I admit to being an Anglophile, one particularly obsessed with things Victorian. And my first reaction was that the city of Victoria- -the largest town on Vancouver Island, just off the coast of the city of Vancouver, B.C., Canada--appeared to have been transplanted straight from 19th-century England. I thought that was wonderful. So when I informed a ferry captain that Victoria put me in mind of a British city, I felt I was paying his home my highest compliment. ""After all,"" he continued, ""Victoria was settled 75 percent by Americans."" He referred to the thousands of miners who swarmed the shores in 1858 after gold was discovered outside Vancouver. When I explained that I'm American and that I saw nothing American about his city--but it did seem very British--he looked at me as if my brain were addled. Victoria, the capital of British Columbia, sits at the south end of Vancouver Island, which was claimed for England by Captain Cook in 1798. When Vancouver Island became a British colony in 1843, Queen Victoria was on the British throne. What the ferry captain didn't say was that after 1843 she would remain on the throne for half a century, proving a tremendous influence on her fledgling colony.