A chronology of Coal Harbour and its environs: 1857–1920

(Timeline)

A chronology of Coal Harbour and its environs: 1921–1960

(Timeline)

Aerial view of Coal Harbour c. late 1940s/early 1950s

Courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives

Affordable Vancouver Homes 2007

(Bibliography)
Affordable Vancouver Homes, viewed 10 June 2007, http://www.affordablevancouverhomes.com/account/767599610d8c925c/CoalHarbourMap.jpg

Asia Pacific Business Institute 1987

(Bibliography)
Asia Pacific Business Institute, 'Vancouver as Corporate Headquarters Location for Asia Pacific Trade and Commerce: A Pre-Feasibility Study', Asia Pacific Business Institute, Vancouver, July 1987.

Asia Pacific Initiative Advisory Committee 1988

(Bibliography)
Asia Pacific Initiative Advisory Committee, Backgrounder, Asia Pacific Initiative Advisory Committee, Vancouver, 1988.

Ballantyne Pier, 1945, looking north

Aerial view of Ballantyne Pier looking north, 1945

Courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives

Ben's Tours 2008

(Bibliography)
Ben's Tours: Coal Harbour, Vancouver, BC, viewed 15 January 2008, http://uk.youtube.com/watch?v=j6y10D8gKqE&feature=related

Berelowitz 2005

(Bibliography)
Berelowitz, Lance, Dream City: Vancouver and the Global Imagination, Douglas and McIntyre, Vancouver, 2005.

British Columbia Film Commission 2009

(Bibliography)
British Columbia Film Commission, viewed 15 February 2009, http://www.bcfilmcommission.com/locations/metro_vancouver.htm

Canada Line 2009

(Bibliography)
Canada Line, viewed 15 January 2009, http://www.canadaline.ca/

City of Vancouver Archives 2008

(Bibliography)
City of Vancouver Archives, viewed 15 January 2008, http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/ctyclerk/archives/index.htm

City of Vancouver, Coal Harbour Official Development Plan 2007

(Bibliography)
City of Vancouver, Coal Harbour Official Development Plan, viewed 10 June 2007, http://www.city.vancouver.bc.ca/commsvcs/BYLAWS/odp/ch.pdf

City of Vancouver, Coal Harbour Policy Statement 2007

(Bibliography)
City of Vancouver, Coal Harbour Policy Statement, viewed 10 June 2007, http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/Guidelines/ch/index.htm

City of Vancouver, Coat of arms 2009

(Bibliography)
City of Vancouver, Coat of arms, viewed 15 February 2009, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Coat_of_arms_of_Vancouver

City of Vancouver, Community Services 2008

(Bibliography)
City of Vancouver, Community Services, Current Planning, viewed 15 January 2008, http://vancouver.ca/commsvcs/currentplanning/urbandesign/br2pdf/coalharbour.pdf

CNN 2005

(Bibliography)
CNN, 'Vancouver is "Best City to Live"', 5 October 2005; viewed 10 June 2007, http://www.cnn.com/2005/WORLD/europe/10/04/eui.survey/

Coal Harbour and the 'All-Red Route'

(MiniEssay)

When John Cabot sailed the ship Matthew through the North Atlantic fog to Newfoundland in 1497, it was not a new land he was seeking but trade with China, which Marco Polo had visited via ancient caravan routes a century earlier. During the next 350 years many ships and lives were lost in the fruitless drive to find a northwest passage through Arctic waters to Asia. By the seventeenth century it had become apparent that an Arctic route was virtually impossible. Not until the 1830s and England's invention of the steam railway did a new generation of adventurers grasp the possibilities of a North American 'land bridge' from the Atlantic to the Pacific to link up with ships bound for China and Japan. Rather than an Atlantic sea route, the North-West Passage would be an overland system of steel rails (MacKay 1986).

The quest for an 'All-Red Route', and the idea of spanning the North American continent with rail arose in the 1840s. At that time many anticipated the imperial advantage of what came to be called an 'All-Red Route' across British North America, red being the colour used by map-makers to designate the United Kingdom and its distant colonies such as Canada, Australia and New Zealand, as well as Singapore and Hong Kong.

Trade could be improved between Britain and Asia, and soldiers sped out to police it by a railway from Halifax on the Atlantic coast of Canada to a British port on the west coast from whence ships could sail on to the Far East. By this time, hopes of finding the long-sought north–west sea passage from the Pacific to the Atlantic via the Artic had virtually been abandoned after Sir John Franklin's expedition in two specially outfitted ships met with disaster in 1847.

What Franklin's party and others had failed to find—because the north–west passage to the Pacific Ocean did not exist here—was being artificially created instead in an age of iron, steel and steam. The railroad would, in conjunction with steamers on the Atlantic and the Pacific, provide an all-British route, not only to Asia and Australasia, but also as the final link for British steamships that circled the globe.

With the appearance of steamships, which increased carrying capacity and gave a dependency of movement unknown to sailing ships, Britain's position in the Far East was greatly strengthened.

The first British steamer arrived on the China coast in 1866. Within three years the opening of the Suez Canal cut more than 1800 kilometres (3000 miles) off the eastern route to Asia, and with the coaling stations and colonies flying the Union Jack from the mouth of the Mediterranean to China, the 'All-Red Route' took on new meaning.

By late 1880s the CPR was more or less complete, with tracks from Atlantic tidewater at Saint John, New Brunswick, to the Pacific, though not literally an 'all-red route' because its eastern leg from Quebec to New Brunswick lay through the state of Maine in the United States. But if associated with Pacific steamers, the CPR could obtain through-traffic from Asia to the east coast of North America. In conjunction with Atlantic steamers, it could provide an 'All-Red Route' linking Britain and its Asian and Australasian colonies.

In pursuit of this goal the company lost no time in convincing the British government that CPR vessels could carry mail and trans-ship Japanese tea to the eastern seaboard with more dispatch via Coal Harbour than was possible by way of Portland Oregon, with its problems of river navigation, or via San Francisco lying further to the south.

In 1885 the new president of CPR, George Stephen, approached British Prime Minister Gladstone in London for a subsidy for a line of fast trans-Pacific steamships operating to China and Japan, but at that time was turned down.

For his pledge to build a line of ships to be convertible for admiralty service in time of war, Stephen asked for a £1 million subsidy. The British postmaster-general went so far as to advertise for tenders for a Burrard Inlet to Hong Kong mail service, but the negotiations with the CPR fell through. This failure was blamed on the opposition of the powerful Peninsula and Oriental (P and O) shipping line.

Stephen, undeterred by his previous failure in England, pressed on with his trans-Pacific plans, chartering a number of sailing ships to make passages connecting with transcontinental trains later in the year.

The CPR then begun to solicit traffic from Japan and China, and the first East-Asian cargo to be carried by a CPR train across Canada from Burrard Inlet took place in the summer of 1886. It consisted of 17 000 half-chests of tea aboard the 800-ton W. B. Flint from Yokohama. Forty-nine days after it sailed from Yokohama the last of its cargo reached New York, a record that even the fastest ship could not beat around Cape Horn.

Six other vessels arrived that year (albeit landing at the railhead then located at Port Moody, rather than at Coal Harbour) with tea from Toronto, Montreal, Chicago and New York.

The success of these pioneer voyages led to a three-year contract between George B. Dodwell of Adamson Bell and Company, a British shipping and exporting firm, and the railway. Dodwell named the line the Canadian Pacific Steamship Company and secured three former Cunard vessels Abyssinia, Parthia and Batavia to operate between the Far East and Coal Harbour.

By the time the Abyssinia, the first of these liners, reached Canada, Vancouver had replaced Port Moody as the terminus, and it was from the CPR wharf in Coal Harbour that the railway carried the Abyssinia's merchandise cargo to North American markets back east (Morley 1969).

The importance of the new steamship technology for placing Coal Harbour on a trans-shipment node in a truly global trade corridor cannot be overestimated. The Abyssinia arrived three weeks after the first train had rolled into town in 1887. On 14 June, just thirteen days, fourteen hours out of Yokohama, Abyssinia docked at Coal Harbour with 102 passengers (80 of them Chinese), tea, general merchandise, 'curios' and the Inlet's first load of raw silk.

Hastily unloaded and sent on its way, the steamers' cargo was trans-shipped back east, with a 'small trial parcel' that was rushed to New York, loaded on a steamer and sent to London, arriving twenty-nine days after it left Yokohama.

Part of its cargo was to be of prime importance to the CPR for the next half century. A special train stood on the dock to take sixty-five bales of raw silk, consigned to Montreal, New York and London. With some tea added to its load, and all other traffic yielding way, the train reached New York on 21 June.

The London consignment was transferred to a fast passenger ship and arrived there on 29 June. This meant that precious and perishable silk could reach London from Japan in just twenty-nine days and in just twenty-one days to New York.

Here was the birth of a new era, and the last nail was driven into the coffin of the old clipper ships. A steamship could reach Japan and the China coast in far less time than the 120 days taken by the clipper ships, brought east and west closer together. 'The P and O tycoons, so long lords of the South Seas, and so determined to impede the CPR and its grandiose schemes, "shook in their boots"' (Morley 1969: 98).

Abyssinia, Parthia and Batavia thereafter made regular voyages to and from Vancouver and the Far East, usually fully loaded with tea, rice, silk and other merchandise and contingents of just over 100 passengers. They initially carried little back to Asia when leaving Vancouver. The lumber trade, still active, was carried to markets in sailing ships, which even in the triumphant age of the steamships, carried bulk cargoes cheaply and competitively.

Trans-Pacific commerce jumped into full flow after the arrival of the Abyssinia in 1887. Nine trips were made during the balance of the year, with the steamships Port Augusta and Port Victoria also chartered for the run. Apart from carrying goods, a trans-Pacific passenger service proved popular. on her second arrival, the Parthia brought Sir Francis Plunkett, British minister to Japan, and Lady Plunkett, and on her return voyage, carried west the brother of the King of Siam, and his four sons. So great was the crush on the dock that the CPR excluded the public from the sailing, a custom still in force when ocean liners arrive or depart in Vancouver (Nicol 1978).

In 1888 the CPR added four more chartered ships for a total of nineteen sailings across the Pacific to Vancouver, which began to take trade away from trans-Pacific crossings to San Francisco. A US Congressional inquiry into the plight of US railroads, hard hit by the new CPR line, showed that in the first seventeen months of Vancouver's life as an ocean port, 1 351 382 pounds of silk, 3 677 713 pounds of rice and 23 288 127 pounds of tea destined for US markets were landed at Coal Harbour and hauled east by the CPR.

Most of the export traffic in those days was Canadian flour and English cottons. Both the US imports and the British exports were also Vancouver's gain from the Suez Canal trade, and in the eighteen months ending at the close of 1889, Vancouver was handling 27 per cent of all East Asian traffic for the west coast of the American hemisphere (Morley 1969: 108).

Following these successes, the CPR made further efforts to link its base in Vancouver into the trade routes of the Far East and beyond. Within two years of Coal Harbour being the terminus of the CPR, a score of ships were bringing goods to Canada every year.

Following the CPR's shift from the wooden to the three veteran iron-hulled steamers it chartered from the Cunard Line, the company re-negotiated with the British government for a contract to carry the mail, and a resultant subsidy for constructing steamers on its own.

In July 1889, Stephen reached his long-sought goal; the British government granted the CPR a 45 000 pound subsidy and the Canadian government a 15 000 pound subsidy for a fast trans-Pacific steamship service consisting of monthly voyages to Hong Kong, Yokohama and Shanghai by vessels of a minimum average speed of 16 knots.

By October, the company had contracted with the Naval Construction and Armament Co of Barrow for three such vessels. In order to satisfy the growth in higher-class passengers, the CPR ordered three new steamships destined to become famous as a part of the Vancouver scene: the 'Empress ships'—Empress of India, Empress of China, and Empress of Japan.

These entered service in 1891, creating the key link in the new fast route from Britain to the Far East. As a result, on 28 April 1891, SS Empress of India arrived at Coal Harbour wharf after a record-breaking voyage from England via the Far East. The sleek liners, which embodied the grace of a schooner with the speed and efficiency of steam, for a time, outpaced anything on the Atlantic. The all-white ships brought dependability as well as acceleration to scheduled sailings between Vancouver and Hong Kong, Yokohama and Shanghai.

Suddenly on that day in 1887 the globe had shrunk to half its size and the CPR made good a boast in trains and ships maintained for another 50 years—the CPR 'Spans the World'.

For these 50 years the great Empresses would plough the North Pacific, glide up beside the docks at Coal Harbour and tumble their costly cargo into waiting silk trains that rocked across the continent, outpacing the finest passenger trains by one and two hours in a division (Morley 1969: 98).

For many years the 'All-Red' Canadian Pacific route across the Canada and then to Europe with Canadian Pacific ships was one of the preferred routes to the Far East, competing with the steamer route through the Suez Canal. The London to Yokohama route via Vancouver was two weeks quicker than via Suez (Hull et al 1974).

Incidentally, history is repeating itself here with the boom of BC maritime trade as a result of the current China and Asia booms, and the northern route across the Pacific and connecting rail to the United States is a modern variant of the old 'All-Red Route.'

In 1891 Van Horne's second-in-command and fellow-American, Thomas Shaugnessy, spent four months in the Far East establishing the foothold that was to serve the CPR well during the Depression of the 1890s when it might have foundered, like 156 railways in the United States. The CPR had the silk, tea and spices of the 'Orient' trade to see it through these lean years, as well as the support of a doting Conservative government in Ottawa.

During the 1860s a trans-continental railway was deemed necessary to bind together the new federation of British Colonies and keep the West out of the hands of the Americans. Later, in the 1880s and beyond, the prime minister of the day, Wilfred Laurier (1896–1911), deemed that expansion of trade across the Pacific would lessen dependence upon the United States.

The CPR expanded its regional transportation network in the early 1890s when ships were put on the BC lakes—400 kilometres to the east—in order to stretch the company's reach for traffic into inland BC. In 1901 the company moved into the BC coastal trade with the purchase of a fleet of fourteen vessels. The final move was the development of its own Atlantic fleet so that it offered an unbroken service from the shores of Europe to Yokohama and Hong Kong (McDougall 1968).

For all these efforts of the CPR it is significant that when Japan established its first official presence in Canada in 1889 it chose to set up its consular office in Vancouver. The Japanese had been showing interest in Canadian wheat and flour since it was introduced at the Yokohama fair in 1886 by Shinkichi Tamura, a Japanese who had settled in Vancouver. Bread had been known in Japan for generations, having been introduced there by the Portuguese (Mackay 1986: 112).

Coal Harbour and the Brickmakers' Claim

(MiniEssay)

One lump of the coal was destined to play a further part in Vancouver's history. This morsel, displayed in a New Westminster shop window, caught the eye of a young prospector named John Morton, younger son of a noted family of Yorkshire potters, 'bound for the gold fields' (Morley 1969: 21). He travelled with his cousin, Samuel Brighouse, and together with a shipboard acquaintance, William Hailstone, arrived in Victoria during 1862 travelling to the Cariboo gold fields further north.

The block of Burrard Inlet coal he saw in the shop window has been put there by a native Indian. Morton's potter's mind ran from coal to clay, clay to bricks and bricks to money, as building materials in the colony were at a premium. He hired an Indian guide and set out for Burrard Inlet. There Morton found the coal embedded in gravel and sandstone rather than clay. However, having viewed the coal seam Morton approved of the general area and conveyed his enthusiasm for Coal Harbour to the others (Nicol 1978: 17). The party then returned home to New Westminster and set off for the Cariboo goldfields in the interior of BC. But due to 'inclement weather' and the fact that 'all the good claims were taken up' they were back at the coal seam later in the year and found good clay on the bank above. Morton filed in the names of all three on what later became District Lot 185—all of present-day Vancouver's West End, from today's Burrard Street west to Stanley Park, and from the Burrard Inlet south to English Bay (Morley 1969: 21)

Morton convinced Brighouse and Hailstone that apart from brick-making they should also try farming at Coal Harbour. Farms supplying the New Westminster settlement had been established further south along the shores of the Fraser River.

It was hoped that working the land would be more profitable than washing river silt and searching for gold. The three partners thus bought 550 acres of lot 185, and subject to some misgivings of their own, cleared a patch of their land to become the first settlers in what was later to become Vancouver—a distinction whose significance escaped them at the time. They also built a brickyard and put in a vegetable plot.

The three were hard at work clearing a cabin site on 'the bluff' above the waterfront between today's Thurlow and Burrard streets. They built a cabin, known as 'Morton's shack,' a small barn, and cut a trail which joined up to False Creek.

Their pre-emption consisted of land bought 'four shillings, two pence an acre', a total of $555.75 for land worth billions of dollars today (Morley 1969). On the north of their property was the Burrard Inlet; on the south, English Bay. In short, they pre-empted the entire area of today's West End of Vancouver, acre for acre probably the most valuable piece of real estate west of Toronto's Golden Mile (its CBD). The land cost them about $1.01 an acre (Nicol 1978: 19).

Nevertheless, the general feeling at the time among their acquaintances was that the Englishmen had squandered their grubstake. Indeed, when they took hold of the land it had no trail to other settlements in the area and so it had a tenuous line of communications with both the local region and the outside world. There was very little other settlement here for quite some time, other than some Kanakas (workers brought from the Pacific Islands) employed at Hastings Mill and a fishing float in the harbour processing herring. To be sure, the very lack of connection of Coal Harbour with other places degraded the importance of the Brickmakers' Claim.

The West End in the 1860s was forested land, heavily timbered and swampy up to the time that the Canadian Pacific Railway arrived. And for pre-empting this apparently useless land (with no access to New Westminster except for a single trail through the forest), they were dubbed the 'Three Greenhorn Englishmen'.

Morton and his compatriots took turns living in a cabin on the pre-emption, having somehow persuaded government officials this could satisfy the residency conditions normally required for each of them. Thus, the 'Three Greenhorns' (as folk in New Westminster called them) and the 'Brickmakers' Claim' (as the community in adjoining Granville called it) came to be, respectively, the first settlers and the first settlement along Coal Harbour and in downtown Vancouver. In reality, however, they played little part in the early development of either the city or its waterfront. It was left to others to bring Coal Harbour into being and to develop this land (Nicol 1978: 20).

Map of Vancouver city and Coal Harbour

(ImageMap)

City map courtes Google Map; inset map of Coal Harbour courtesy of mycoalharbour.com