Floating Households

Tugs

As contemporaries often observed, Victoria’s harbour during the Edwardian period was a hive of activity. Tugboats were the worker bees within that hive. Some of these vessels were built locally at shipyards such as William Turpel & Sons at Point Hope, underscoring the city’s role not only as a port of operations but also as a centre of shipbuilding.

Tug Spray approaching Victoria harbour, c. 1908
Image courtesy of BC Archives, E-00651

Tugs moved the raw materials of the regional economy. Vessels such as Spray towed log rafts from logging operations on southern Vancouver Island to mills in the Upper Harbour, while Owen and Sadie hauled coal barges from Ladysmith to fuel Victoria’s industries and households. Others carried out less celebrated work. Several tugs owned by Capt. William E. Gardner were contracted by the City of Victoria to tow garbage scows into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, where the city’s refuse was dumped at sea.

The census records reveal that tug crews were small and tightly organized, typically consisting of a master, an engineer, and a handful of deckhands. Compared to the large passenger steamers and even the coastal freighters, these vessels operated with minimal personnel, reflecting their specialized, task-oriented roles within the harbour.

Tugboat masters often came from established maritime regions such as Nova Scotia, but the census also reveals the presence of more local figures. Capt. Robert Reginald McMicking, master of the Petrel, was born in Victoria. His father, a notable pioneer, created the city’s telephone system. At the time of the 1911 census, Capt. McMicking was preparing to lay communication cables between Victoria and the Gulf Islands—an indication of the varied technical roles performed by tug operators.

Previously, McMicking was commander of the tug Lorne. That vessel was the queen of Victoria's tugboat fleet. Built in Victoria in 1889 for the Dunsmuir coal company, the Lorne was a legend on the Gulf of Georgia and Puget Sound. She was designed to carry large quantities of coal from the Wellington mines near Nanaimo to markets in the Pacific Northwest and to escort ocean-going transport ships out to sea.

The following tugs are listed in order of enumeration:

The tug Lorne in Victoria harbour
Image courtesy of City of Vancouver Archives

In keeping with maritime tradition, many of these vessels were named for the wives and daughters of their owners, reflecting the close ties between family, ownership, and enterprise in this segment of the maritime economy.

The tug boat fleet represents the most locally based sector of Victoria’s maritime workforce. Small in scale but constant in activity, tug boat crews sustained myriad economic activities that took place in the Port of Victoria.