Ogden Point is a deepwater port facility and cruise-ship terminal located 21 miles (34 km) north of Port Angeles, Washington, and one mile (1.6 km) southwest of downtown Victoria, British Columbia. It was named for Peter S. Ogden, a prominent 19th-century fur trader and explorer employed by the Hudson’s Bay Company. Today the terminal is Canada’s busiest cruise port, hosting roughly 300 to 335 ship calls and more than 1 million passengers each season, which runs from April to October; most ships call for just a few hours to a day while sailing between Alaska and home ports in Seattle, Los Angeles, or San Francisco.

In 1883 Robert P. Rithet built piers at Ogden Point to increase shipping traffic to Victoria. Rithet, a Scottish-born merchant who arrived in Victoria in 1862, became one of the city’s most influential businessmen and served as its mayor from 1885 to 1886. In 1914, to take advantage of the Panama Canal‘s opening, plans were drawn up for two breakwaters and a large wharf to replace the piers. A British firm was awarded the contract to build the breakwaters, which were to extend from Ogden Point and Macaulay Point to shield the planned wharves from the winter gales that lash Victoria’s southern shoreline.

The Ogden Point Breakwater was built first. It is a 2,500-foot (762-m) wall of granite and concrete that required more than 1 million cubic yards of quarried rock to form its foundation, topped by a structure of over 10,000 granite blocks. Each block, weighing up to 15 tons and quarried on Hardy Island, was stacked in a nine-course pyramid. The breakwater has needed no major upgrades since it was built, and only 136 blocks have ever required repositioning, a testament to the soundness of its engineering and construction. It was completed on schedule in 1917, despite the demands of the First World War. Once finished, the Macaulay Point breakwater was judged unnecessary and was never built. Read more here and here. Explore more of Ogden Point and Victoria here: