Editorially speaking…
A century and a-half later, the 1875 sinking of the paddlewheel steamship Pacific by collision off Cape Flattery remains one of the greatest marine tragedies in B.C. and Washington state history. There were only two survivors of almost 300 on board.
The Pacific is remembered for another reason: the likelihood that she was carrying a fortune in Omineca gold in her safe and in the personal luggage of some of its San Francisco-bound passengers.
In November 2022, after six years of expensive effort, American treasure hunters claimed to have discovered wreckage 500 metres down on the ocean floor that they’re convinced is the Pacific. By U.S. law, descendants of those who are known to have been on board the ship can claim a share—less a recovery fee—of any recovered gold if they can make a case that their ancestor was, in fact, carrying gold in his or her possession when the Pacific sank.
These, obviously, are uncharted waters for the would-be salvors.
Last week, it was reported that a single claimant, a descendant of the Wells Fargo agent who went down with the ship, has come forward. The sticking point for his claim is whether a Wells Fargo agent would have been carrying gold of his own besides that of his employer aboard the Pacific.
Salvage work is expected to resume this summer. I’ll keep you posted.
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Another historical ship is in the news, this one with a decided twist.
The Flower Class corvette HMCS Alberni was only a year old when she was torpedoed and sunk by the German submarine U-480 in August 1944. 59 of her crew perished.—National Defence photo/Wikipedia
The non-profit HMCS Alberni Museum and Memorial originally opened in the Comox Centre Mall, Courtenay, in 2013. Its present location at Cliffe Avenue and 6th Street is contributing to the quandary it’s now facing.
The recent Supreme Court injunction that allows virtually unrestricted consumption of drugs has resulted in, for the museum, a loss of attendance because of the public’s reluctance to patronize a mall where addicts are openly consuming drugs and discarding their used paraphernalia in plain view.
As if our museums and historical sites don’t have enough to contend with.
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The City of Victoria has removed a historic plaque from Beacon Hill Park because of, so it seems but apparently isn’t, at least publicly, certain, an ambiguous comma.
The text reads: “When Victoria was settled in 1843, this area was a natural park. It was reserved in 1858 for a park by Sir James Douglas of the colony of Vancouver Island and given in trust to Victoria by the province of British Columbia, in 1882 it was so named from two beacons placed on the hill in 1846 to mark the position of Brotchie Ledge. Area in 154 acres.”
It’s the comma after British Columbia that’s suspect. According to Tom Epplett, president of the Friends of Beacon Hill Park Society, it creates some ambiguity and might be interpreted by some to mean the park was established before the trust was created in 1882.
He says that, “Depending upon how you read the comma, it slightly change[s] the context of the information.”
Surely, this is splitting hairs. What the plaque doesn’t say, even ambiguously, is anything about the park’s Indigenous history. Today’s Beacon Hill Park was an ancient burial site consisting of (so far as is recorded) 23 cairns or mounds composed of boulders, stones and dirt that varied in diameter from one to 10 metres and were up to two metres in height. But, over the years, most of the mounds were removed, only one intact cairn and the circular bases of others (which have been disturbed and shifted) remaining by the 1970s.
The City’s haste and secretiveness in removing the plaque raises my suspicions that it’s the plaque’s lack of reference to Beacon Hill Park’s Indigenous history that’s the motivator here. I guess we’ll see in due course.
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