Sound Footings

It took a century and a half for British Columbians to recognize James Cook’s third voyage as an origin point for their province and nation. In 1924, the lieutenant-governor and other dignitaries journeyed to Friendly Cove (Yuquot) on Nootka Island, just off the west coast of Vancouver Island. They sang the first stanza of Rudyard Kipling’s “Recessional” and unveiled a memorial tablet, among the first in western Canada to be erected by Ottawa’s Historic Sites and Monuments Board. The cairn memorialized Cook’s discovery in 1778 of the harbour he named King George’s Sound, as well as the controversy of 1789–94, in which the Spanish arrested British traders before withdrawing their claims over the area. F. W. Howay, the judge and Historic Sites and Monuments Board member who pressed for the marker’s creation, knew that the British presence at Nootka Sound had been “spasmodic,” but he nonetheless felt that it had opened “paths which have led us to the proud position of...