Royal Navy Mapmakers Left Their Mark

The recent passing of HRH Queen Elizabeth II and numerous comments made online and in letters to the editor about the British influence on our history, coming at a time of truth and reconciliation, set me to thinking.

There are 350,000 place names on Canadian maps, 50,000 of them in British Columbia. Of the 1000s that identify our Pacific Coastline, most—indeed, almost all—were coined by officers of the Royal Navy.

It was a daunting task even for the vaunted “iron men in wooden ships”.

The B.C. coast, as the crow flies, is approximately 954 km (593 miles). But when you allow for its indentations and over 40,000 islands, it’s over 25,725 km or 15,985 miles—a tenth of all of Canada’s coastlines.

Charting and naming these 10s of 1000s of features—bays, inlets, islands, rivers, reefs and on and on—took decades of dedicated, often dangerous, work and is, in fact, an ongoing task. But it was the officers and crews of the Royal Navy’s handful of survey ships that did the heavy lifting at incredible personal expense.

The result of their work still stands.

Most of their pioneering navigational charts continue in use today; work that’s vital to the safe navigation of some of the most treacherous waters to be found anywhere. Thanks in great part to their efforts, coasts that were notorious for shipwreck are no longer threats to life and limb when navigated with due diligence.

All thanks to these British tars who, for the most part, are unnamed and unsung. I’ll tell you about some of them and the stories behind some of their more interesting christenings next week in the Chronicles. 

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PHOTO: The modest Sir George Henry Richards, KCB, FRS, who surveyed and named 1000s of features of the British Columbia coastline, never named a single geographical feature after himself. —Wikipedia