The Things One Learns While Killing Time

[mbarrick]

I have another photography gig tonight and was just killing time having dinner and a Guinness at the pub. I grabbed an old copy of the "British Columbia Historical News" from work to read over dinner and learned some very interesting things:

Turns out the James Douglas (the first governor of British Columbia and Vancouver Island, for which the main street in Victoria is named) was not born in Scotland as I was taught in school. Turns out that while his father was Scottish, James Douglas was born in the Caribbean and his mother was a Jamaican mulatto. And while it is common knowledge that the British put an emphasis on colonising Vancouver Island in the early 1860's to provide a bulwark against American "Manifest Destiny" expansionism, what is not common knowledge is the first 100 colonists brought by Douglas where blacks from California that wanted to leave the U.S. and become British citizens for fear of California joining the Confederate states (most of those colonists ended up bailing on Victoria and going back to the U.S. after the south lost the war, BTW). Interesting stuff.