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Updated: June 4, 2025
On the western coast, the Gulf of California runs 800 miles up its side, with the Rio Colorado falling into it; and further north are the Straits of Juan da Fuca, between Vancouver's Island and the mainland, north of which are numerous archipelagoes and inlets extending round the great peninsula of Yukon to Kotzebue Sound.
Perhaps, too, it would have been marked, on future maps of the world, with greater precision, and more, certain signs of reality, than the invisible, because imaginary, Straits of de Fuca and de Fonte.
The valley was at one time occupied by a great glacier which came down from the Cascade Range and moved northwest through the sound and into the Strait of Juan de Fuca, scouring and polishing the rocks over which it passed. The sinking of the land flooded the lower Columbia River and the mouth of the Willamette, so that ocean ships may now go up as far as Portland.
Early in August, a wandering band of savages from the Strait of Juan de Fuca made their appearance at the mouth of the Columbia, where they came to fish for sturgeon. They brought disastrous accounts of the Tonquin, which were at first treated as fables, but which were too sadly confirmed by a different tribe that arrived a few days subsequently.
Don Quadra maintained that it only surrendered Spanish rights north of Juan de Fuca, leaving the northwest coast free to all nations for trade. With Vancouver it was all or nothing. Don Quadra then suggested that letters be sent to Spain and England for more specific instructions. For this purpose Lieutenant Broughton was to be despatched overland across Mexico to Europe.
It has an excellent class of people, as have the towns upon the Sound in general; and the evidences of taste and culture, which are continually seen, are one of the pleasantest characteristics of this new and thinly settled part of the country. There are no sawmills on the Straits of Fuca, and the slight settlements along its shores have scarcely marred their primitive wildness and beauty.
Captain Vancouver was selected for these purposes: his instructions were, after accomplishing his mission at Nootka Sound, to examine that part of the coast occupied by the chain of islands, discovered by the vessels in the fur trade, "and to ascertain, with the greatest exactitude, the nature and extent of every communication by water which might seem to tend to facilitate commercial relations between the north-west coast and the countries on the east of the continent, inhabited by British subjects or claimed by Great Britain;" and in particular to search for the strait of John de Fuca, and to examine if Cook's River had not its source in some of the lakes frequented by the Canadian traders, or by the servants of the Hudson's Bay Company.
Now, whether the old Greek pilot, Juan de Fuca, lied or dreamed, or only told a yarn of what some Indian had told him, it was along this coast that he had said the straits leading to the east side of America lay; and Cook's two ships hugged the coast as close as they dared for fear of roaring breakers and a landward wind.
He was god of all the waters that wash the coast, of the Gulf of Georgia, of Puget Sound, of the Straits of Juan de Fuca, of the waters that beat against even the west coast of Vancouver Island, and of all the channels that cut between the Charlotte Islands.
To return now to the Spanish explorations, in the latter part of the seventeenth century we find that Heceta, following the first expedition, succeeded in getting as far as Vancouver Island, where, having been parted from an accompanying ship by a storm, he turned southward, passing the Strait of Juan de Fuca and keeping close by the shore.
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