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Updated: June 4, 2025
It now became apparent that the small sloop had the advantage, not only in speed, but because it could go in closer to the coast. Towards the end of August Gray's crew distinctly observed the Olympic mountains and set down record of Cape Flattery. 'I am of opinion, notes the mate, 'that the Straits of Juan de Fuca do exist; for the coast takes a great bend here.
The Gulf of Georgia, the Straits of Fuca, and Queen Charlotte Sound are the words upon the lips of everybody. Shades of my schoolboy days! How much sweeter they taste here than in the old geography class! Before us stretches a wilderness of islands, mostly uninhabited, which penetrates even into the sunless winter and the shadowless summer of Behring Sea.
In the morning, he put on jeans and his best aloha shirt, walked to the pier next to the hotel, and boarded the Victoria Clipper. The San Juan Islands are a three hour trip from Seattle, north out of Puget Sound, across the Strait of Juan De Fuca, and nearly to Vancouver Island in Canada. The catamaran hummed along while passengers sunned themselves, took pictures, and moved about the cabins.
Both Bering and Cook had been driven out from this section of the coast by gales. This left a thousand miles of American coast unexplored. Cook had said there were no Straits of Fuca, of which the old Greek pilot in the service of New Spain had told legends of fictitious voyages two centuries before; yet Barclay, an East India English trader, had been up those very straits.
But they were amply corroborated by Wilkes and others who followed many years later. "Nothing," says Wilkes, "can exceed the beauty of these waters and their safety. Not a shoal exists in the Straits of Juan de Fuca, Admiralty Inlet, Puget Sound or Hood's Canal, that can in any way interrupt their navigation by a 74-gun ship.
It is very remarkable, that, while the Atlantic coast abounds in excellent harbors, on the Pacific side of the continent there is no good harbor where a vessel can find refuge in any kind of weather between San Francisco Bay and San Diego to the south, and Port Angeles, on the Straits of Fuca, to the north. It is fitly characterized by Wilkes as an "iron-bound coast."
"Victoria is distant from Esquimault, by land, about three miles round by sea, double the distance. The intervening ground is an irregular promontory, having the waters of the Straits of Fuca on the south, the Bay of Victoria on the east, and the Victoria arm encircling: it on the north. The promontory contains three farms, reclaimed from the forest of pines, oaks, alders, willows, and evergreens.
The first expedition passed the Strait of Juan de Fuca apparently without seeing it, although there was a rumor to the effect that a broad opening into the land had been discovered by a certain Juan de Fuca in 1592, while he was exploring in the employ of Spain. The latitude of this opening, as he gave it, nearly corresponds to that of the strait which now bears his name.
Keen to prove that no Northeast Passage existed by way of the Straits of Fuca, Vancouver headed inland, close to the south shore, where craggy heights offered some guidance through the labyrinth of islands and fog. Eight miles inside the straits he anchored for the night.
By that treaty the two governments agreed to continue the forty-ninth parallel as the boundary from the Stony Mountains "westward to the middle of the channel which separates the continent from Vancouver's Island, and thence southerly through the middle of said channel and of Fuca Straits to the Pacific Ocean."
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