Colonial Despatches

According to this letter, from Staines to Boys on 6 July 1852, demaris_coveDemaris Cove was owned by Palmer & Balch, who operated a shipping company that ran between Puget Sound and San Francisco.

Staines notes that the ship sailed to Haida Gwaii in 1851 in search of gold; it did not stay long, as it was warned off by a letter that Captain Mitchell of the unaUna had left behind, presumably with a group of Haida people, who supposed it to be a letter of recommendation. Staines writes that the demaris_coveDemaris Cove returned to Olympia to bear news of the georgiannaGeorgianna's wreck on Haida Gwaii.

Staines mentions that once the ship returned to Puget Sound it was charted as a Revenue Vessel by the U.S. Collector of customs, Moses, to retrieve the georgiannaGeorgianna’s crew from the East side of [Queen] Charlotte's Island. According to Scott, Captain Balch, with the demaris_coveDemaris Cove, managed to safely ransom all the georgiannaGeorgianna’s crew.1

demaris_coveDemaris Cove was also involved in the rescue of passengers from the wreck of the Hudson’s Bay Company ship unaUna.

• 1. Andrew Scott, The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Placenames (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2009), 55.