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 Placenames (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2009), 242.
  • 2. Ibid.
Mentions of this place in the documents
The Colonial Despatches Team. Haddington Island. The Colonial Despatches of Vancouver Island and British Columbia 1846-1871, Edition 2.0, ed. The Colonial Despatches Team. Victoria, B.C.: University of Victoria. https://bcgenesis.uvic.ca/haddington_island.html.

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