Lt(Navy) Mike Makow 

  • Jemmy Jones (1830–1882), a Welsh-born sea captain, left his mark on B.C.’s coast with an island off Cadboro Bay named after Jones accidentally grounding his ship there.
  • Known for fearless seamanship, Jones once navigated the deadly Columbia River Bar from memory and famously escaped jail in disguise to reclaim his seized schooner, Jenny Jones.

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Just off the coast of Cadboro Bay, Victoria, lies an islet jutting out of the sea — Jemmy Jones Island, an oftenoverlooked place carrying the legacy of one of British Columbia’s most audacious mariners.

James ( Jemmy) Jones (1830–1882) was a Welsh-born sea captain whose life was filled with daring West Coast escapes and shipwrecks. The island is named not in honor of a great victory, but because Jones once ran his ship aground on it. And that, as history would have it, is what stuck. The incident was minor, with no lives lost or shipwreck — but it did leave a mark. The islet was soon dubbed Jemmy Jones Island, a name that endures on nautical charts and local maps to this day.

After spending his youth searching for his father, adventuring, and mining, Jones first made his way to the coastlines of B.C. around 1854. Here, he quickly earned a reputation as a fearless and resourceful mariner, captaining schooners through treacherous waters and running freight between Puget Sound and Victoria for over a decade.

Though illiterate, Jones also possessed a photographic memory and an uncanny sense of navigation. A striking example of this came in 1864, when Jones daringly navigated a ship through the Columbia River Bar, a stretch of water so deadly it’s known as ‘the Graveyard of the Pacific.’ When the bar pilot refused to guide the ship through dangerous conditions, Jones took the helm of his schooner and made the crossing himself — from memory alone.

Eventually imprisoned for debt in Victoria, Jones watched as his beloved schooner, Jenny Jones, was seized by creditors in 1865. The vessel was then taken to Olympia, Washington. Determined to reclaim his ship, he orchestrated one of the most audacious escapes in Pacific Northwest history by disguising himself as a woman and slipping out of the Victoria jail. Jones then made the 75-nauticalmile journey to Olympia, likely by canoe and small boat. After discovering that Jenny Jones was being taken to Seattle for auction by a United States marshal, Jones boarded the ship as a passenger, stealing it under cover of darkness when the marshal went ashore for the night.

When eventually tried for theft, Jones was acquitted on the grounds that the marshal had abandoned the vessel. As the court reportedly reasoned: “The marshal left the ship – the ship did not leave the marshal.”

This article draws on historical information from the Index of Historical Victoria Newspapers.