Floating Households

The 1911 Census of Victoria Harbour
Reconstructing a Population Afloat

by Patrick A. Dunae

How the census was taken

Firth Census of Canada, 1911.
Instructions to Officers, Commissioners and Enumerators
Link to Digital copy

Before we can reconstruct Victoria’s population afloat, we must understand how the census was taken and how enumerators found their harbour households.

The logistics of enumeration

The Fifth Decennial Census of Canada was authorized by the Census and Statistics Act of 1905. The objective was to determine the population of Canada’s provinces and territories for purposes including parliamentary representation. In keeping with Canadian practice, the 1911 census was a de jure rather than a de facto census. That is, people were enumerated at their home or usual place of abode rather than simply where they happened to be found by an enumerator. The census reference date was Thursday, 1 June 1911. The decisive hour was midnight on the night of 31 May–1 June, and the population was to be recorded according to its de jure residence at that moment.

British Columbia was divided into census districts based on federal electoral divisions, and the City of Victoria was one of them. Victoria City, Census District 13, was in turn divided into twenty-five sub-districts. Two of these sub-districts, SD 19 and SD 22, were concerned with the population of vessels registered in the Port of Victoria.

Thomas Hick, a mining broker by profession, was appointed District Commissioner for Victoria City. He was responsible for overseeing an enumeration that was expected to be completed within six weeks. Robert H. Williams and Alfred Edward Hayward, bookkeepers by trade, were assigned to SD 19 and SD 22 respectively. On their internal documents, Williams referred to SD 19 as “Shipping,” while Hayward identified SD 22 as “Shipping List.”

The complete census consisted of thirteen schedules recording information about Canada’s population and vital statistics, real estate and infrastructure, agriculture, commerce, natural resources, and institutions. Only Schedule 1, Population by Name, Personal Description, Etc., has survived in manuscript form. The original paper copies of Schedule 1 were microfilmed in the mid-1950s and have subsequently been digitized by Library and Archives Canada.

Schedule 1 contained forty-one questions. The questions covered residence and personal description; citizenship, nationality, and religion; profession, occupation, trade, or means of living; wages and hours of labour; insurance; education and language; and infirmities. The schedules were printed on large pages, with space for fifty individual records on each page.

Unlike the practice followed in England and Wales, Canadian census-takers did not usually leave blank schedules with householders to be completed and collected later. Enumerators were expected to interview the people in every habitation within their jurisdiction and record their answers to the questions on Schedule 1. The questionnaire was organized around the concept of a household, with one person designated as its head and other members identified in relation to that person.

Before the census began, District Commissioner Hick provided his enumerators with detailed instructions on how to carry out their duties. The official manual, The Census of Canada 1911: Instructions to Officers, Commissioners and Enumerators, anticipated and clarified the questions contained in Schedule 1, including the definition of a census household.

The 1911 Manual defined a person's home as the “habitual place of abode”—where the person usually slept or dwelt, and where his or her "fixed home" was located. It defined a household as "a housekeeping community," whether or not its members were related, usually with one member occupying the position of head. The Manual gave examples of non-domestic census households, such as residential hotels, lodging houses, hospitals, military barracks, and mining camps.

Surprisingly, the 1911 census manual did not mention ships as a category of a non-domestic household. However, the official manual for the previous decennial census, entitled Fourth Census of Canada 1901, Instructions to Chief Officers, Commissioners and Enumerators, alluded to floating households. That census was carried out under the provisions of an earlier statute, the Census Act (RSC, 1886, c. 58), and the 1901 Instructions stated: “As defined in the Census Act, the term ‘house’ includes ships, vessels, dwellings or place of abode of any kind."

The silence of the 1911 census manual on waterborne craft is surprising since ships were counted as households in the 1901 census. Indeed, a sub-district in Victoria, styled D7 in official returns for 1901, included dozens of vessels based in Victoria harbour. An analysis of those vessels and Victoria’s population afloat in 1901 must await a separate study

The examples of households provided in the 1911 Manual reveal the terrestrial assumptions underlying the census. The “habitual place of abode” was normally a fixed home. But the census households encountered in Victoria Harbour were not fixed abodes. They were not a collection of houseboats permanently moored along the waterfront. Rather, floating households in Victoria Harbour were frequently or routinely under way. They were simultaneously workplaces and residences whose occupants could be moving through the harbour or beyond it at any given time.

They formed a community in motion.

This presented the enumerators with a distinctive logistical problem. How could a census based upon habitual residence be carried out among households whose homes could move?

A systematic method of enumeration

The official instructions provide one clue. The 1911 Manual prescribed a systematic method for moving through each census sub-district. Point 14 instructed enumerators to begin at a well-established starting point and proceed through their territory in regular order, entering every house or building before moving to the next. In cities and towns, the Manual envisaged an enumerator beginning at one corner of a city block and proceeding around and through it before moving to the next block.

For the floating population, that terrestrial model had to be adapted to the geography of the harbour.

Victoria harbour - detail of map of the City of Victoria, 1911.
Click on the image to enlarge the map.

The Schedule 1 records suggest that Williams and Hayward were methodical. The order in which vessels appear on their manuscript schedules corresponds to the order in which they were enumerated. The schedules therefore preserve not merely a list of floating households but evidence of the sequence in which the enumerators encountered them.

Williams's work in SD 19 followed a distinctive geographical pattern. He began with CPR passenger steamships berthed at the CPR terminal on Belleville Street at the south end of the harbour. He then proceeded north to the whaling steamers and sealing schooners moored near the Point Ellice Bridge in the Upper Harbour, then down to the Grand Trunk Pacific steamship terminal on Wharf Street on the southeast side of the Inner Harbour, before returning to CPR steamships and coastal freighters at the Belleville Street berths.

Hayward's sequence in SD 22 was different. He began with government vessels, tugs, and dredgers near the Outer Wharf at the entrance to the harbour. He then proceeded to coastal freighters at Laurel Point on the western side of the harbour before completing his circuit at the CPR freight shed on Belleville Street, where he enumerated coastal passenger steamers.

The sequences are systematic rather than random. They suggest that the enumerators adapted the census's prescribed method of proceeding regularly through their assigned territory to the physical geography of the harbour, moving from vessel to vessel. The sequence preserved in the manuscript schedules therefore provides a valuable record of how the census-takers moved through Victoria's inhabited waters.

The challenge of mobility

The surviving records do not tell us precisely how Williams and Hayward coordinated their visits with vessels whose movements were governed by sailing schedules, commercial requirements, seasonal activity, and the work of the harbour. Several features of the census operation, however, suggest the practical difficulties they faced.

The vessels were not all in Victoria harbour at the same time. The large CPR and GTP passenger steamships operated scheduled services and had to be enumerated while they were in port. The whaling steamers and sealing schooners, by contrast, were seasonally inactive and were concentrated in the Upper Harbour. Other vessels presented different challenges. Tugs and coastal freighters were working vessels whose movements could be less predictable.

It is possible that the District Commissioner coordinated the work of the two enumerators with the managers and agents of the major transportation companies, particularly where enumeration depended upon the arrival or departure of scheduled vessels. Similar arrangements may have been necessary with owners and operators of tugs, freighters, sealing schooners, and whaling vessels. The evidence currently available does not establish the precise nature of such arrangements, but the successful enumeration of the harbour's mobile population suggests that some means of locating vessels and obtaining access to their crews had to be found.

The time required to enumerate individual households was another consideration. Schedule 1, as mentioned, contained forty-one questions and the information sought was detailed. Respondents were asked not only about their age but their exact date of birth. Immigrants were asked when they had first come to Canada and, where applicable, when they had been naturalized. Wage-earners were asked about hours of labour, weeks of employment, and remuneration.

Enumeration of a large passenger steamer with more than ninety crew members would therefore have required considerably more time than enumeration of a small tug or freighter. The surviving records suggest that the enumerators had to accommodate these differences in the availability and mobility of their households. Some vessels, such as the cable ship Restorer, which was maintained on standby at the Outer Wharf, and the dredger Mudlark, appear to have offered relatively stable targets for enumeration. Working tugs and other vessels that operated without fixed schedules presented a different logistical problem.

Moving through a floating household

The census encounter also had a spatial dimension at the level of the individual vessel. The manuscript schedules suggest that enumeration commonly proceeded through the vessel according to its occupational hierarchy, which broadly corresponded to its physical organization. The captain, designated head of household, was normally followed by the officers and other deck personnel; the enumeration then extended to the engineering staff and firemen and finally to the galley and stewarding personnel.

Thus, the census-taker moved through several layers of the ship's social and physical organization—from the bridge and upper deck to the engine room and galley. The floating household was not simply a list of names. It was a structured working community, and the census schedule provides evidence of that structure.

Port of Registration question

The census records must also be understood as an administrative representation of Victoria’s maritime population. The vessels enumerated in SD 19 and SD 22 were not the only ships present in Victoria Harbour during the six-week enumeration period. Some vessels visiting the harbour may have been registered elsewhere and therefore may not have fallen within the jurisdiction of Victoria’s shipping enumeration, while Victoria-registered vessels could have been absent from the harbour.

Determining precisely how census officials identified the vessels to be enumerated is therefore an important question for understanding the scope and limitations of the surviving record. However, all of the vessels enumerated in SD 19 and SD22 were registered in the Port of Victoria. This fact has been verified by official records at the Maritime Museum of British Columbia.

Census-takers Williams and Hayward enumerated only vessels that were registered in the Port of Victoria. In so doing, they were mindful of the de jure principle of the census. According to the 1911 Manual, the “literal meaning of the term de jure is ‘by right of law,’ ‘rightfully,’ or ‘legally.’" Vessels that were rightfully and legally registered in the Port of Victoria fell within Victoria City Census District.

How did census takers identify which vessels to visit in the busy harbour? They may have received assistance from the local Department of Marine and Fisheries office, particularly Victoria Harbour’s Shipping Master. Reporting to the Harbour Master and Port Warden, the Shipping Master handled administrative matters, including crew lists. During the 1901 census, Victoria Harbour’s enumerator noted on Schedule 1 that the Shipping Master had supplied “particulars” for crew members aboard some local vessels. The same arrangement may have existed in 1911, when the Shipping Master could have provided Williams and Hayward with a list of vessels considered within Victoria City Census District’s jurisdiction. At the time, the position was held by Captain George Kirkendale, a former master with the Canadian Pacific Navigation Company.

Aggregate census records

Despite these logistical difficulties, Williams and Hayward completed their assignments. In SD 19, Williams enumerated 882 people aboard twenty-six vessels, recording their details on twenty pages of Schedule 1. In SD 22, Hayward enumerated three hundred people aboard thirty vessels. Together, the two enumerators recorded 1,182 people aboard fifty-six vessels, each vessel functioning as a census household.

The nominal data recorded by Williams and Hayward provide an extraordinary opportunity to reconstruct this maritime community: its people, occupations, households, vessels, and spatial relationships. The two enumerators could not have known that their manuscript schedules would eventually provide the means to recover a population that has largely disappeared from the historical record.

The 5th Decennial Census of Canada, with its precise reference point, offers a snapshot of Victoria harbour on 1 June 1911—a snapshot that provides the starting point for reconstructing Victoria's population afloat.

Table of contents

Researched and written by Patrick A. Dunae
August 2026