Morpheus Island
| Morpheus Island | ||
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| Waters | Clayoquot Sound | |
| Geographical location | 49 ° 9 '25 " N , 125 ° 52' 47" W | |
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| length | 740 m | |
| width | 420 m | |
| surface | 25 ha | |
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Morpheus Island is a 25 hectare island off the west coast of Vancouver Island on the Canadian Pacific coast. It is located immediately west of Meares Island in Clayoquot Sound , from which it is separated by Lemmens Inlet (also called Disppointment Inlet). At its northern end one arrives at the spacious sound. Nelson Island is west of Morpheus. From around 1900, the island was used as a cemetery by the residents of Tofino and Stubbs Island , before that by the surrounding First Nations .
history
The island was used as a burial place by the surrounding Nuu-chah-nulth groups for several centuries . On some beaches there are mussels (clams), probably these were also collected early. From 1900 to 1950 it was the cemetery of Tofino, where numerous Japanese fishermen lived until the Second World War , some of whom were buried on the island. At least 44 of the tombstones can still be seen today. The Clayoquot Cemetery Co. , founded in 1912, took over management of the island
The choice of the island as a cemetery is due to the fact that Tofino's first residents did not settle on the mainland, where the place is today, but on Stubbs Island (locally called Clayoquot Island ). Since the region could only be reached by boat and there were no roads on the mainland of the large Vancouver Island, they preferred the island location. Stubbs and even more so Tofino are again close to Morpheus and at the same time not too close. From 1912 the residents moved to what is now Tofino, but this process, hardly accelerated by the road construction, lasted until the 1950s. Then Stubbs was sold and the island is now the Clayoquot Island Preserve , founded by an American philanthropist .
The Morpheus Island Remediation & Interpretation Project , founded in 2008 and supported by the Tonquin Foundation and funded by Environment and Climate Change Canada and the Clayoquot Biosphere Trust , is helping to preserve the island as a historic monument . The Tonquin Foundation, in turn, works closely with the Underwater Archaeological Society of British Columbia .
Until 1966 it was assumed that Fort Defiance might have been on the island , but traces of it were discovered elsewhere, namely on Meares, on the other side of the inlet. Robert Gray , the first American to circumnavigate the world, had come into conflict with Chief Wickaninnish of the Tla-o-qui-aht and had wintered in Clayoquot Sound, in what he called Adventure Cove. In fact, the bay was found about 5 km further north on Lemmens Inlet, but the site, the Lemmens Inlet site , is on Meares.
literature
- Arnoud Stryd, Morley Eldridge: CMT Archeology in British Columbia: The Meares Island Studies , in: BC Studies 99 (Fall 1993) 184-234.
Web links
- Morpheus Island . In: BC Geographical Names (English)
- Photos of tombstones on Morpheus
Remarks
- ^ Andrew Scott: The Encyclopedia Of Raincoast Places Names: A Complete Reference to Coastal British Columbia . Habour Publishing, Madeira Park (BC) 2009, ISBN 978-1-55017-484-7 , pp. 402 (English).
- ↑ Donald H. Mitchell: The Investigation of Fort Defiance. Verifications of the Site , in: BC Studies 4 (1970) 3-20.