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Portlock Point Light

by Captain Alec Provan and John MacFarlane 2016

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

Portlock Point Light (List of Lights 267 G5368) on the East side of Prevost Island, N. of Bright Islet, Cowichan Land District. It is a white tower.

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

Portlock Point was named for Captain Nathaniel Portlock RN. A Virginian who served in the Royal Navy he served with Captain James Cook RN on his third voyage in HMS Discovery. He led trading expeditions to the British Columbia coast in the King George. Later, in 1791, he served under Captain Bligh RN on the voyage to bring breadfruit to the West Indies.

References: http://apps.gov.bc.ca/pub/bcgnws/names/16163.html; 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:

MacFarlane, John M. and Captain Alec Provan (2016) Portlock Point Light. Nauticapedia.ca 2016. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Light_Portlock.php

Site News: March 24, 2025

ANOTHER MILESTONE REACHED

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 95,326 vessel histories (with 16,457 images and 14,217 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,600 entries (with 4,003 images).

My thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of the vessel histories in the vessel database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he continues to contribute to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

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

Thanks to John Spivey who is in his 4th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database, one-by-one.

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