The Curious Passage of Richard Blanshard: First Governor of Vancouver Island

Review By Peter Cook

August 8, 2024

BC Studies no. 222 Summer 2024  | p. 162-164

With The Curious Passage of Richard Blanshard, Barry Gough delivers an engaging and largely sympathetic portrait of an oft-forgotten figure in the colonial history of British Columbia, one whose legacy, he argues, is deserving of greater recognition. The book is both a biography (although that word is never used) and a case study in British imperial governance. It builds on Gough’s long experience researching and writing about British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest in the nineteenth century – his Gunboat Frontier of 1984 is frequently cited, for example – while bringing several newly discovered primary sources to bear on its treatment of the topic.

The author’s task was not an easy one: for all that Blanshard was the well-educated scion of a wealthy London family – he attended both Oxford and Cambridge, in addition to studying law at Lincoln’s Inn – he left behind virtually no personal writings, due largely to various accidents of history (including a canoe upset while traversing the isthmus of Panama). Gough compensates for this lack by drawing on a wide range of primary sources from Blanshard’s contemporaries. The result is a narrative rich in detail and texture, despite the absence of sources that give direct insight into the governor’s private life. On this matter, Gough makes space for some carefully controlled speculation, marked by appropriately tentative language.

The book’s sixteen chapters are divided into three parts. The first establishes the geographic and historical context of Blanshard’s short tenure as governor of Vancouver Island, using his circumnavigation of the island in the HMS Driver in March 1850 to frame a vivid snapshot of the peoples and forces driving change in this region. Part II, of similar length, backtracks in time to flesh in detail of Blanshard’s background as a privileged child of the gentry, lawyer-businessman, and military adventurer in the Punjab, before relating the principal events of his eighteen-month term as the Queen’s representative at Fort Victoria. The third and shortest part reviews Blanshard’s post-gubernatorial existence, focusing on his 1857 testimony before the House of Commons select committee investigating the Hudson’s Bay Company (HBC).

In Gough’s telling, Blanshard was a progressive and eager servant of empire who, thanks to his father’s connections and following a brief stint as a volunteer in the Second Sikh War, garnered at age thirty-two a governorship in the new colony of Vancouver Island. He clearly hoped to make a name for himself, but once on the ground his promise quickly became undone. Repeatedly stymied and deceived by the domineering agents of the HBC (and in particular by his “nemesis” [263] James Douglas, who opposed Blanshard in matters both personal and political), afflicted by debilitating bouts of illness brought on by malaria contracted during his outbound voyage, and lacking support from a “helpless and unhelpful” (271) Colonial Office for whom his appointment was a minor matter of political expediency, the Londoner tendered his resignation a mere eight months after arrival. He steamed away a financial, physical, and emotional wreck, leaving behind a “land of sorrows” (221) that he later dismissed as “nothing more than a fur trading post” (243). There would be no more imperial service for Richard Blanshard. Gough concludes that he was “a victim of Douglas’s machinations” (184) and, more generally, a “casualty of empire” (249).

It is difficult to feel too sorry for Blanshard. Back in England, he recovered his health, married well, and inherited significant wealth from his father. He settled near Portsmouth, becoming a yachtsman, serving as a justice of the peace, and overseeing estates and investments that would be inherited by a nephew after his death at seventy-seven. Considering the origins of the family’s wealth (the plantations of the British Caribbean and the plundering of the Indian subcontinent by the East India Company), we might well conclude that empire did quite well by Richard Blanshard. More palpable casualties of empire would certainly include the Kwakwa̱ka̱ʼwakw killed or displaced by the punitive Royal Navy expeditions Blanshard sanctioned in the fall of 1850 and summer of 1851 because several were believed to have killed three British deserters and it was therefore necessary, in his view, to demonstrate to the First Nations that “a white man’s blood never dies” (175).

Although Gough does not engage explicitly with recent comparative literature on governance in the British empire, the rich primary source evidence cited here and the author’s careful explication of the conflicting agendas of the Colonial Office and the HBC will be of considerable value to scholars investigating how this outpost of empire differed from others or to what extent Blanshard’s passage there was uniquely “curious” in comparison to other colonial settings. For general readers, this book is a vivid portrait of a corner of the Salish Sea that was on the cusp of dramatic (and, for some, traumatic) change and of the man who, symbolically if not effectively, inaugurated British civic government in a place where virtually no one wanted it.