The colonial despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846-1871
Disclaimer/warning
This site seeks to provide transcripts of the original incoming and outgoing correspondence
of the Colonial Office in London and the colonies of Vancouver Island and British
Columbia, along with related documents. The transcripts are based on editorial and
markup work by Dr. James E. Hendrickson, assisted by a large team of people, in the
1980s and 1990s. The transcripts were originally encoded in a now-obsolete script
and were algorithmically converted to XML code by Martin Holmes of the UVic HCMC.
Additional editing and markup has been done by Pat Szpak, Kim Shortreed, and Gord
Lyall, among many others.
Although the original transcription work was proofed against the microfilm copy—and
the British Columbia documents from 1858 against the originals in London—we cannot
(yet) claim that the text on the site is a completely accurate transcription from
the original handwritten texts, so readers may still wish to check the transcripts
against the digitized images of the original handwritten texts. Many of the original documents, particularly viewed
on microfilm, are difficult to read; they occasionally defeated the original transcribers,
and gave rise to some errors, and the subsequent processes of conversion and rendering
introduced more errors, some of which we may not have caught. If you intend to use
the content on this site for serious research purposes, please ensure that you check
the original microfilms to confirm the accuracy of the transcriptions. If you encounter
any errors, please report them to mholmes@uvic.ca.
All of the documents have now been edited at least once, and entities (people, vessels,
places, and organization) mentioned within them have been linked to additional information,
but many of the biographies and explanatory texts relating to these entities are not
yet complete. Similarly, not all documents have abstracts yet.