Generating some discussion about renaming British Columbia is an excellent idea. I happen to think that the name "British Columbia,"; which Queen Victoria chose a century-and-a-half ago, has served us well, all things considered, but agree that it now sounds 'veddy colonial' and old hat.

It's all very well for the provincial capital, Victoria, to have a newspaper quaintly called The Colonist, but let's remember that Vancouver, besides being the only Canadian city mentioned in James Joyce's still futuristic Finnegan's Wake, is also the westernmost metropolis in the Western Hemisphere, hence a pivotal point in the greater scheme of things.

With these thoughts in mind I do have a suggestion for a new name. We could do a lot worse than go back to the first recorded name possibly applied by a European to this territory (or, rather, its southwestern corner)-New Albion.

After spend some six weeks during the summer of 1579 careening his ship, the Golden Hinde (which had itself undergone a name-change upon entering the Pacific) preparatory to continuing on his epic voyage around the world, which, unlike his predecessor Magellan, he was able to complete in person, mastermariner Francis Drake bestowed the name New Albion on Pacific coastal territory.

Exactly where Drake applied the name remains open to dispute, but we know from the Diary of the Golden Hinde's chaplain, Francis Fletcher, that Drake chose the name New Albion for two reasons: "the one in respect of the white bancks and cliffs which lie towards the sea; the other, that it might haue some affinity even in name also with or owne country, which was sometimes so called.";

Drake's men nailed a brass plate onto a wooden post with an inscription mentioning New Albion incised thereon and a round hole with an English sixpence showing through from the other side, to which it was soldered. (Albion, the eponymous name of a giant in ancient British mythology, comes from the Latin albus, meaning white.)

Following two recent books-the second an augmentation of the first-by Sam Bawlf concerning Drake's "secret voyage,"; I am one of those who choose to believe that New Albion was, in all probability, hereabouts. The Drake-Hondius map of New Albion, in my opinion, matches Boundary Bay better than anywhere else along the Northwest Coast, and (to cite a less well-known piece of evidence that has recently come my way) since the palisaded fort "at the foot of a hill"; which Fletcher avers Drake and his men built upon their arrival would have to have been near freshwater, it was probably in the region of what is now Crescent Beach at the mouth of the Nicomeki River.

The exact site might have impinged on native fishing rights, and nearby hilly Ocean Park has a street named Old Indian Fort Road to commemorate the location of a palisaded Indian fort, in itself unusual, perhaps a structural descendant of Drake's fort, and leaving ruins known to have been there within living memory.

Albion eventually became a poetical name for England found in the works of (among others) Spenser, Shakespeare and William Blake. There is an ancillary Scottish legend about a giant named 'Albyn' which may go back to the Albanians, who seem to have shared with their Celtic counterparts a love of rugged mountains, kilts and bagpipes, if not of oatmeal. Myth tends to be timeless as well as inclusive, at least this one does, and in Blake's illuminated epic poem Jerusalem, Albion symbolized the fall and regeneration of mankind.

Of course my new name suggestion, if adopted, would entail other changes. BC BookWorld would have to become NA BookWorld. And ICBC would become ICNA-short for "I see New Albion,"; another way of saying, "I see the Promised Land.";

[Warren Stevenson wrote this commentary from White Rock in 2007 at the invitation of BC BookWorld publisher Alan Twigg.]

"Essay"