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Dryad Point Light

by Captain Alec Provan and John MacFarlane 2016

Dryad Point Light (Photo from the Captain Alec Provan collection. )

The Dryad Point Lighthouse is frequently seen and photographed from passing cruise ships. It is a square–tapered, reinforced concrete tower 7.3 metres (24 feet) in height.

The Holland America Line Ship Westerdam Passes in Close Proximity to Dryad Point Light (Photo from the Captain Alec Provan collection. )

The name Dryad Point was adopted in the 3rd Report of the Geographic Board of Canada, 30 June 1901; not Turn Point as labelled on British Admiralty Chart 2449, 1872. Renamed after the Hudson’s Bay Company brig Dryad, which in company with the brig Lama, brought material and stores from Fort Vancouver for founding Fort McLoughlin in 1833.

Dryad Point is located at the NE corner of Campbell Island at the junction of Seaforth Channel and Lama Passage, just NW of Bella Bella and Waglisla. Originally named Turn Point by Admiralty surveyors and changed to Dryad Point when the lighthouse was built here in 1901, to avoid confusion with the United States lighthouse situated at Turn Point on Stuart Island, Haro Strait.

References: BC place name cards, or correspondence to/from BC's Chief Geographer or BC Geographical Names Office; Walbran, John T; British Columbia Coast Names, 1592-1906: their origin and history; Ottawa, 1909 (republished for the Vancouver Public Library by J.J. Douglas Ltd, Vancouver, 1971);

To quote from this article please cite:

Provan, Captain Alec and John MacFarlane (2016) Dryad Point Light. Nauticapedia.ca 2016. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Light_Dryad_Pt.php; http://www.lighthousefriends.com/light.asp?ID=1429;

Site News: April 17, 2024

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 92,205 vessel histories (with 15,628 images and 13,173 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters). The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,616 entries (with 4,013 images).

In 2023 the Nauticapedia celebrated the 50th Anniversary of it’s original inception in 1973 (initially it was on 3" x 5" file cards). It has developed, expanded, digitized and enlarged in those ensuing years to what it is now online. If it was printed out it would fill more than 300,000 pages!

My special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into a semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.

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