No. 55.
Mr. Gibbs to the Secretary of State.
Sir: * * * * * * *
The superior depth and width of the Canal de Haro are fully exhibited not only on Wilkes’s Charts, but on those of our own Coast Survey, and I presume on those of the British Commission *on the boundary. It would be therefore useless to add any merely verbal statement as to that fact. The reason for Vancouver’s not surveying it was, that his object being to find a passage to the eastward, he hugged the main shore on returning from the examination of Admiralty Inlet and Puget’s Sound, and thus went northward through what is now called Rosario Strait; but that it was known to him from the charts of Quadra is evident from his having laid it down on his chart by the name of the canal de “Arro,” and his delineation of the whole group of the disputed islands. The reason that Governor Simpson, in his voyage from Nisqually to Sitka, (Overland Journey Round the World, during the years 1841 and 1842, by Sir George Simpson,) took the same passage, was doubtless because, however roundabout from the Strait of Fuca, it is the most direct from Admiralty Inlet. The pretense that the Hudson Bay Company was unaware of the existence of the Canal de Haro is as absurd as it would be, were the inhabitants of Brooklyn to ignore the passage between Long and Staten Islands, and claim the Kill von Kull as the outlet of the Sound and Hudson River to the sea. * * *Statement of Mr. George Gibbs on the canal de Haro.[68]
It appears from Mr. R. M. Martin’s work on “The Hudson’s Bay Territories and Vancouver Island, London, 1849,” page 35, that “the Chief Factor” [since Governor Sir James Douglas] “surveyed the south coast of Vancouver’s Island in 1842, and, after a careful survey, fixed on the port of Camosack” [now Victoria] “as the most eligible site for the Hudson’s Bay Company’s factory within the Straits of de “Fuca;” and further, Mr. Douglas, after investigating the south coast of the Island, says, “Camosack is a pleasant and convenient site for the establishment, [Page 154] within fifty yards of the anchorage, on the border of a large tract of clear land, which extends eastward to Point Gonzalez at the southeast end of the island,” &c. Ho man who knows Governor Douglas will charge him with stupidity, negligence, or want of knowledge of his own interests, and it is drawing too much on human credulity to suppose that his examinations did not lead to a knowledge of the strait, if he was not aware of it before. At any rate the Indians who frequented the new trading-post, coming not only from the Gulf of Georgia, Johnston’s Straits, and the northern end of Vancouver Island, but from Queen Charlotte’s Islands and the whole northwest coast as far as the Russian possessions, knew and pursued the passage of the Canal de Haro and that only, and do so still.
*With regard to the channel actually in use at present, I can positively state that the Rosario Strait is not followed at present at all, by vessels of the Hudson’s Bay Company; nor is the Strait of Haro in its entire length. Vessels bound northward from Victoria follow the latter as far as Stuart Island, and thence take the channel between Salt Spring Island on the east and the Saturna group on the west, going out into the Gulf of Georgia by Active Passage, between that group and Galiano Island, thus cutting off the detour round Java Head, and taking an almost straight line from the southern entrance of the Canal de Haro to the middle of the Gulf of Georgia on the forty-ninth parallel, and to the mouth of Fraser river. This interior passage is perfectly navigable for large vessels, as in fact it is beyond the forty-ninth parallel, Captain Prevost himself having gone through Virago passage in Her Britannic Majesty’s ship of that name long before the Boundary Commission was organized.[69]
There seems to exist a general misapprehension of the amount of trade carried on by the Hudson’s Bay Company’s or other British vessels on these waters. Prior to the treaty of 1846, Fort Vancouver, on the Columbia river, was the great depot for the receipt and distribution of goods for the northwest coast, as well as the interior, and the annual ship from London delivered its cargo there. All furs were likewise received and packed there for transportation. Fort Langley, on Fraser River, was the nearest post of any magnitude. Fort Nisqually, on Puget’s Sound, belonged to the Puget’s Sound Agricultural Company, and according to the testimony in the case of the Hudson’s Bay and Puget’s Sound Agricultural Companies’ Claims, the goods received there were purchased of and accounted for to the Hudson’s Bay Company. It never was a distributing post of the latter. * * * * *