Richard Blanshard

Richard Blanshard

Richard Blanshard (born October 19, 1817 in London , † June 5, 1894 ibid) was a British lawyer . From 1849 to 1851 he was the first governor of the Vancouver Island colony .

biography

The son of a wealthy London businessman studied law at the University of Cambridge and was admitted to the bar in 1844. He served in the army in British India and was involved in the Second Sikh War in 1848/49 . On his return to London, he secured himself in July 1849 through personal connections the appointment as first governor of the newly founded colony Vancouver Island in the west of British North America . In March 1850 he arrived in Victoria .

Blanshard was unable to set any accents during his brief tenure. The reason for this was the great influence of James Douglas , the autocratic acting head of the local branch of the Hudson's Bay Company (HBC). There was no civil administration, no police, no militia and almost every British colonist on Vancouver Island was an employee of the HBC. Blanshard found that the company controlled all areas of life and that Douglas had practically all power. He had to forego the convening of a legislative assembly, as hardly anyone met the necessary conditions (such as land ownership) to be eligible.

There was inevitably a dispute over competence between Blanshard and Douglas. Only in the legal system did the governor have a relatively free hand. In June 1850, he gave John Sebastian Helmcken the job of keeping the workers of a coal mine near Fort Rupert quiet who would break their contract and move to California to look for gold. They also felt threatened by the local Kwakiutl . Helmcken was unable to come to an agreement and when Blanshard wanted to see that things were going well himself, he found the settlement abandoned. Some workers had been killed by the Kwakiutl so he ordered one of their villages to be burned down. His superiors reprimanded Blanshard's actions.

The lack of any influence, lack of cooperation on the part of those responsible for the HBC and health problems induced Blanshard to give up his post as governor in September 1851. James Douglas succeeded him. On his return to Great Britain, Blanshard was shipwrecked on the Chagres River while crossing the Isthmus of Panama and lost almost all of his luggage. He did not seek further offices and some years later inherited from his father country estates in the counties of Hampshire and Essex .

Web links

• Richard Blanshard . In: Dictionary of Canadian Biography . 24 volumes, 1966–2018. University of Toronto Press, Toronto ( English , French ).