River. Evidence of quick profits soon drew many other canneries to British Columbia and, by the end of the 1880s, canneries were found on every major salmon river. By 1892, 67 canneries were in operation along the coast, employing thousands of labourers. As seen in this photo, canneries featured a long butchering table, the waste parts of butchered salmon being disposed of through holes in the table which allowed heads, tails, and innards to rain down into the sea below, much to the delight of hordes of feasting seagulls. |
 |
| Cannery workers hand-packed salmon into cans, then cooked the cans in large pots before sealing them. |
 |
| A scale model of the Britannia Cannery at Steveston on the Fraser River in 1900, a typical example of a British Columbia coastal cannery. The Britannia Cannery was built in 1890 on stilts over the water, with a wharf to allow scows of freshly-caught salmon to be tied-up alongside for processing. Large bluestone pots on the wharf were used to soak fishing nets in copper sulphide to disinfect and preserve them. Each cannery was allocated a certain number of boat licences for its fleet of gill-netting skiffs. A network of weekly and daily steamship routes operated by the Union Steamship Company, the Canadian Pacific Railway, and the Grand Trunk Pacific Railway kept coastal canneries in touch with each other and the rest of the world, delivering people, supplies, and news from Vancouver, Victoria, and Prince Rupert to the isolated processing plants. Steveston's 'Cannery Row' had 17 fish processing plants by 1911. |
 |
| A display on British Columbia's commercial fishery, including the integral role of Japanese immigrants in the province's fishing industry as early as the 1890s. Japanese fisherman introduced seine nets and initiated the harvesting of herring, which were salted and exported to the Japanese market. Items displayed here include nets and floats, pieces of shipboard equipment, a coastal map of Barkley Sound, different types of hooks, and nautical flags. |
 |
| A model of the fishing boat Loyal No. 2, originally named Kuroshima No. 2 and built for Japanese fisherman Kanzo Maekawa of Ucluelet, British Columbia in 1930. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Hawaii on 7 December 1941, and the Canadian government's fear that British Columbia residents of Japanese origin might connive to assist a Japanese attack on Canada's poorly-defended Pacific coast, led to the official confiscation of Japanese-owned fishing boats, including Loyal No. 2, and the internment of Japanese-Canadians at inland camps during the Second World War. |
 |
| Mechanisation came to British Columbia's fish canneries early on, with the first butchering machines being introduced around 1900 and the first sanitary canning machines being introduced a decade later. The mechanisation of the industry massively increased productivity, with huge quantities of salmon being canned and exported to the British market. Seen here is a fish butchering machine, built by Victoria Machinery Depot in 1909, which replaced 30 cannery workers and was capable of butchering 60 salmon per minute. It automatically removed the tail and fins, sliced open the belly and scraped out the guts. Because the fish butchers that these machines replaced were typically Chinese, the machine was given the racist nickname 'Iron Chink' by its manufacturer. |
 |
| A display of just a few of the dozens of different brands of canned salmon produced by British Columbia canneries. Before the advent of mechanised canning machines, skilled Chinese labourers, usually working for a contractor, would cut, shape, seal, and lacquer the cans by hand. The fishing and canning industries employed a diverse mix of people in addition to the Chinese, including East Indians, Greeks, Yugoslavs, Japanese, First Nations, Scots, Scandinavians, and many others. |
 |
| A display on commercial hook-and-line trolling, which harvests quality salmon for the fresh-fish market. Japanese fishers began trolling off the west coast of Vancouver Island and the practice soon became an important part of the fishing industry in the 1920s. Today, hook-and-line trolling is the most common commercial fishing technology that does not employ nets. |
