Stanley Park almost missed 125th birthday

VANCOUVER–On Sept. 27, 1888, Stanley Park was opened as Vancouver’s first official green space. This month the city is marking the 400-hectare park’s125th birthday with a weekend of special events –The Canadian Press.

None of this would be possible had Capt. Edward Stamp had his way. A quarter century before this Burrard Inlet rain forest was declared parkland, he wanted to clear-cut it. He would have, too, but for an unforeseen obstacle.

So, who was Capt. Edward Stamp?

Historians hold conflicting opinions of this pioneer businessman. The late Victoria historian James K. Nesbitt termed him, “British Columbia’s first No. 1 industrialist.” Vancouver writers Alan Morley and Eric Nicol didn’t take as kindly to the former mariner’s early day efforts to develop what’s now the metropolis of Vancouver.

Few can deny, however, that Stamp made a considerable contribution to the birth of Canada’s third largest metropolis. In fact, residents and visitors owe him for Stanley Park’s very existence, even if not intentionally.

Even though he wanted to log Brockton Point

Indeed, he wanted to log all of the first-growth forest surrounding Brockton Point in the 1860s and was only deterred by the tricky currents which occur here. It was the threat to his bundling of logs into rafts for towing to the sawmill that prompted him to look elsewhere.

Stanley Park

Back in the ‘50s, Mr. Nesbitt wrote this of Stamp: “He had an unshakeable faith in the future of this new land. There were those who scoffed at him because he invested heavily in the future; he was told he was throwing his money away. He was laughed at each new venture he went into.

“He built sawmills in outrageous places, many of his fellow citizens said–in out-of-the-way places that would never, never possibly amount to anything–faraway, isolated places like Alberni and a wilderness arm of the sea called Burrard’s Inlet… He built empires, small compared to those of today, but empires nevertheless, and to his initiative and vision must go in some measure much of the credit for the British Columbia we know today.”

Stamp was a walking contradiction

He could be charming and ruthless. He made fortunes for himself and his investors overnight and lost them as quickly. He gained wide respect for his daring in business but alienated many of those with whom he dealt. He was irascible and vindictive. His photo shows a mutton-chopped scowl which can only be taken as indicative of the real nature lurking within.

A British mariner and hero of the Crimean War, he landed on the West Coast in 1856 when commissioned by the British government to purchase ships’ spars in Puget Sound. When, two years later, the discovery of gold on a Fraser River sandbar sparked a stampede to the unknown interior of New Caledonia, Stamp abandoned his maritime career, not to prospect for gold but to develop the new colony’s seemingly limitless natural resources.

First, however, he attempted, unsuccessfully, to form a company to pipe water to Victorians then being served by tank-wagons at 25 cents a gallon, delivered to the door. With Victoria as his headquarters, he then became manager of the Puget Sound Mill Co. of Port Gamble, Wash. Territory to “furnish spars for the English markets”. Among the company’s shipments during this period were the masts and spars for Brunel’s behemoth, the S.S. Great Eastern.

By the following year he was building a sawmill on Alberni Canal. But it didn’t hold his interest for long, either; within three years he sold his shares in Messrs. Stamp & Co. That time, at least, he hadn’t offended anyone, his employees presenting him with a gold watch and chain “as a token of their respect and esteem”. The watch cost $250. Multiply that by at least 20 to put it in today’s values and that’s some ‘token’ of regard, indeed.

That’s when Stamp turned his attention to Burrard’s Inlet

There, on the North Shore, Sewell (Sue) Prescott Moody had transformed the foundering J.G. Smith sawmill into a thriving operation and town in the rain forest. Stamp held the same hopes for the inlet’s southern shore and, after discounting Brockton Point, his first choice, he obtained from Colonial Gov. Frederick Seymour a lease for 30,000 acres. Good for 21 years, it cost his British Columbia and Vancouver Island Spar, Lumber & Sawmill Co. all of a cent an acre. Which it could easily afford, Stamp having just returned from England with 100,000 pounds capital.

Seymour had even waived duty on any equipment the company imported by granting the mill status as a port of free entry. As noted, Stamp could be a charmer when it suited him.

Stamp’s Mill, soon renamed Hastings Mill, originally consisted of the sawmill, a store and four acres of slash, shacks and saloons. Business was good enough to warrant his ordering construction of a $50,000 tugboat, the 143-foot-long S.S. Isabel which would go on to have an illustrious career. She was built of the “finest timber ever put into a vessel on this coast,” after all. In fact, she was initially thought to be “almost too good to be engaged as a tug” and Stamp had her outfitted for 30 passengers and 50 tons of freight for the Victoria-New Westminster route.

Turning to real estate, he built “a fine block of stores” in downtown Victoria on spec, so convinced was he that, contrary to the popular belief of the day, he’d easily rent them. And he did, even before completion.

Casting his eye upon the political scene, he was elected in Esquimalt to the Legislative Assembly. With the union of Vancouver Island and British Columbia, he changed his mind and address to Lillooet where, by acclamation (“the other candidates, finding they had not the ghost of a chance, resigned rather than continue the contest”), he was returned to the legislature. A Victoria journalist congratulated Lytton on its fortune in having “secured a gentleman of wealth, respectability, talent and, above all, unflinching loyalty… We compliment the electors of Lillooet for their display of good sense in selecting so fine a representative.”

He seemed to have the Midas touch

For a time, anyway. But not everything he touched turned to gold. Hastings Mill, for example, folded despite a production of 40 million feet of lumber and 100,000 hand-cut shingles in a single year, with sales as far distant as China and Hawaii. Conversely, across the inlet, Moody had topped these figures and prospered.

Bloodied but unbowed, Stamp turned to canning salmon, then a novel venture. After 14 months’ securing more funding in England, he returned, contracts in hand and eager to begin exporting barreled and tinned salmon to Europe. Leasing the former Royal Engineers’ barracks in New Westminster, he set to work with his usual enthusiasm and soon had the plant in operation, a gourmet praising his piscatorial product as being tastier than any other preserved fish.

He recommended that the salmon be eaten cold “or, as some prefer it, warmed up in the tin previous to being served… It constitutes a most convenient article of food for the bachelor who does his own housework, as all trouble in preparation is avoided.”

It was another first for Capt. Edward Stamp–TV dinners!

Resolving to personally promote the first shipment of salmon to the Old Country, he sailed for England in November 1871. It was his last venture. Two months later, word of his sudden death in London reached Victoria. Mourned the Colonist: “Capt. Stamp was a most enterprising and energetic citizen and will be greatly missed here, where he had a host of friends. He leaves a wife, two sons and a daughter in England, and two sons in this province.”

Within six months his son Edward, who’d inherited charge of the salmon cannery, died at 35. About the same time, half a world away, Mrs. Stamp succumbed at age 60. Less than a month before Stamp’s own passing, his brother had died.

None can deny Stamp’s faith in B.C.’s potential. Where others had feared to tread, he’d rushed in to build sawmills, steamboats and buildings and he’d gambled on a new process for canning salmon. But not all remember him kindly. In his book Milltown to Metropolis, Alan Morley referred to him as “the bumbling, fuming Capt. Stamp. Well-connected, hand-in-glove with the Victoria political clique, captain probably by courtesy (since he once bought a ship he was afraid to sail in) he had unfortunate intervals as a merchant in Victoria and a mill-owner on Alberni Canal…”

Morley’s dead wrong about Stamp being afraid of the sea. He’d earned distinction for saving his command, the troopship Emma, from destruction in a savage gale during the Crimean campaign. That said, while personally commanding the tug Isabel, he did run out of fuel and get lost in the Gulf Islands.

Mr. Morley appears to have based his judgement on Stamp’s having filed the “inlet’s first civil lawsuit” over shipment of a piece of sawmill equipment and for contesting a mining claim on land to which he held only the timber rights. When he objected to the granting of a timber lease near Brockton Point, even the generous Gov. Seymour had had enough, complaining, “Capt. Stamp has given us a great deal of trouble.”

Eric Nichols, in his history of Vancouver, considered Stamp to have been, well, difficult. Both he and Morley, however, acknowledge his role as one of Vancouver’s founding fathers.

Let’s leave the last word to the Colonist.

It wrote at the time of his building the three-storey office block in Victoria: “When so many here systematically decry the country and endeavour to shake the faith of capitalists in its future, it is gratifying to see men of colonial experience like Capt. Stamp thus silencing the voice of the country’s calumniators.”

Let’s just be grateful for those tidal rips off Brockton Point. Otherwise Capt. Stamp would have laid it to waste and we wouldn’t now be celebrating Stanley Park’s 125th.

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