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The Monument for Captain Victor Jacobsen

by John M. MacFarlane 2017

The plaque monument to Captain Victor Jacobsen (Photo from the John MacFarlane collection.)

Among the plaques along the seawall in the Inner Harbour of Victoria BC is one to Captain Victor Jacobsen (Nicknamed "The Scurvey Kid") who was a well known marine character in Victoria BC.

Captain Victor Jacobsen (Photo from the MMBC collection.)

Captain Victor Jacobsen was born in 1862 at Botney Finland. He apprenticed in a shipyard at Helsingfors Finland. He came to the Pacific coast about 1880 working mainly as a sealer. He married Minnie McLean on 10/11/1888. He was a Master Mariner and Sealer. He owned the sealer Eva Marie (1903–1916) He owned the sealing schooner Minnie 1889–1900, which was seized by the US Government, which caused him a major financial loss. He was elected as a member of the Thermopylae Club in Victoria BC in 1934.

The Victor Jacobsen house (Photo from the MMBC collection.)

Jacobsen’s distinctive house located in Esquimalt BC.

Captain Victor Jacobsen at work in Thunderbird Park repairing damage to the Tilikum (Photo from the MMBC collection.)

To quote from this article please cite:

MacFarlane, John M. (2017) The Monument for Captain Victor Jacobsen. Nauticapedia.ca 2017. http://nauticapedia.ca/Gallery/Monument_Jacobsen.php

Site News: January 14, 2025

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 94,957 vessel histories (with 16,337 images and 13,935 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 3998 images).

My thanks to Ray Warren who is beginning a long process of filling gaps in the photo record of the vessel histories in the vessel database. Ray has been documenting the ships of Vancouver Harbour for more than 60 years.

Thanks to contributor Mike Rydqvist McCammon for the hundreds of photos he continues to contribute to illustrate British Columbia’s floating heritage.

My very special thanks to our volunteer IT adviser, John Eyre, who (since 2021) has modernized, simplified and improved the update process for the databases into semi–automated processes. His participation has been vital to keeping the Nauticapedia available to our netizens.

Thanks to John Spivey who is beginning his 4th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database.

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