How Captain George Vancouver Mapped and Shaped the Modern Pacific Northwest

On April 29, 1792, two ships carrying around 150 British sailors lingered off the coast of what is now Washington State. It had taken more than a year for the Discovery and the Chatham to make it here after departing from Falmouth, England, on a grand journey to map the Pacific coast of North America. The expedition’s captain, a 34-year-old naval veteran named George Vancouver, had reached this same exact spot 14 years earlier, in 1778, as a crew member on Captain James Cook’s ill-fated third voyage.

During that trip, Cook had named the site (now considered the most northwestern point in the contiguous United States) Cape Flattery. He then kept sailing north, failing to recognize the opening as the immense mouth of an inlet of the Pacific Ocean. It was only in 1787 that this inlet received a name: the Strait of Juan de Fuca, after a 16th-century sailor who purportedly journeyed to the area while searching for the Strait of Anián, a fabled waterway believed to be a potential passageway between Europe and Asia. Several expeditions had attempted to officially navigate and map the strait, but all had been unsuccessful. Cook’s protégé, Vancouver, wouldn’t make the same mistake as his predecessors.

“We followed the Chatham between Tatooche’s island and [a large rock in the water], hauling to the eastward along the southern shore of the supposed straits of de Fuca,” wrote Vancouver in his journal. Before entering the strait itself, Vancouver paused to do something he’d already done numerous times on this voyage: He gave the geographic feature a name.

“This rock, which rises just above the surface of the water, and over which the surf breaks with great violence, I called Rock Duncan,” the captain recalled, “in commemoration of that gentleman’s discovery.” (The “gentleman” in question, a British fur trader named Charles Duncan, had visited the area four years earlier and drawn sketches of the landscape that Vancouver later referenced during his own journey.)

Whether the rock already had a name was of no consequence to Vancouver. The act of naming different places and features was something he’d do dozens of more times in the months and years ahead. With each swipe of his quill, Vancouver altered the history of the Pacific Northwest—a rain-soaked patch of North American coastline that stretches from present-day Washington, Oregon and Idaho to the Canadian province of British Columbia—for generations to come.

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At the time of Vancouver’s voyage, the Pacific Northwest was one of the last areas of the continent left largely unexplored by European countries. Spain, England, Russia and other colonial powers had been drawn to the region in this period by the allure of a fabled Northwest Passage between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, as well as the prospect of acquiring highly coveted sea otter pelts to trade with Asia.

The Spanish had claims on the region from their religious mission outposts in California and the 1494 Treaty of Tordesillas, which divided lands in the so-called New World between Spain and Portugal. At the same time, Russian fur trappers were beginning to creep south from their outposts in Alaska. The British Admiralty, a government division tasked with overseeing the Royal Navy, was wary of getting boxed out, so its leaders commissioned a Vancouver-led expedition to map the entire area and take possession of a small, Spanish-controlled outpost called Nootka Sound.

“The European powers are debating over who’s going to get what and where and why,” says Gwen Whiting, head exhibitions curator at the Washington State Historical Society. “They’re out there, and they’re mapping [the Pacific Northwest] with this view that they were going to claim it, generally without regard to the Indigenous people that were living there at the time.”

In the late 18th century, thousands of Indigenous people occupied the Pacific Northwest, living in complex, village-based societies. “In Washington alone, there are over 300 different tribal groups,” Whiting says, “and those are just the ones we know about.”

Brandon Reynon, historic preservation officer for the Puyallup Tribe, describes the region prior to the Europeans’ arrival as “a certain type of utopia.” He adds:

In our language, there’s 39 different terms for family. The concept of family was much different than what Europeans would consider family. Because of that, our networks were very wide and broad. Our family could be all the way up into Lummi, or all the way west to Quinault. That’s … why you see very little warring occurring between a lot of the tribes here around the Puget Sound.

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Vancouver himself encountered many Native people almost as soon as he turned into the Strait of Juan de Fuca and started probing the interior of the Salish Sea, as the body of water encompassing the strait, Puget Sound and the Strait of Georgia is now known.

“Some of the inhabitants found no difficulty in visiting us,” Vancouver wrote. “This they did in a very civil, orderly and friendly manner, requesting permission before they attempted to enter the ship, and on receiving some presents, with assurances of our friendship, they very politely and earnestly solicited us to stop at their village.”

The first people Vancouver met were the Makah, or, as they call themselves, Qih-dihch-chuh-ahtX, which roughly translates to “people who live by the rocks and seagulls.” In the 18th century, the Makah resided at the very northwest tip of Washington; they remain there to this day. Their name for the place that Cook called Cape Flattery is Ah-bahq-klihltht-iq, which means “the middle point.”

Upon entering the Strait of Juan de Fuca, Vancouver started fulfilling the primary objective of his mission: surveying the area. Over the next several weeks and months, he and his crew systematically sighted 75 geographical features in this purportedly “new” land, giving them entirely new names based on European taxonomy and imperial ambitions.

“[We already have] Indigenous names for our areas, and our villages, and every little creek and field,” says Makah tribal member and linguistics expert Maria Parker Pascua. Today, she adds, the Makah people’s names for different areas and geological features far outnumber those seen, for instance, on a U.S. Geological Survey map. “Some of them are landmarks named so that if you’re on the ocean and you want to get to a certain halibut bank, you can triangulate your location with certain rocks and mountaintops,” Pascua says.

A name is often more than just a name. For Indigenous people, the meanings behind names run much deeper than they appear on paper. There’s a connection between the name and the land itself that becomes almost indistinguishable.

“When we described a place, we were describing what could be found there,” Reynon says. “The name Puyallups literally is ‘the people living at the bend at the river.’” He notes that the Puyallup have historically used names to easily identify where to hunt game, pick berries and harvest local camas flowers in the spring.

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Vancouver had many faults—including poor leadership skills—but he was an extremely meticulous surveyor. He and his crew explored every inlet and island they could find, aiming for accuracy as much as possible. “They don’t have the same tools that we have today,” Whiting says. “They had to draw on a wide range of sources, including celestial navigation, interviews, triangulation, depth sounding and visual mapping.”

Every location new to the British crew got a name. The large inlet around modern-day Seattle became Puget Sound, named after Lieutenant Peter Puget, who surveyed the area in two small boats. A long island north of present-day Seattle became Whidbey Island, after midshipman Joseph Whidbey. And a 14,410-foot-tall ice-covered volcano looming in the distance received the name of one of Vancouver’s mentors, Admiral Peter Rainier, a Royal Navy veteran who fought in the American Revolution.

Powerful patrons left their mark, too. Vancouver named one area Admiralty Inlet in honor of the government officials who assigned him to the expedition. The moniker of another spot, Restoration Point, alluded to the anniversary of the Stuart monarchy’s restoration to the English throne in 1660. “Names like that are a way of claiming the space and tying it to the culture and people you know, or in some cases of financing your expedition,” Whiting says.

Today, Mount Rainier’s name is controversial among locals. The mountain itself is a place of immense spiritual and cultural importance to the Puyallup, Cowlitz, Muckleshoot, Nisqually and Yakama people, to name just a few. Its geographical dominance over the region also can’t be overstated. On a clear day, observers can see it from nearly everywhere in Puget Sound.

The Puyallup have “always called it Taquoma, or Tahoma,” Reynon says. “We’ve been using [the mountain] since 11,000 years ago. We’ve been using her for ceremonial purposes, for spiritual purposes. … We went to the mountaintops to speak and to meet with the Creator, to be in the environment, [to] feel the spirituality that comes from those special places.”

To erase a name off the map is a form of cultural and historical desecration. To superimpose a new one that has no meaningful affiliation with the land itself leaves a different kind of sting. “Rainier never sat here,” Reynon says. “[The admiral] never stepped foot on this land.”

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Driving up and down Washington and British Columbia today, it’s impossible not to feel the continued resonance of Vancouver’s voyage more than 230 years ago. There’s a Vancouver, Washington, and a Vancouver, British Columbia. The biggest island in the region bears Vancouver’s name, though if the captain had had his druthers, it would have been called “Quadra and Vancouver Island” instead. (The Quadra in question was Vancouver’s Spanish counterpart, Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, who negotiated the handover of Nootka Sound to the British. It was not necessarily in the best interest of either Canada or the British to keep the “and Quadra” portion, so it got dropped.)

Vancouver’s maps were an essential resource for Meriwether Lewis and William Clark when they launched their expedition to the Pacific Coast in 1804. His work was “still considered accurate enough in the 1840s that when the Oregon question of who owns Oregon is being debated, they pull these maps out again,” Whiting says. “In that respect, the Vancouver expedition did a lot to shape the modern Northwest. It helped set the boundaries of it.” Those same state lines and international borders remain fixed to this day.

On October 20, 1795, Vancouver’s nearly five-year journey came to an end. But if he expected a hero’s welcome upon his return to London, he was sorely mistaken. He’d made several high-placed enemies during the voyage, including Joseph Banks, one of the world’s leading botanists and a veteran of Cook’s first voyage around the world. Angry at Vancouver’s treatment of a Scottish surgeon who’d accompanied him on the expedition to collect botanical samples, Banks used his immense influence to diminish Vancouver’s name at home.

Vancouver had been a forceful captain at sea, maligning much of his crew through his ill temper and liberal use of corporal punishment. He’d regularly flogged a midshipman named Thomas Pitt for a variety of infractions; after the expedition’s end, Pitt attempted to exact his revenge by stalking Vancouver, challenging him to a duel and ultimately physically attacking him in the streets of London. With his name in tatters and his health declining, Vancouver wrote an account of his circumnavigation, then died soon after on May 10, 1798. He was 40 years old.

Despite the ignominy of his final years, Vancouver’s name lives on today in the maps he created, the places he named and the borders that were set based on his claims. But some think it’s time to move past Vancouver’s vision of the Pacific Northwest. Consider, for instance, Mount Rainier.

“When you return [its name] to Taquoma, you’re giving back the respect that she deserves,” Reynon says. “Then also it becomes a recognition of, ‘Hey, there were people here first.’”

He adds, “That is one tiny step to helping those wounds heal,” by saying, “‘Yes, we recognize you. We see you. We realize that you’re still here.’ That’s something [Indigenous peoples are] always saying: ‘We’re still here.’”