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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: May 09, 2025

ANOTHER MILESTONE REACHED

The vessel database has been updated and is now holding 95,509 vessel histories (with 16,548 images and 14,407 records of ship wrecks and marine disasters).

The mariner and naval biography database has also been updated and now contains 58,599 entries (with 4,009 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 our chief Canadian contributor, Mike Rydqvist McCammon, for the hundreds (approaching a thousand) 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 (our US contributor) who is in his 4th year of fact checking all of the entries in the vessel database, one-by-one. This has resulted in thousands of updates and corrections which might never have occurred without his intervention.

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