Colonial Despatches

Birch Bay is located just south of the Canada-US border in southeastern Strait of Georgia. To the west, across the Strait from the bay, sits the southern Gulf Islands. In 1792, Vancouver anchored in the bay, and was inspired to name it in reference to the abundant birch on the bay’s shores; the Spanish knew it as Ensenda de Garzon.1

According to George Davidson, a British painter on Vancouver’s expedition, one of the Indigenous names for the bay was, in Davidson’s anglicization, “Tsan-wuch”.2

• 1. Lynn Middleton, Placenames of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Victoria: Elldee Publishing Company, 1969), 23.
• 2. Ibid.