About this project

Introduction

It is difficult to imagine a collection of documents more significant in the history of a Canadian province than the collection represented here. This digital archive contains transcriptions of virtually the complete correspondence between the British colonial authorities and the successive governors of the nascent Vancouver Island and British Columbia colonies, along with a great deal of associated writing, generated within the colonial office, and between public offices, which relates to the colonies. The entire history of Vancouver Island and B.C., from 1846 to 1871, is represented here, in the words of those most intimately concerned with the governance and development of the land, its resources, and its population. But these documents are not only historically important; they are also enthralling and absorbing. Here are adventures and exploration, financial windfalls and disasters, conflicts, smuggling, and even murder. Look into this collection for fifteen minutes, and you will surely find yourself drawn into the stories of the early settlers and the First Nations people of 19th-century B.C.
This collection is built on the solid foundations of a large-scale transcription project undertaken by Dr. James E. Hendrickson of the University of Victoria during the 1980s, which resulted in the publication of a 28-volume edition of the correspondence. You can read his original introduction to the print edition, and his acknowledgements, to get some idea of the scale and complexity of the transcription project. The print volumes were created from many thousands of files encoded in Waterloo Script, a text-encoding language processed using SCRIPT, a “document composition processor” developed at the University of Waterloo in the 1980s.
Waterloo Script is long obsolete, and the days of 28-volume print publications are likely coming to an end; but now we have a much more universal and flexible publishing platform, in the form of the World Wide Web. Our team at the University of Victoria Humanities Computing and Media Centre has converted those original files from Waterloo Script into TEI P5 XML, an XML standard developed and maintained by the Text Encoding Initiative, and we have built a Web application to make them readable and searchable.
All of the original documents have been converted to XML, and now reside in an eXist XML database. In honour of the 150th anniversary of the founding of British Columbia—a story which itself plays out in intriguing detail in these documents—we have worked hard to make the 1858 documents ready for the general reader, by adding and expanding footnotes and biographical sketches prepared by Dr. Hendrickson, along with many manuscript images. As a result, we can now provide access to the 1858 documents. However, all of the documents in the collection, including those from 1858, require detailed proofing. Please see our disclaimer page if you intend to make use of the data for serious research or legal purposes.
In the long term, we plan to check and proof the whole collection, then to expand and enhance it by adding more transcriptions (of attachments, enclosures etc.), and images of all of the original documents. See Development for more details of our progress.

Press coverage and awards

This is a list of some of the articles and other press coverage of our project:
The Colonial Despatches Team. About this project. The Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846-1871, Edition 2.0, ed. James Hendrickson and the Colonial Despatches project. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria. https://bcgenesis.uvic.ca/about.html.

Last modified: 2020-03-30 13:22:16 -0700 (Mon, 30 Mar 2020) (SVN revision: 4193)