Stephen Hume
Sun
If, as poet Gary Geddes argued on The Vancouver Sun’s oped page, history is the deep mirror in which we discover who we are, British Columbians gained another opportunity for reflection this week.
A website that makes accessible to everyone a searchable database of letters from the first governors of what would become B.C. to the colonial authorities in London was launched this week at Government House in Victoria by Lieutenant-Governor Steven Point.
Developed from a more ambitious project that puts online all the colonial dispatches between Fort Victoria and London during the critical years of early political development between 1846 and 1857, The Governor’s Letters project also provides tools for teachers that amplify the B.C. schools history curriculum from Grades 5 to 10. Four curriculum “challenges” for students, complete with lesson plans and support material for teachers in both French and English, use the principle that everyone loves to solve a puzzle. By solving the puzzles, students develop critical thinking skills in analyzing and interpreting history using real events and real resources that were previously the preserve only of academics and professional historians.
Using the governors’ actual letters, students are encouraged to study the evidence and try to figure out: 1. What were the reasons for creating the colony of B.C.? 2. Were the treaties Douglas signed with aboriginal people — and later treaties — fairly negotiated? 3. Did the gold rush of 1858 radically change daily life in Victoria? 4. Did Governor James Douglas deserve to be knighted?
The Governor’s Letters project is part of a bigger University of Victoria scheme. It began more than 20 years ago when history professor James Hendrickson set out to transcribe into digital form the mass of handwritten letters, notes, internal memoranda, marginalia and various reports that were exchanged between local government and Britain’s Colonial Office. From an age before the typewriter, telegraph or telephone, this correspondence represents the lifeblood of an empire during a tumultuous period for the west coast of North America.
Expanding American interests coinciding with a gold rush in California had carved Oregon and Washington out of British territory. The British and Americans came close to war over where the boundary should pass through the Gulf Islands. Britain warred with Russia, which controlled Alaska. And a new gold rush into British territory was imminent.
Written by hand in the ornate copperplate of the Victorian era, some of it with quill pens, the dispatches posed special problems for Hendrickson, who was himself working in an age before the personal computer, fast digital scanners and the new computer languages that make possible the rich experience of today’s World Wide Web pages.
Using punch cards and archaic software, Hendrickson, his wife Sonya and a team of students spent thousands of hours decoding the difficult handwriting and cryptic marginal notes in hopes of eventually publishing them. But when they wound up with 28 coil-bound volumes of text, it was too large for any conventional publisher. Hendrickson retired before the text could be annotated. The data languished on an old IBM mainframe computer until, just as it, too, was about to be retired, some of Hendrickson’s colleagues remembered his project.
The colonial dispatches transcripts were recovered, translated into modern computer languages and a new UVic team was assembled to create an annotated digital edition that would be easy to read but would link to scanned images of the original documents.
Archival material was made available from collections held by the National Archives in Britain, the National Library and Archives of Canada and the B.C. Archives. Now, at the click of a key, the entire collection of colonial correspondence surrounding the creation of B.C. can be searched by key words, names or locations. Place names have active links to modern maps. The original maps that accompanied the texts — more than 200 of them in the British National Archives — are all connected by hyper-link. This means researchers can see the evolution of geographic as well as political developments. So far, the project has created a searchable database of documents relating to the 1858 gold rush and the creation of the colony of B.C. and, in Phase 2 launched this week, correspondence from 1846 to 1857. A third phase, completing the correspondence up to B.C.’s entry into Confederation in 1871, now seeks funding and resources. Frankly, this is the exciting future of historical research and we should have more projects like this.
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