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)
Famous quotes containing the word history:
“For a transitory enchanted moment man must have held his breath in the presence of this continent, compelled into an aesthetic contemplation he neither understood nor desired, face to face for the last time in history with something commensurate to his capacity for wonder.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“If you look at history you’ll find that no state has been so plagued by its rulers as when power has fallen into the hands of some dabbler in philosophy or literary addict.”
—Desiderius Erasmus (c. 1466–1536)
“The history of any nation follows an undulatory course. In the trough of the wave we find more or less complete anarchy; but the crest is not more or less complete Utopia, but only, at best, a tolerably humane, partially free and fairly just society that invariably carries within itself the seeds of its own decadence.”
—Aldous Huxley (1894–1963)