Ships in Esquimalt Harbor

ID: 542 ~ Source: Macmunn, Charles. Ships in Esquimalt Harbour, between 1893 and 1900. Between 1893 and 1900. Photograph. Charles Macmunn Photographs, PH coll 1496, Special Collections, University of Washington Libraries, Seattle, WA. https://digitalcollections.lib.washington.edu/digital/collection/alaskawcanada/id/800. Accessed December 6, 2020.

This file appears in: Esquimalt Harbour

Five ships sit at anchor in Esquimalt Harbor near the turn of the Twentieth Century. The port, by now the Royal Navy's headquarters for the Pacific, was of increasing strategic importance to the broader British Empire.

This file appears in: Esquimalt Harbour

Esquimalt Harbour – Place of Gradually Shoaling Waters and Sudden Arrival of Empire

By Neil Christenson

By the time Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC) head James Douglas first scouted the harbor in 1843, Esquimalt already had a long human history. A corruption of the Coast Salish word “es-whoy-malth,” meaning “the place of gradually shoaling water,” The vast…