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The Monument to the Royal Roads
by Christopher James Cole and John MacFarlane 2017
The Monument to the Royal Roads (Photo from the Christopher James Cole collection. )
Royal Roads is located off of Esquimalt Harbour west of Victoria. A ‘road’ or ‘roadstead’ is a secure anchorage location and was popular with sailing vessels. The name is now also associated with the University and Hatley Park the form Dunsmuir home.
Close-up of the Text (Photo from the Christopher James Cole collection. )
According to Captain Walbran (in British Columbia Coast Names) Royal Roads was originally called Royal Bay by Captain Kellett RN sailing in HM Survey Vessel Herald in 1846. Long before that, Sub–Lieutenant Manuel Quimper of the Royal Spanish Navy, while in command of the Princess Royal in 1790 named the locale as Rada de Valdes y Bazan (after the Spanish Minister of Marine. In the late 1880s and 1890s the area was used by arriving ships to rendezvous with customers seeking freighters – or while awaiting sailing orders.
Plaque Text (Photo from the Christopher James Cole collection. )
In 1972, during one of a chain of Centennial celebrations hosted by the Province of British Columbia this monument sign was erected by the Thermopylae Club of Victoria.
The sale of the wreck of the Tiger. (Article from the Daily Colonist 26 April 1883. )
To quote from this article please cite:
Cole, Christopher James and John MacFarlane (2017) The Monument to the Royal Roads. Nauticapedia.ca 2017. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Monument_Royal_Roads.php
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.
Also my special thanks to my volunteer content accuracy checker, John Spivey of Irvine CA USA, who has proofread thousands of Nauticapedia vessel histories and provided input to improve more than 11,000 entries. His attention to detail has been a huge unexpected bonus in improving and updating the vessel detail content.