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.