Haddington Island
Map
This tiny island, just northeast of Port McNiell, was a quarry site from 1896 to 1966; some of its andesite, a fine-grained stone, can be found on Victoria's Empress Hotel, the original Vancouver courthouse (now the Vancouver Art Gallery), and British Columbia's Parliament Buildings.1
The Island, as well as a reef and nearby passage, is named after Thomas Hamilton, 9th Earl of Haddington (1780-1858).2 Curiously, an 1846 document makes reference to another Hamilton, Captain Baillie Hamilton Secretary of the Admiralty, after whom Commander Gordon names a coal-rich bay, about eight miles further down the coast from present-day Port McNiell, and the archaically named Ellenborough Peninsula.
  • 1. Andrew Scott, The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2009), 242.
  • 2. Ibid.
Mentions of this place in the documents