TIDINGS FROM PORT AUGUSTA

How two ships reshaped the Land of Plenty

In 1862, the paddle steamer Brother Jonathan drifted into Victoria’s harbour, trailed months later by the Tynemouth, a bride ship out of England. The Tynemouth carried the promise of life. The other, a merchant ship from San Francisco, would deliver death.

Isabella Robb, the watchful eye and matron in charge of the bride ship’s 62 marriageable women, did not linger. Her duties complete, she boarded another ship and headed up island with her children and husband, James Robb. As they sailed past Goose Spit, the family first laid eyes on the protected bay known as Port Augusta.

Settlement and strategic land choices

James Douglas, the governor of the colony of Vancouver Island, had opened the Comox District up for settlement the same year. The Robb family and a handful of bachelors took the government’s offer to pre-empt land at $1 an acre. [Beginning in 1859, individuals and companies could apply to purchase provincial Crown land cheaply to build on, as long as they cleared and cultivated it. This process was called pre-emption. – Ed.] Before this, only one European man lived here. Isabella Robb became the first female settler to step ashore.

Giant Douglas fir and cedar grew down to the shoreline everywhere except for the estuary. Most of the new arrivals pre-empted land along this flat delta at the mouth of the Courtenay River, not far from the K’ómoks village. With no trees, this land required less clearing to grow food. But the Robbs had another idea.

A vision for the future

They had learned two interesting facts about Port Augusta: the area directly west of Goose Spit offered protection from the predominantly southeasterly storms, and large ships could not land anywhere along the tide-affected shore. The best location to build a wharf—and the shortest distance from beach to deep water—lay east of the K’ómoks village site. Here the Robbs pre-empted 280 acres. When a wharf eventually got built, a community would spring up around it. Then the Robbs would sell off part of their land as city lots.

Through a series of events, the merchant ship from San Francisco, Brother Jonathan, had forever changed life at the village. In early 1862, tribes from the entire Northwest Coast had been gathered at Victoria. Then, in March of that year, a man infected with smallpox stepped off the ship to visit the burgeoning city. When illness broke out, some tribes received vaccinations, but most of the sick, including some K’ómoks and Pentlatch peoples, were forced to return home.

The K’ómoks and Pentlatch groups

Long before the arrival of settlers to the Comox District, the K’ómoks and Pentlatch groups were made up of numerous subtribes. Previously, these two groups had lived apart, but by the summer of 1862, the smallpox brought back from Victoria had greatly reduced their numbers. The two tribes merged into one at the mouth of the Courtenay River.

Intertribal warfare and earlier epidemics had left the area, known to the local First Nations as the Land of Plenty, relatively empty for Europeans to settle. That said, the area has always been occupied—and was never ceded—by the ancestors of the modern K’ómoks First Nation.

The Robbs’ dream realized

Over a decade would pass before the Robbs’ dream of a wharf came to pass. In 1874, the province of British Columbia took a portion of the Robb property to build a roadway and awarded a contract to Joe McPhee and John Wilson to build a long wharf that connected the road to deep water. The area became known as The Landing, and large ships could now more easily export the area’s agricultural goods.

Over the next decades, the settler community continued to grow. Common complaints included the abundance of wolves, cougars, and pigs that roamed free. One early settler noted that the droves of pink Yorkshires could protect themselves against predators and were found “rooting up the roadsides, eating salmon along the rivers, and camping in the woods under the trees, where they carried heaps of fern in their mouths to make their beds.”

Port Augusta, Comox Valley

PHOTO COURTESY OF COMOX MUSEUM (a-1998.001.102)

Settler life and local Indigenous history

With a careful eye out for wildlife, settler children spent their time combing middens and grave sites for artifacts from thousands of years of Indigenous occupation.

The Hudson Bay Company had been trading on the coast for decades. Traders received items like salmon and elk hides. In exchange, Indigenous peoples favoured items useful for fishing, hunting, clothing, and adornment: axes, chisels, combs, mirrors, and blue beads. Settler children in Port Augusta also cherished these large, bright-blue, many-sided beads and would string them into necklaces.

The name change and modern legacy

As more settlers arrived, the name of the wharf shifted from The Landing to Comox. The name for the bay, Port Augusta, fell out of use. Settlers preferred a name with connection to the area’s original inhabitants. Thus, in 1902 the bay officially became Comox Harbour.

In 1914 workers punched the E&N Railway through the old-growth forests between Parksville and Courtenay. The wharf at Comox, previously the only connection to the greater world, became obsolete. The park, pier, and slips we see today are a result of dredging the muddy bottom in the 1970s.

The K’ómoks people and their history have always been complex. Today, they continue to assert their rights and title to the whole of their territory, a small part of which comprises a place once known to outsiders as Port Augusta.

FEATURED PHOTO COURTESY OF COMOX MUSEUM (a-98.1.524)