Colonial Despatches

William Head is a headland on the southern end of Vancouver Island, just to the southeast of the Sooke Basin, on the north side of Pedder Bay.

In 1846, Captain Kellett, of the HMS Herald, named William Head in honour of accomplished Arctic explorer William Parry.1 However, the area is perhaps best known as a former quarantine station for passengers and crew who arrived, largely from Asia, to Vancouver Island between 1894 and 1958; a year after the station closed it became a minimum-security prison, which it remains to this day.2

• 1. Andrew Scott, The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Placenames (Madeira Park, BC: Harbour Publishing, 2009), 645.
• 2. Ibid.