Colonial Despatches

Una was a 135-tonne brigantine bought in London by the Hudson’s Bay Company in 1849, for £950, roughly $90,000 CAD in current money.1

In 1851, as recounted in this 1852 despatch, and another in 1853, Una traveled to Mitchell Inlet, Haida Gwaii where it discovered gold. On its return, it was wrecked during a storm in Neah Bay, near Cape Flattery. The Indigenous people in the area plundered the ship and then set fire to it. The US schooner Susan Sturges rescued Una’s crew as well as part of its cargo.

Staines recounts, with Gothic flourish, the sack of the Una, as part of a letter to his uncle, Boys.

• 1. Judith Hudson Beattie and Helen M. Buss, eds., Undelivered Letters to Hudson's Bay Company Men on the Northwest Coast of America, 1830-57 (Vancouver: University of British Columbia Press, 2003), 414.
• 2. Ibid.