Vietnam or Thailand ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
Updated: June 4, 2025
The sail down the broad lower reaches of the Columbia and across its foamy bar, around Cape Flattery, and up the Juan de Fuca Strait, was delightful; and after calling again at Victoria and Port Townsend we got fairly off for icy Alaska. Alexander Archipelago and the Home I found in Alaska To the lover of pure wildness Alaska is one of the most wonderful countries in the world.
Meares had come from China in January, and during the summer had been up the Straits of Fuca, where another English captain, Barclay, had preceded him. Then Meares had gone south past Flattery, seeking in vain for the River of the West.
One hundred miles long, but so full of inlets and straits that its navigable shore line measures one thousand seven hundred and sixty miles, dotted with lovely islets, with gigantic trees almost to the water's edge, with safe anchorage everywhere, and stretching southward, without shoals or bars, from the Straits of Fuca to the capital and centre of Washington Territory, it will be a magnificent entrepôt for the commerce of that grandest ocean of the world, the Pacific."
III: "A note made by Michael Lok, the elder, touching the strait of sea commonly called Fretum Anian in the South Sea through the North-West Passage of Meta Incognita." Lok met in Venice, in April, 1596, an old man called Juan de Fuca, a Greek mariner and pilot, of the crew of the galleon Santa Anna taken by Cavendish near southern California in 1587.
That had only one meaning: Spain was trying to lay hands on everything from New Spain to Russian territory on the north. If Spain claimed all north to the Straits of Fuca, and Russia claimed all south to the Straits of Fuca, where was England's claim of New Albion discovered by Sir Francis Drake, and of all that coast which Cook had sighted round Nootka?
That is what the old Greek pilot in the service of New Spain, Juan de Fuca, had said some few years after Drake and Cavendish had been out on the coast of California.
To be sure, two Hudson's Bay Company ships' crews those under Knight and Barlow had been totally lost fifty years before Hearne's tramp inland in 1771, trying to find that same mythical strait of Juan de Fuca westward of Hudson Bay.
Vancouver was gliding into the Straits of Fuca when the slender colors of a far ship floated above the blue horizon outward bound. Another wave-roll, and the flag was seen to be above full-blown sails and a square-hulled, trim little trader of America. At six in the morning of April 29, the American saluted with a cannon-shot.
The great natural divisions of this system are: the Straits of Juan de Fuca, extending from the ocean eastward about eighty miles, and then branching into the vast Gulf of Georgia to the north, and Admiralty Inlet to the south; Hood's Canal, branching from the latter, on the west side, near the entrance, and running south-west about sixty miles; Possession Sound, branching from the east side, and extending north between Whidby Island and the mainland, as far as Rosario Straits; and Puget Sound, connected with the southerly end of Admiralty Inlet by the "Narrows."
But Cook was too far out to descry the narrow opening but thirteen miles wide of Juan de Fuca, where the steamers of three continents ply to-day; though the strait by no means led to Europe, as geographers thought. All night a hard gale drove them northward.
Word Of The Day
Others Looking