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named for him, which separates Washington’s
Olympic Peninsula from Vancouver Island,
but Vancouver’s investigation was aimed at
determining if Fuca had found the fabled
Strait of Anian
Vancouver reached the California coast
north of San Francisco on April 17, 1792, and
proceeded north, surveying and charting the
coastline. Within weeks, the expedition turned
east into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and began
exploring its southern shore. On May 2, 1792,
Vancouver’s ships Discoveryand Chatham
entered a natural harbor near the east end of
the strait that Manuel Quimper had discov-
ered two years earlier. Unaware that Quimper
had named the bay Porta de la Bodega y
Quadra after his fellow Spanish explorer, Van-
couver named it Port Discovery after his own
ship. Vancouver’s expedition anchored in the
bay for several days, making repairs and col-
lecting supplies of wood and water. European
epidemics had preceded Vancouver, decimat-
ing Native populations. He noted in his jour-
nal that “skulls, limbs, ribs, and back bones,
and other vestiges of the human body, were
found in many places promiscuously scat-
tered” on the beaches and woods surrounding
deserted Indian towns.COLUMBIA RIVER AND
PUGET SOUND
While Vancouver was exploring the area, the
American fur trader Robert Gray was farther
south on the Pacific coast, at the future
boundary between Oregon and Washington.
He carefully navigated past sandbars at the
mouth of the great river Heceta had mistaken
for a bay 17 years earlier. Gray named the river
the Columbia, after his ship. This discovery by
Gray, who had witnessed the earlier Martínez
incident while sailing through the region but
managed not to become entangled like his
British counterparts, was the foundation for(^164) B Discovery of the Americas, 1492–1800
Despite his careful attention to the Pacific Northwest coastline, George Vancouver missed the mouth of the
Columbia River (near the present-day border of Washington and Oregon), shown in a 1908 photograph.
(National Archives, Pacific Alaska Region NRIS-77-SEADECIMAL-13-47)
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