Britannia’s Navy on the West Coast of North America, 1812–1914 by Barry Gough (review)

Britannia’s Navy on the West Coast of North America, 1812–1914 is an expanded revisit to the subject of Barry Gough’s 1971 The Royal Navy and the Northwest Coast of North America, 1810–1914. No British battle fleet ever visited the northeast Pacific, but its power in Atlantic waters, demonstrated in 1790 following the Nootka Sound incident, ensured that those sloops, frigates, and, ultimately, ships of the line that did, by their attention to constabulary duties, could establish the practical reality of Britain’s claim. Gough’s thesis is that “the influence of the Royal Navy in the history of British Columbia was . . . decisive”–and cost the settlers nothing (310). Following the American declaration of war in 1812, a Royal Navy squadron was dispatched to escort a North West Company ship to the Columbia River. An overland expedition was also dispatched, and, in November, HMS Racoon ran the dangerous Columbia River bar. The end of the war left an Anglo-American condominium in the Oregon, and a succession of Royal Navy sloops continued intermittently to run the Columbia bar to provide practical support for Fort Vancouver at the head of navigation. Eventually, however, it had to be accepted that the dangers of navigating the river were such that the pressure of American migration into the Oregon could not be halted.

Navigation north of the Olympic peninsula and into the Strait of Georgia, on the other hand, was practical for ocean-going ships. There, British sea power could exert its influence and brought an amicable agreement in the Oregon Treaty of 1846 extending the American border west along the 49th parallel into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and then south of Vancouver Island, which was established as a British colony. For the next half century, the Royal Navy used Esquimalt Harbour near the capital at Victoria; coal mines were developed at Nanaimo, which ensured an ample source of the bunker increasingly needed as the navy developed steam propulsion; and, during the Crimean War, Esquimalt provided essential support for the naval squadron that attempted, inexpertly, to deal with the Russian establishment and ships at Petropavlovsk. This fiasco has recently been described in more detail by Andrew C. Rath, The Crimean War in Imperial Context, 1854–1856 (Palgrave Macmillan, 2015), published while Gough’s book was already at press.

The period of the American Civil War was one of particular tension, during which the British squadron was under orders to observe a strict neutrality. When the United States purchased the Russian claim to Alaska in 1867, concern for British interests again surfaced, and, once again, the Royal Navy provided through its constabulary activity demonstration of the reality of Britain’s claim. But when an American general landed soldiers on the disputed San Juan island, and navy ships that had been summoned to provide the colony with support during the Fraser River gold rush were available to support the British claim, the navy resisted Governor James Douglas’s appeal for decisive action. With the completion of the transcontinental railway in 1885, an “all Red” British route was established joining the empire and improving the capacity of the Royal Navy to provide security for trade.

During all this period, the only guns fired in anger were when the navy was enforcing its police role with respect to Indigenous peoples, a subject Gough treats with evident discomfort. His earlier cross-cultural study of colonial relations with Aboriginal peoples includes a 1984 book Gunboat Frontier, British Maritime Authority and Northwest Coast Indians, 1846–1890 (ubc Press, 1984) and a 1998 article in the Journal of Canadian Studies (33, no. 2 (1988): 177–85) recounting his role in providing historical evidence to support the Aboriginal right to Meares Island on the west coast of Vancouver Island.

Gough’s forty-six pages of notes and eighteen pages of bibliography tell a tale of hard work, but there...