478 THE ADVOCATE
VOL. 78 PART 3 MAY 2020
ually shoaling water”. Esquimalt First Nation members had, for years, a village
near Ashe Head on the east side of the harbour. In 1790, the Spanish
naval officer Manuel Quimper was the first European to visit the harbour,
which he named Puerto de Cordova after the Mexican viceroy Antonio Villacis
y Cordova. James Douglas, then the Hudson Bay Co. chief factor, contemplated
the site in 1843 for a trading post but eventually established Fort
Victoria in what is now Victoria harbour. Douglas reserved the lands
around Esquimalt for HBC farms. Douglas spelled the name “Is-whoymalth”.
The Royal Navy became interested in the area from the 1840s
onward, when its vessels began to anchor in the harbour. Lt. Cdr. James
Wood, of HMS Pandora, surveyed the harbour in 1847, naming many of its
features after officers of HMS Fisgard, which occasionally visited the area.
Hospital buildings built on Duntze Head in 1855 were the beginning of the
naval dockyard. By the 1860s Esquimalt had replaced Valparaiso as the HQ
of the Royal Navy’s Pacific station. A drydock was completed in 1887. By
the 20th century Esquimalt had become the Royal Canadian Navy’s primary
West Coast base and training facility, a shipbuilding centre and a residential
suburb of Victoria.
Sagely observed the court in Winn & Lovett Grocery Co. et al. v. National
Labor Relations Board, 213 F.2d 785 (5th Cir. 1954): “True believers, as we are,
in the adversary process as the best method yet found for insuring the full
and satisfactory development of the facts underlying, and the law controlling,
a suit or controversy, we do not believe that every law suit should necessarily
be a Donny Brook fair and every lawyer a Don Quixote tilting at
windmills for the feel of the fighting.”
Thoughts du mois:
Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.
Isaac Asimov (1920–1992), Russian-born American
author and biochemist
On hearing ill rumour that Londoners may soon be urged into their
lodgings by Her Majesty’s men, I looked upon the street to see a gaggle
of striplings making fair merry, and no doubt spreading the plague
well about. Not a care had these rogues for the health of their elders!
Dr. Samuel Pepys (1633–1703), English Member of Parliament,
naval administrator and diarist