This essay examines the letters, diaries, and memoirs written by a number of middle-class Englishmen relating their experiences on the west coast of British North America during the colonial era. It focusses on their perceptions of the physical environment, disproving the assumption that appreciative depictions of British Columbia’s mountainous landscape emerged only in the late nineteenth century. It also challenges the belief that there was a distinctive difference between the male and female colonializing gazes of the Victorian era, and it speculates as to why, in contrast to other contexts, there was a sharp disjunction between the descriptions of the physical environment and those of its indigenous peoples.