History
Before European development the Coast Salish Songhees people lived in settlements to the east of the harbour and the Esquimalt people lived to the west of it. They cultivated camas root and other crops in meadows lined with cultivated Garry Oak trees along the harbour. Shell middens along the Gorge Waterway are evidence of human habitation dating back 4000 years.
In the summer of 1790 Manuel Quimper, Gonzalo López de Haro, and Juan Carrasco aboard the Princesa Real explored the Juan de Fuca Strait where they claimed Esquimalt Harbour for Spain, naming it Puerto de Córdova.
Read more about this topic: Victoria Harbour (British Columbia)
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“In nature, all is useful, all is beautiful. It is therefore beautiful, because it is alive, moving, reproductive; it is therefore useful, because it is symmetrical and fair. Beauty will not come at the call of a legislature, nor will it repeat in England or America its history in Greece. It will come, as always, unannounced, and spring up between the feet of brave and earnest men.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)
“The history of men’s opposition to women’s emancipation is more interesting perhaps than the story of that emancipation itself.”
—Virginia Woolf (1882–1941)
“The history of his present majesty, is a history of unremitting injuries and usurpations ... all of which have in direct object the establishment of an absolute tyranny over these states. To prove this, let facts be submitted to a candid world, for the truth of which we pledge a faith yet unsullied by falsehood.”
—Thomas Jefferson (1743–1826)