Richard Carr

by Stephan Perrin

Member of the Grand Jury that heard the trial of Tshuanahusset.

Richard Carr was born in Kent, England on July 16, 1818.¹ He was a poor, uneducated young man when he decided to leave home and go find his fortune. His chance came in London on August 18, 1836. He began his "vagabond" voyage aboard a steamship bound for Calais.² Carr had an interest in daguerreotype photographs which lured him to many remote locations for inspiration.³ While exploring the Yucatan, he found his dog, Spot, who stayed with him for the following 11 years. His diary tells of the different routes and modes of transportation he utilized to reach many exotic locales. On his journeys, Carr had seen such places as Warsaw, Geneva, Nicaragua, Peru and Panama. Many of his entries into the journal gave reference to the amount or quality of merchandise received at particular ports. Typical entries included such goods as fish, sugar, coffee and oranges. His wanderings ended in Ecuador around 1848, after he failed as a photographer for the fourth time.⁴ The new adventures that had caught his attention were the gold rushes up the northwest coast of North America during the 1850s.

Richard Carr married Emily Carr (born July 3, 1836) on January 18, 1855.⁵ The wedding took place at Ensham Church, England. (There is some conflicting information as to where the bride was born.) Mr. and Mrs. Carr eventually came to Victoria, British Columbia on July 5, 1863. They moved into a small house in James Bay that November and then into their permanent residence on April 1, 1864. Carr remarked in his diary about how much he enjoyed the climate and location of Victoria, and he became fairly wealthy as a merchant selling food and liquor. His success allowed him to purchase land for which, in one case, he took R.C. Moody to the Supreme Court over a land dispute.⁶ Another situation worth noting was a robbery that was thwarted by Carr after he fired two shots at a burglar while chasing him out of his residence.⁷

Carr and his wife had five girls and four boys. Their youngest child was named after her mother, Emily. She became an extremely well respected artist and writer in British Columbia and throughout Canada. This was probably Richard Carr's greatest contribution to the history of this area. Emily Carr described her father as an autocrat and bigot,⁸ but there is nothing in his diary between January '68 through June '68 other than that his friend, Shumway, had died. Carr battled gout through much of his life, and finally gave in to consumption over a six week period.⁹ His body was pronounced dead in Victoria, on November 20, 1888.¹⁰ A funeral was held for him on November 22, 1888, at the church he had attended, the Reformed Episcopal.

Notes:
1. British Columbia Archives, (hereafter BCA), Add.Mss. 610, Diary of Richard Carr, Microfilm # A0788.
2. Edythe Hembroff-Schleicher, The Untold Story of Emily Carr (Saanich, B.C.: Hancock House, 1978), p. 43-47.
3. Ibid.
4. Ibid.
5. Ibid.
6. The Victoria Daily Colonist, February 10, 1864.
7. British Daily Colonist, April 10, 1875.
8. Hembroff-Schleicher, The Untold Story, p. 43-47.
9. BCA, Vital Statistics-Death Index, GR 2951, B13077, 09-005539, 1888.
10. Ibid.