Saved by the Crown

Trading Fate: How a Little-Known Company Stopped British Columbia from Becoming an American State
by Graeme Menzies  

Victoria: Heritage House, 2025
$29.95 / 9781772035483

Reviewed by Ron Verzuh

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Canadians rightly balked at American President Donald Trump’s suggestion that Canada become the 51^st state. Fortunately, Victoria historian Graeme Menzies has sidelined that suggestion with his latest history of Captains James Cook, George Vancouver, and others who sailed to our shores in the late 18^th century. Thanks to them, he explains, we remain thoroughly Canadian.

In his subtitle, Menzies also credits a “little-known company” with saving BC from American annexation. But which little company? Was it British, Russian, Spanish, Portuguese, or American? All of them were greedily trying to secure the region for Crown or government. And what is the story behind it saving our province from the fate of becoming a state?

Menzies keeps us waiting for an answer until the last few pages and I won’t spoil the suspense. He provides hints throughout this short history of BC’s rugged beginnings as he covers the full range of European explorers, fur traders, and “unlicensed get-rich-quick traders” that followed.

The first part of the book recaps Cook’s three world voyages of discovery. He’s a figure that merits the space considering that whole books have covered his world-changing adventures. Those who want more about him need only read Hampton Sides’s The Wide Wide Sea (Doubleday, 2024). It’s subtitled “Imperial Ambition, First Contact and the Fateful Final Voyage of Captain James Cook.” If you live somewhere on the vast Pacific coast, chances are he christened your town.

But this is only partially Cook’s story. It is more often about John Etches, “the rascal John Meares,” and other fortune seekers. These two British businessmen established the King George’s Sound Company under the British flag and set out to pursue trade with Mowachaht Chief Maquinna and other First Nations leaders while based at Friendly Cove in Nootka Sound on western Vancouver Island.

The book’s second and third parts describe trader first contact, commerce, and conflict with the region’s indigenous people. In 1789-90, the conflict flared into a potential war between Spain and Britain. “The Spanish believed in possession by declaration;” explains Menzies, “the British believed in possession by occupation.”

The dispute was eventually resolved when Vancouver, “the diplomat,” negotiated the Nootka Agreement with Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, the gentleman commander of the Spanish fleet. But for a brief period, Europe sat on the brink of war. Menzies fills in the various imperial conflicts surrounding the Nootka standoff, not the least of which was the American War of Independence. 

Vancouver, Quadra, and James Douglas — Vancouver Island’s second governor and BC’s first — are among the good guys in this report of how Britain held on to BC despite Spanish resistance and US efforts to achieve annexation. Menzies provides details on these attempts and offers an analysis of the geopolitics that were in play.

He also condemns the subsequent displacement of indigenous people. As he explains, “the earliest days of connection were not without conflict, and sometimes deadly violence,” adding that “as the number of predatory traders increased in the years following the Nootka Crisis and Vancouver’s mission, the frustrations of the local people increased.” Numerous and lengthy quotations from the journals and correspondence of explorers politicians and observers add to the book’s documentary quality. 

In a final part, Menzies imagines what might have happened if the Nootka Agreement had never been signed. Here we are offered a “counterfactual” view of Canada wherein he enlightens readers about his subtitle’s claim. “The Stars and Stripes would be proudly flying over British Columbia today,” he concludes, had it not been for that agreement.

Despite its relative shortness, Trading Fate, with its plentiful supply of historic maps and illustrations, slides easily from regional history into a national one with connecting references to the War of 1812, the US Civil War, and the American doctrine of Manifest Destiny to name only a few events that shaped Canada’s future.

For readers looking for a short foray into our country’s past, you need look no further than this well-written factual account of the key historical points that made us the sovereign nation we are today.

[Editor’s Note: Menzies previously explored this territory in a book on Dr. Archibald Menzies (no relation), the physician on board when Cook sailed to Vancouver Island in search of the long-sought northwest trading passage to Asia. See Ron Verzuh’s review here.]

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Ron Verzuh is a writer and historian. [Editor’s note: Ron recently wrote about Tom McGauley and has reviewed books by Angie Ellis, Mark Waddell, R. Bruce Macdonald, George M. Abbott, Barry Potyondi, and Brandon Marriott for The British Columbia Review.]

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The British Columbia Review

Interim Editors, 2023-26: Trevor Marc Hughes (non-fiction), Brett Josef Grubisic (fiction)
Publisher: Richard Mackie

Formerly The Ormsby Review, The British Columbia Review is an on-line book review and journal service for BC writers and readers. The Advisory Board now consists of Jean Barman, Wade Davis, Robin Fisher, Barry Gough, Hugh Johnston, Kathy Mezei, Patricia Roy, and Graeme Wynn. Provincial Government Patron (since September 2018): Creative BC. Honorary Patron: Yosef Wosk. Scholarly Patron: SFU Graduate Liberal Studies. The British Columbia Review was founded in 2016 by Richard Mackie and Alan Twigg.

“Only connect.” – E.M. Forster