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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: November 2, 2024
The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,538 vessel histories (with 16,140 images and 13,887 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters). The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3989 images). Vessel records are currently being reviewed and updated with more than 35,000 processed so far this year.
Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he has contributed 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.
Also my special thanks to my volunteer content accuracy checker, John Spivey of Irvine CA USA, who continues (almost every day) to proof read thousands of Nauticapedia vessel histories and provided input to improve more than 14,000 entries. His attention to detail has been a huge unexpected bonus in improving and updating the vessel detail content.