The harbor of Victoria is small, and has only sufficient depth to accommodate vessels drawing eighteen feet of water; but near at hand is a second harbor, known as Esquimalt, with sufficient depth for all practical purposes. If quiet is an element of charm, then Victoria is charming; but we must add that it is also rather sleepy and tame. It might be centuries old, everything moving, as it does, in grooves. Business people get to their offices at about ten o’clock in the morning, and leave them by three in the afternoon. There is no evidence here of the fever of living, no symptom of the go-ahead spirit which actuates their Yankee neighbors across the sound.
Esquimalt is situated but three or four miles from Victoria, and is the headquarters of the English Pacific squadron, where two or three British men-of-war are nearly always to be seen in the harbor, and where there is also a very capacious dry-dock and a naval arsenal. At the time of our visit a couple of swift little torpedo-boats were exercising about the harbor and the sound. The well-wooded shore is dressed in “Lincoln green,” far more tropical than boreal. The many pleasing residences are surrounded with pretty garden-plots, and flowers abound. We have rarely seen so handsome an array of cultivated roses as were found here. So equable is the climate that these flowers bloom all the year round. A macadamized road connects Esquimalt with Victoria, running between fragrant hedges, past charming cottages, and through delightful pine groves. We see here a flora of great variety and attractiveness, which could not exist in this latitude without an unusually high degree of temperature, accompanied with a great condensation of vapor and precipitation of rain. Victoria is admirably situated, with the sea on three sides and a background of high-rolling hills, and also enjoys an exceptionally good climate, almost entirely devoid of extremes.
The suburbs are thickly wooded, where palm-like fern-trees a dozen feet high, and in great abundance, recalled specimens of the same family, hardly more thrivingly developed, which the writer has seen in the islands of the South Pacific. The wild rose-bushes were overburdened with their wealth of fragrant bloom; we saw them in June, the favorite month of this queen of flowers. No wonder that Marchand, the old French voyager, when he found himself here on a soft June day, nearly a century ago, amid the annual carnival of flowers, compared these fields to the rose-colored and perfumed slopes of Bulgaria. If the reader should ever come to this charming spot in the far Northwest, it is the author’s hope that he may see it beneath just such mellow summer sunshine as glows about us while we record these pleasant impressions in the queen-month of roses. Glutinously rich vines of various-colored honeysuckles were draped about the porticoes of the dwellings, whence they hung with a self-conscious grace, as though they realized how much beauty they imparted to the surroundings. The drone of bees and swift-winged humming-birds were not wanting, and the air was laden with their delicious perfume. The wild syringas, which in a profusion of snow-white blossoms lined the shaded roads here and there, were as fragrant as orange-blossoms, which, indeed, they much resemble. The air was also heavy with a dull, sweet smell of mingled blossoms, among which was the tall, graceful spirea with its cream-colored flowers, so thickly set as to hide the leaves and branches. The maple leaves are twice the usual size, and fruit trees bend to the very ground with their wealth of pears, apples, and peaches. The alders, like the ferns, assume the size of trees, and cultivated flowers grow to astonishing proportions and beauty. The bark-shedding arbutus was noticeable for its peculiar habit, and its bare, salmon-colored trunk contrasting with its neighbors.
A portion of the site of Victoria is set aside as a reservation, and named Beacon Hill Park, containing choice trees and pleasant paths bordered with delicate shrubbery. But the whole place is park-like in its attractive picturesqueness. In the interior of the island there is said to be plenty of game, such as elk and red deer, foxes and beaver. These forests are dense and scarcely explored; sportsmen do not have to penetrate them far to find an abundance of game, so that in the open season venison is abundant and cheap in the town.
British Columbia, of which this city is the capital, embraces all that portion of North America lying north of the United States and west of the Rocky Mountains to the Alaska line. Its area is three hundred and forty thousand square miles, and it certainly possesses more intrinsic wealth than any other portion of the Dominion, except the eastern cities of Canada. It is but sparsely settled, and its natural resources are quite undeveloped.
The well-constructed roads in and about Victoria give it an advantage over most newly settled places, and the idea is worthy of all commendation. The seaward, or western shore of Vancouver, overlooking the North Pacific is very rocky, and is indented by frequent arms of the sea, like the fjords of Scandinavia, while the surface of the island is generally mountainous.
The Haidas and the Timplons are the two native tribes of Vancouver, who are represented to have once been very numerous, brave, and warlike. Some of their canoes were eighty feet long, and most substantially constructed, being capable of carrying seventy-five fighting men, with their bows, arrows, spears, and shields of thick walrus hide. These war-boats were made from the trunk of a single tree, shaped and hollowed in fine nautical lines, so as to make them swift and buoyant, as well as quite safe in these inland waters. In these frail craft the natives were perfectly at home, and excited the admiration of the early navigators by the skill they displayed in managing them, so that Admiral Lütke named them the “Cossacks of the Sea.”
But the Haidas, like the tribes of the Aleutian islands and the Alaska groups generally, have rapidly dwindled into insignificance—slowly fading away. People who subsist on fish and oil as staples can hardly be expected to evince much enterprise or industry. It cannot be denied, however, that as a race they appear much more intelligent and self-reliant than the aborigines of our Western States. Vincent Colyer, special Indian commissioner, says with regard to the natives of the southern part of Alaska and the Alexander Archipelago: “I do not hesitate to say that if three fourths of these Alaska Indians were landed in New York as coming from Europe, they would be selected as among the most intelligent of the many worthy emigrants who daily arrive at that port.”
When these islands were first discovered by the whites, the native tribes occupying them were almost constantly at war one with another. The different tribes even to-day show no sympathy for each other, nor will they admit that they are of the same origin. Each has some theory of its exclusiveness and independence, all of which is a puzzle to ethnologists.
There seems never to have been any union of interest entertained among them. Before and after the advent of the Russians tribal wars raged among them incessantly. Blood was the only recognized atonement for offenses, and must be washed out by blood; thus vengeance was kept alive, and civil war was endless. Bancroft in his “Native Races of the Pacific” tells us that the Aleuts are still fond of pantomimic performances; of representing in dances their myths and their legends; of acting out a chase, one assuming the part of hunter, another of a bird or beast trying to escape the snare, now succeeding, now failing, until finally a captive bird is transformed into an attractive woman, who falls exhausted into the hunter’s arms.