Mudge Island

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Mudge Island
Waters Strait of Georgia , (Pacific Ocean)
Archipelago Gulf Islands
Geographical location 49 ° 8 '0 "  N , 123 ° 47' 0"  W Coordinates: 49 ° 8 '0 "  N , 123 ° 47' 0"  W.
Mudge Island, British Columbia
Mudge Island
length 4 km
width 800 m
Residents 60 (2006)
Gulf Islands
Gulf Islands

Mudge Island is an island in the Canadian province of British Columbia . It belongs to the southern Gulf Islands in the Strait of Georgia and is located between Gabriola Island and Vancouver Island southeast of Nanaimo . It is about 800 m wide and 4 km long. Administratively, the island belongs to the Regional District of Nanaimo and there, together with Gabriola Island and De Courcy Island , to District B.

It is named after William Fitzwilliam Mudge, one of the officers of the HMS Plumper , who sailed the region under Captain George Henry Richards from 1858 to 1859 to survey them. The captain gave the islands new names without asking about the existing ones.

The island has 60 permanent residents, the number of which increases to around 100 to 150 in summer. Except for a private marina called Moonshine Cove , which allows visitors, there is no access, no bridge or ferry service. However, unlike the other, small islands of the De Courcy Islands, it has electricity, telephone and cable networks. There are no shops there.

history

Early history

Around 1840 , the ancestors of the Snunéymuxw lived in five villages on the eastern edge of Vancouver Island . In 1987 an investigation identified ten so-called shell middens , various cave burial sites and petroglyphs . At least seven other archaeological sites were found on Mudge Island. In the opposite Departure Bay, artifacts up to 2000 years old were unearthed in 1992. They are related to the Marpole culture . The remains of 86 individuals and 2,194 artifacts were found at the False Narrows Site in 1966–1967 . David Burley re-examined the finds in 1989 and was able to date the oldest to the 1st century BC. The finds show a high degree of cultural continuity, so they can be assigned to today's Snunéymuxw. In addition, they demonstrate a pronounced social differentiation. Since August 2007, 15 more graves have been discovered in Departure Bay.

European settlers and displacement of the Salish

Oral tradition shows that the relationship between the first settlers who appeared in the 1860s and the Snunéymuxw was very good. Some of the settlers married Salish women, the indigenous people traded fish for European fruits they had brought with them, such as apples. Methodist missionaries won the entire tribe, which is an exception in British Columbia, so that every Methodist Indian was considered a member of the Snunéymuxw. In 1876 the Indian Reserve Commissioner established two small reservations that were located on Gabriola. With that they lost the right to live on Mudge.

One of the first settlers was David Samuel Reece Roberts from England . Born in 1846, the man came to Canada in 1871 and lived on Mudge Island according to the 1881 census . He was living with a 28-year-old Salish woman named Mary at the time, but married 22-year-old Mary Isabella Martin, daughter of a Gabriola settler, in 1883. In 1884 the family received 160 acres of land on Mudge, likely the land that Roberts had occupied before 1881. It was between Dodd's Narrows and False Narrows. He planted Baldwin apples , a particularly large variety of apples, on mudge, as well as plums and cherries. Around 1892 there was even a ferry called Esperanza to Mudge, if only on Fridays. In 1893, Mary Isabella died during her fifth birth. Eight months later, Robert remarried, this time to 19-year-old Mary Silvie, daughter of Joseph Silvie from Reid Island . In 1901 the family still lived on the island, but in 1920 it is no longer recorded, David lived in Northfield near Nanaimo . Instead, two new families lived on the island, the Coxe and the Juriet.

literature

  • Loraine Littlefield: The Snunéymuxw village at False Narrows , SHALE 1, pp. 3-11, Gabriola Historical & Museum Society, November 2000

Web links

supporting documents

  1. ^ Andrew Scott: The Encyclopedia of Raincoast Place Names: A Complete Reference to Coastal British Columbia . Harbor Publishing, Madeira Park, BC 2009, ISBN 978-1-55017-484-7 , pp. 412 (English).
  2. ↑ David Samuel Reece Roberts & family of Mudge Island , The Gabriola Historical & Museum Society ( Memento of October 28, 2010 in the Internet Archive )
  3. ^ Journal of the Gabriola Historical & Museum Society