Cruising north in June of ’42, Douglas notices two magnificent bays north of 49°, on the south end of Vancouver Island opposite what is now British Columbia. The easterly bay named by the Indians, Camosun, meaning rush of waters, offers splendid sea space combined with a shore of plains interspread with good building timber. Also, there are fresh-water streams. The other bay, three miles west, called Esquimalt--the place of gathering of roots--is a better, more land-locked harbor but more difficult of anchorage for small boats. Simpson and McLoughlin decide to build a new fort at Camosun--the modern Victoria. Those, who know the region, need no description of its beauty. To those who do not, descriptions can convey but a faint picture. Islands ever green, in a climate ever mild, dot the far-rolling blue of a summer sea; and where the clouds skirt the water’s horizon, there breaks through mid-heaven, aërial and unreal, the fiery and opal dome of Mt. Baker, or the rifted shimmering, ragged peaks of the Olympic Range in Washington. So far are the mountains, so soft the air, that not a shadow, not a line, of the middle heights appear, only the snowy peaks, dazzling and opalescent, with the primrose tinge of the sheet lightning at play like the color waves of Northern Lights. Westward is the sea; eastward, the rolling hills, the forested islands, unexpected vistas of sea among the forests, of precipices rising sheer as wall from the water. Hither comes Douglas to lay the foundations of a new empire.