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SPANISH BANKS (PART 2)
Words and Music
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When George Vancouver crossed the bay
There met the Spaniards; Galiano & Valdes
Names that leap from my atlas pages
Were present on that day
In tandem up the coast they faired
Through Salish, the Nootka, Kwakwak'l & Haida Guaii
The ancient people watched them pass and they knew
Their world could never be the same
What if they had seen the years unfolding
Would they have believed a world so changed?
Could they have foreseen in all their wildest fantasies
This place that bears their names?
Oh, I walked the road to Spanish Banks
And where the cliffs rise over sandy shoals below
I wondered how it felt to be alive
Two hundred years ago
Imagine the impression their great winged ships must have made on the indigenous people whose villages for eons had lined these pristine waters. On Spanish navigator Jose Maria Narvaez's 1791 map of Burrard Inlet, he had marked three squares on the north side. Evidence suggests that these were villages, the earliest recorded human settlements in Vancouver.
Captain Vancouver went on to chart the coast of Alaska and then returned to England. With the charts made, the area was opened for inland exploration and settlement.
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