For the Europeans, Spanish, Russian and English, the convergence on the North Pacific was the culmination of three centuries of exploration, exploitation and settlement.

The fall of Constantinople in 1451, by placing the Ottoman Turks astride Mediterranean trade routes, had accentuated Europe's need to find alternative routes to Asia and new markets for its burgeoning industries. Even after the Portugueses navigator Batholomew Diaz rounded the Cape of Good Hope in 1485 and Ferdinand Magellan in 1520 threaded the strait that now bears his name to reach the Pacific, the need remained unsatisfied. The routes around the Cape of Good Hope and Cape Horn were long and perilous and the quest for shorter routes to China, northwest across the top of America and northeast across the top of Europe and Asia, was only spurred by the discoveries of each failed attempt.

When John Cabot made his landfall in Newfoundland or Cape Breton in 1497, he thought he had reached Asia, but instead of the spices he hoped to take back he found a "sea covered with fish." He had discovered one of the world's great fishing grounds, a discovery of far greater interest to Basque and Breton fishermen than to the Bristol merchants who financed his voyage.

The Portuguese explorers, Gaspar and Miguel Cortereal, who followed Cabot to Newfoundland and Labrador, believed they were off northeast Asia when they reached Greenland on the first of their three voyages between 1500 and 1502.

Jacques Cartier too was charged with seeking a passage to Asia when he discovered and charted the St. Lawrence River in 1535, raisin the French standard on the territory he named New France.

In September, 1740, the St. Peter, under his command, and\the St. Paul, under Chirikov's, left Okhotsk to winter at Avacha Bay in Kamcha~ka, which was named Petropavlowsk in their honor, and in June, 1741 they set course for Amenca.

Two weeks out, the ships became separated in heavy fog, each searching vainly for the other before proceeding alone.

Chirikov made his landfall among the southern islands of what would become the Alaska Panhandle, sailing north until he found an anchorage. But after the first men sent ashore failed to return and a second party searching for them also vanished in the silent wilderness, Chirikov reluctantly lifted anchor, leaving 15 of his crew to their fate.

His vessel wracked by storms, his crew weakened by scurvy, Chirikov was still the more fortunate of the two commanders. On October 10 he brought the St. Paul back to Petropavlovsk with 55 survivors of her original complement of 76. Even as the sick were being taken ashore, De la Croyere died.
Bering, sighting the glistening peaks of the St. Elias Range, anchored off Kayak Island, which he named for St. Elias. Steller, despite his protests, was allowed just one day ashore to make his notes. "We do not know this country; nor are we provided with supplies for a wintering," was Bering's reason for'; refusing to stay longer.

His foreboding was borne out as the SL Peter made her way westward, past; Kodiak Island, past what now is Chirlkov Island, past Shumagin Island, named for the crew member buried there, and along the Aleutian chain. By November, beset by storms and contrary winds, and with most of the crew too ill with scurvy to work, a shipboard conference decided to seek haven on an island sighted earlier. The decision became irreversible after the St. Peter had been; anchored and the sick carried ahsore. A violent storm drove the ship hard and fast up the beach. The survivors were marooned.
Bering did not live long to endure the forced wintering he had feared. He died on December 8, a victim of the scurvy which claimed so many of his crew, and command devolved upon his Swedish assistant, Ileut. Sven Waxell.

Throughout the winter the crew eked out a miserable existence on the snowcovered treeless island now named for Bering, living in covered hollows scooped in $he sand and warmed by driftwood fires. Inquisitive blue foxes, which scattered and carried off their stores, sea otters and fur seals, and a dead whale providentially washed ashore, provided them with meat. And when the snow melted, Steller identified antiscorbutic herbs, for the collection of which to augment a "miserably supplied" medicine chest he had pleaded in vain before the expedition sailed.

In March the survivors decided after much debate to build a new vessel from timbers salvaged from the St. Peter, although only one had any experience of shipbuilding, and five months later their work on the new St. Peter, 13 metres in length, was completed. Four days after they left the island they sighted Kamchatka and their ordeal was over.

To the traders and promysloviki at Kamchatka the significance of the expedition lay in the cargo of sea otter pelts the SL Peter brought back from lands where the waters abounded in fur-bearing animals.
As they had in Siberia, the Russians used the enticement of their trade goods and cheap tools, copper kettles, beads, trinkets - and coercion such as holding women and children hostage, to ensure their supply of furs from Native hunters. But in Siberia, except for the fierce hostility of the Chukchi and the resistance of the Buryats to Russian intrusion on their own fur trade with the Chinese, the Russian advance largely was unopposed.

Along the Aleutians, the Russian advance left a trail of blood, on land as in the water. By seizing Native furs for tax, Russian exactions often transformed amicable trading relations into deadly conflict The Aleuts ambushed shore parties and destroyed vessels. The Russians burned villages and slaughtered their inhabitants. Like the fur-bearing animals they hunted, the Aleuts were decimated in an unequal struggle only the Russians could win.

For half a century after Bering and Chirikov initiated its advance into Alaska, Russia was unchallenged in the North Pacific. Apart from a few early voyages from Mexico as far upcoast as Oregon, Spain evinced little interest in expanding its colonial empire northward until it became aware of Russian activities in Alaska and their perceived threat to Spanish interests.

Neither the French nor the English had penetrated west of the Rockies by 1741. Wars periodically erupting out of Europe slowed their advance westward as forts and territories were seized and regained by the ensuing peace. Both enlisted Native Indian tribes in their struggle for control of the fur trade, at times with devastating consequences, as when the Iroquois, allied with the English, fell upon the Hurons in 1649, razing their villages and dispersing the survivors. The attack effectively destroyed the furtrading network the Hurons provided to the French in Ontario and Quebec.

Fearing interception by Spanish warships if he tried to return by the Strait of Magellan, Drake is believed to have reached the latitude of Vancouver Island on the Golden Hind before desisting from his attempt to find an Arctic route back to England. Turning south again, he landed in the vicinity of the future San Francisco to claim for England the land he named New Albion before setting his course across the Pacific. When he got back to England in 1580, he had been gone for three years, but the 10,000 percent financial return from his riratical voyage was the rich reward.

For two centuries after Drake's voyage no other English ship had sa~ed the North Pacific until Capt. Cook, with his two sloops Resolution and Discovery made landfali at Nootka Sound.

Cook, however, had already been preceded by two Spanish expeditions, the first under Juan Perez in 1774 and the second under Bruno Heceta and Juan de la Bodega y Quadra a year later.

Spain, which claimed the entire Pacific coast of the Americas, had become alarmed by reports of Russian expansion in Alaska. Spanish expeditions in 1769 and 1770 had established outposts at San Diego and Monterey, but the territory north of San Francisco remained unexplored.

Perez' instructions were to sail to 60 degrees North latitude, search for the mythical 'Strait of Anian', the passage between 47 and 48 degrees supposedly navigated by the Greek sailor known as Juan de Fuca in 1592, and to proclaim

S - To make pemmican, lean strips of flesh from larger game animals were dried over a slow fire or in the sun and then pounded. The fat was melted down and mixed while still boiling with the pounded meat in equal proportions. Stored in baskets and bags, it would last for years. Its use was adopted by Sir George Simpson when he became governor of ffie Hudson's Bay Company's northenn department following the merger with the Norm West Company in 1821.

possession wherever he landed. He reached the Queen Charlotte Islands, where high winds foiled his attempt to send a boat ashore, and returned to Mexico without making a landing.

Heceta and Quadra were more successful, establishing that no passage existed where the 'Strait of Anian' reputedly lay and making several landings to take possession, the most northerly by Quadra on Prince of Wales Island. But none of the landings was on the coast of what became British Columbia. Cook's instructions were to land around 45 degrees latitude and then sail north to 65 degrees where he was to search for and explore "such rivers or inlets as may appear to be of a considerable extent, and pointing towards Hudson's or Baffin's Bay" and if he found a passage, to sail through it.

He was "strictly enjoined not to touch upon any part of the Spanish dominions unless driven by necessity and then to avoid giving offence; the same order applied to subjects of any other European state he might encounter on the coast. He was empowered, however, to take possession of "such countries as you may discover that have not already been discovered or visited by any other European power."

Spain's alarm over the intrusion of yet another European power into the North Pacific was reflected in an order sent to the viceroy of New Spain to refuse admittance of Cook's ships to Mexican ports and, if expedient, detain and imprison their crews.

Russia too was alarmed as, leaving Nootka without taking formal possession, Cook sailed into waters it regarded as its own by right of discovery and exploration.

At 60 degrees latitude he landed on what Bering, on the furthermost reach of his voyage in 1741, had named St. Elias Island. Cook renamed it Kaye's Island, leaving a record of his landing with two silver pennies in a bottle.

Then he proceeded westward along the coasts of Alaska and the Aleutians bestowing English names on inlets and islands already named by Russians as a means of asserting England's prior right of discovery, landing twice on the mainland to claim possession.

Convinced after passing through Bering Strait to 70.44 degrees and finding an impenetrable barrier of ice across the Chukchi Sea, that no Northwest Passage through the continent existed, he turned south again to Unalaska in the Aleutians, where the Russian explorer Gerasim Izmailov allowed him to copy his maps.

Cook's death in Hawaii on February 14, 1779 did not end the expedition. Again that summer, the Resolution under Capt. Charles Clarke and the Discovery under Capt. John Gore sailed north from Kamchatka searching for a passage, only to verify Cook's conclusion that none existed.

On its delayed publication in 1784, Cook's journal stirred interest alike in the courts of Europe and among the trading companies suddenly made aware of a new source of profits.

Empress Catherine II ordered L. I. Golenishchev-Kutuzov to begin translating it immediately so that the Russian government could decide its political response. The East India Company, without whose permission no British subject could trade east of the Cape of Good Hope, prepared two expeditions to go to Nootka.

Spanish fears of Russian expansion southward were heightened by the report brought back by Esteban Joseph Martinez and Gonzales Lopez de Haro on their return to Mexico from an exploratory voyage to Alaska in 1788. Both had been told, Martinez at Unalaska and Lopez at Kodiak Island, that Russia intended to establish a trading post in Nootka Sound in 1789.

To forestall the Russians, and without waiting for instructions from Madrid,!; Manuel Flores, the viceroy, sent Martinez with the frigate Princesa and Lopez with the supply ship San Carlos to Nootka. Their orders were to take formal possession and erect a building there to serve as a trading post until a fortified settlement could be built.

When they reached Nootka on May 5,1789, they found that events had overtak~n them in the decade since Cook's visit. Drawn by the profits to be made from the sea otter fur trade, a number of British traders had followed Capt. James Hanna, who had been the first to cross from Macao in 1785 and return a year later with a cargo that sold for some $20,000.

One of these traders was John Meares, a resourceful man of few scruples and questionable veracity, whose plans went beyond making trading voyages. He proposed to build a permanent trading post which could be a link in the grand design for a far-flung British trading network outlined in his Voyages, published in 1790.

A lieutenant in the British navy, he accepted half-pay after receiving permission to command a merchant vessel bound for Calcutta. There he organized a company among merchants associated with the British East India Company who had no qualms about subverting that company's monopoly of British trading rights in the Pacific in order to garner for themselves the profits of the Northwest fur trade.

Meares' first voyage in 1786 took him to Prince William Sound, on his way affronting the Russians who, as Inspector Vasili Golovnin wrote in his journal, gave him instructions for navigating Kenai - now Shelikov - Strait which he then "brazenly considered to be his own discovery, even giving it his own name."

In Prince William Sound he spent what he described as "an inhospitable winter," during which several of his crew succumbed to scur'vy. They were spared further misery only by the timely arrival of Capt. George Dixon on the Queen Charlotte who, with Capt. Nathaniel Portlock on the King George, was exploring the Northwest coast to promote the fur trade with China for the King George's Sound Company of London.

Undeterred by the small returns from this first voyage, Meares and his partners bought two vessels, the Felice and the Iphigenia, adding to their company a Portuguese, Juan Cavalho, through whose connections with the governor of Macao they were given permission, in Meares' words, "to navigate under, or claim any advantages granted to, the Portuguese flag."
This enabled them to evade procuring a trader's licence from the British East India Company and to avoid payment of the heavy port duties imposed on all except Portuguese vessels trading with China. Although Capt. William Douglas was in charge of the Iphigenia, the nominal command was held by a Portuguese, Francisco Jose Viana.
Meares arrived at Nootka on May 13,1789 well prepared to build his trading post. Aboard his ships he had a work force of 50 Chinese, in his own words, "chiefly handicraftsmen of various kinds, with a small proportion of sailors who had been used to the junks which navigated every part of the Chinese seas.

His first act, according to Robert Dutton, his first officer, was to buy the land around Friendly Cove from Maquinna "for eight to 10 sheets of copper and several trifling articles," to which he added a gift of a pair of pistols.

Then the Chinese, destined to become the first immigrants to what is now British Columbia~'~, were set to work, some to putting up a two-storey building, surrounded by a breastwork and fortified with a cannon, and others to laying the keel of the first ship built on the Northwest coast, a schooner launched in September as the North West America.

1 - Conflicting figures given by Meares have led to confosion over the eventaal fate of the Chinese artisans and seamen. The figure of 50 Chinese landed by Meares at Noofita in 1788 is general]y accepted. The figure of "nearly 70" brought over hy Colnelt in 1789, as claimed hy Meares in his Memorial, is disputed by records in the Spanish archives, which list 29 by name and trade as having been taken prisoner by Martinez at Nootka. Some of these were repatriated to Macso aboard the Colambia when she sailed from Nootka in 1789. Others, sent to San Blas by Martinez, were later released and repatriated from Mexico.

The first 50 Chinese brought over by Meares in 1788 by all reports assimilated with the Nootka, adapting readily to Native ways. Vancouver's instructions of August 20,1791 ordered him, if he met any of the Chinese, or any British subjects, '~who may have been held in captivity... to receive them on board the sloop you command and to accommodate them in the best manner you may be able, until such time as opportunities may he found of sending them to the differ ent places to which they may be desirous of being conveyed..." The order was directed specifically to those Chinese taken prisoner by the Spanish, all of whom were gone from Nootka by the time Vancouver arrived.

Meares' reasons for hiring the Chinese would be echoed by employers through decades of British Columbia's colonial and provincial economic development.

"They have been generally esteemed as hardy and industrious, as well as an ingenious race of people; they live on fish and rice and, requiring but low wages, it is a matter also of economical consideration to employ them...," he wrote in his Voyagei Of Meares' three vessels, only the Iphigenia was at Nootka when Martinez and Lopez arrived. The little North West America was away trading along the coast. And Meares was in China, where he had taken the Felice with a cargo of furs, the return from which induced his partners to acquire two more ships, the Princess Royal and the Argonaut.

In the meantime, another flag had been added to those already on the coast.
Two U.S. ships, the first of the 'Boston Men', had arrived in the fall of 1788 to winter in Nootka Sound and their captains, John Kendrick of the Columbia and Robert Gray of the Lady Washington, were there to witness the events that took Britain and Spain to the brink of war.

Amid all the claims and counter-claims, assertions and denials, surrounding those events and their bearing on right of discovery and possession, their sequence was beyond dispute.

Martinez, questioning the instructions of what ostensibly was a Portuguese vessel, seized the Iphigenia and imprisoned her officers and crew aboard his ships. Days later, he restored the vessel to Douglas after taking a bond requiring her owner to pay a fair price if the viceroy held her to be a lawftil prize. On May 31 the Iphigenia sailed, purportedly for Macao. Instead, Douglas headed northward along the coast, determined to get a profitable cargo of furs.

On June 8, when the North West America returned to Nootka, Martinez seized her after learning that she too was owned by Cavalho. Renaming her the Santa Gertrudia la Magna, he sent her southward with a Spanish crew.

On June 13, Meares' third ship, the Princess Royal under Capt. Thomas Hudson, arrived at Nootka. She was still in port unmolested on June 24 when Martinez, having completed a fort protected by 10 cannons, a barracks, a workshop and a bakery, took formal possession in a ceremony naming the settlement Santa Cruz.

On July 2, the day the Princess Royal left Nootka, Capt. James Colnett arrived with Meares' fourth ship, the Argonaut. laden with materials for constructing a trading post and building a sloop, she also carried a force of 29 Chinese artisans who were to form the nucleus of the planned future colony of Fort Pitt.
Faced with this challenge to Spain's proclaimed rights, the ensuing confrontation between Martinez and Colnett aboard the Princess was inevitable.

Martinez placed Colnett under arrest and seized the Argonaut. And when the Princess Royal put into Nootka again on July 13, Martinez seized her too, sending both ships to Mexico as prizes, with their crews as prisoners.

Throughout these events Martinez had maintained cordial relations with the two American captains, but before the year was out he was to seize a U.S. ship, the little Fair American, and send her crew to Mexico as prisoners.

The seizures at Nootka had a long fuse which did not touch off preparations for war until February, 1790. Then, in the first of a series of diplomatic exchanges between Madrid and London, the Marquis del Campo notified Britain that Spain had seized a ship which had come to take possession of Nootka for Britain. His letter set out Spain's claim to prior right of discovery in 1774, although Perez had not landed to take possession, over Cook in 1778, who had landed but also not taken possesslon. And he called on Britain "to punish such undertakings... on these lands which have been occupied and fre quented by the Spaniards for so many years."

Britain's reply was curt. The Spanish "act of violence, spoken of in your letter," the Duke of Leeds advised del Campo, "...makes it necessary to suspend all discussions of the pretensions set forth until a just and adequate satisfaction shall have been made."

Returning to Britain, Meares presented a memorial to the House of Commons on April 30. Bristling with accusations and colored by exaggerations and distortions, it was a document calculated to inflame public opinion and promote his own demand for redress of his losses.

The British government resolved to seek "immediate and adequate satisfaction for the outrages" committed by Martinez and the House voted £1 million for whatever "the exigencies of affairs" might require.
Both countries mobilized for war, Britain by assembling a formidable fleet at Spithead - the 'Spanish armament' - and Spain by gathering its own fleet at Cadiz, which put to sea when it was learned that a small British fleet was already in the Atlantic off the northwest Spanish coast.

Both countries appealed to their allies. Britain was assured of support by Holland and Prussia, its partners in the Triple Alliance. Spain looked to France, its ally under the Family Compact of 1761, but France was in the first throes of revolution. After the national assembly declared that the right to make war or peace was vested in itself, not King Louis XVI, it was clear that Spain could not expect French support.

For Spain the distant settlement at Nootka had become the symbol of its claim to the entire Pacific coast of the Americas. In over-extending its reach to sustain that claim, however, it was dependent on the crumbling base of its American colonial empire. Revolts and uprisings, all ruthlessly suppressed -in Paraguay between 1721 and 1735, Caracas in 1749, Quito in 1765, Chile in 1776 and 1781, and the Inca insurrection in Peru led by Tupac Amarn in 1780 were precursors of the revolution that would dismember that empire in the first decades of the 19th century.

Even as the two countries prepared for war, Sebastian Francisco de Miranda, who served under General George Washington in the American War of Independence, was in London seeking British support for the struggle for inde pendence in Venezuela.

War with Britain would not be fought on the Northwest coast, but on the high seas, in the West Indies ,in Spanish colonies where hostilities might ignite revolt against oppressive Spanish rule.~
After months of negotiations, Spain finally acceded to a treaty. The Nootka convention, signed on October 28, 1790, accorded Britain the satisfaction it demanded by agreeing to compensate Meares for his losses and restore his property.

2 - The attitude of the Catholic Church toward popular struggles was expressed by the Mexico City tribunal of the Council of the Inquisition, which in 1808 denounced the concept of sovereignty of the people as 'Manifest Heresy'.

In effect, Spain relinquished its claim to absolute sovereignty over the North-west coast, for the terms of the convention allowed either power to trade and take possession over an undefined territory north of existing Spanish ports.

In Britain the treaty was criticized for its limitation of British navigational, fishing and trading rights in the vicinity of Spanish ports. In Spain it was seen as breaching the long maintained claim to absolute sovereignty.

Throughout the period of negotiations, the Spanish continued to expand and reinforce the Nootka settlement. Martinez, ordered by Flores to return to San Blas before winter, reluctantly did so in October, 1789, to find that a new viceroy, Count Revilla Gigardo, had replaced Flores and that he himself would be superseded as commandant at Nootka by Francisco de Eliza.

The new expedition ordered to Nootka was the largest Spain had sent - the frigate Conception, the supply ship San Carlos and the seized British ship, Princess Royal, renamed the Princesa ReaL Aboard was a company of 75 Catalonian Volunteers, commanded by Capt. Pedro Alberni. Subsequently, the expedition was reinforced by two more frigates, the Aranzazu and the Princesa and the schooner Saturnina, carried in sections and assembled at Nootka.

For four years, through differing interpretations of what land was to be restored, what compensation offered, and long delays in receiving instructions, the Spanish used Nootka as a base for exploring and charting the coast.

Between 1790 and 1794 a number of Spanish navigators combed the bays and inlets of the west coast south of Nootka - Manuel Quimper, who probed Juan de Fuca Strait; Eliza, who concluded that if the Northwest Passage existed, it "must be situate at no other place but through this great inlet" of Juan de Fuca, which he called the Canal de Floribanco; Jose Narvaez, the first to enter the Gulf of Georgia. (3)

Two others, Dionisio Galiano in the Sutil and Cavetano Valdes in the Merlcana, jointly explored the inside passage north to Johnstone Strait with Capt. George Vancouver after they encountered his vessels, the Discovery and the Chatham, under Lieut. Robert Broughton, off Point Grey in 1792, subsequently sharing in the first circumnavigation of Vancouver Island.

Negotiations at Nootka in August, 1792 between the two commissioners, Vancouver for Britain and Quadra, who had come from San Bias, for Spain, produced conflicting evidence, divergent interpretations and agreement only to refer the dispute back to their respective governments.

At issue was not merely the size of the land for which Meares sought compensation, but the boundary of Spanish claims. Quadra proposed Juan de Fuca Strait as a boundary, and Spain, in fact, was already preparing a settlement site, later abandoned, at NuNez Gaona in what now is Neah Bay in Washington state.

Vancouver was still awaiting new instructions in October, 1795 when he left Nootka for the last time to return to Britain. The Spanish flag was still flying over Nootka, but Spain had become an ally of Britain and Holland in their war with revolutionary France and settlement of the Nootka dispute had acquired new importance.

3 - After the independence of Mexico was proclaimed through the Plan of Ignala in 1821, Narvaez joined the revolution, entering the Mexican navy and attaining the rank of junior captain.

In February, 1793 a second Nootka convention was signed awarding 210,000 Spanish dollars compensation to Meares, whose seized vessels already had been released. And in January, 1794 a third Nootka convention stipulated that Nootka would be abandoned both by Britain and Spain.

The epilogue to the dispute was acted out at Nootka on March 28, 1795. The fort having been dismantled and the cannon loaded aboard the Spanish ships Aetiva and San Carlos, the Natives and the soldiers of the Spanish garrison gathered for a solemn ceremony.

The declaration restoring British sovereignty was signed, the Spanish flag lowered and the British flag raised. Then, entrusting his flag to Chief Maquinna, Lieut. Thomas Pierce of the British navy and Brig. General Jose Manuel de Alava, who had succeeded Quadra at San Bias, joined the garrison soldiers aboard the Activa to return to Mexico.

The Spanish had withdrawn from the contest for empire on the Northwest coast, leaving a vast territory bordered by sea and mountains open to the Canadian and British fur trading companies advancing overland from the east and the Russians thrusting southward along the coast.

Constrained to the south by the border of the newly independent United States and by the territorial monopoly of the Hudson's Bay Company to the north, the North West Company had trade through the Pacific coast as a necessary objective in its western expansion.

Meares, by establishing his post at Nootka, was giving effect to a proposal made by Sir Guy Carleton as governor of Quebec in 1768. In a letter to lord Shelburne, president of the board of trade, he suggested that British traders should push overland to the Pacific coast, locate "a good port, take its latitude, longitude and describe it so accurately as to enable our ships from the East Indies to find it out with ease, and then return the year followiug,~~(4)

The various proposals subsequently advanced for finding a way overland to the Pacific had their strongest advocates in Peter Pond and Alexander Mackenzie, both partners in the North West Company.

Decades later, Mackenzie's concept took shape, but it was not the shape he had envisioned.

After Spain and Britain withdrew, Russia contemplated and discarded the idea of occupying Nootka. Instead, perturbed by reports of British and American ships plying coasts that Russia trading companies had long considered their own, Tsar Paul 1 was persuaded to issue a 20year charter to the Russian American Company in 1799. That same year the British govemment of Wmiam Pitt the Younger authorized the establishment of a colony at Nootka which would be subsidiary to the Australian colony of New South Wales, founded as a penal settlement in 1788. The order was issued but never carried out because Britain was preoccupied with the war against France. The Russian American Company's charter gave it a monopoly of trade and settTement rivalling that of the Hudson's Bay Company. It embraced the waters, islands and territories of the North Pacific from 55 degrees north to Bering Strait, although the only Russian mainland settlements were on Prince William Sound and Cook Inlet -the site Mackenzie had proposed for the North West Company's northern-most post. (7)

Among the discretionary powers invested in the company were those of engaging in war and negotiating treaties. And to ensure the company's absolute control, only shareholders could be employed in administration of colonial affairs and competing companies were exduded from the territory under its jurisdiction.

Grigor Shelikov, the company's founder, did not live to receive the charter for which he had worked so long. From Kiakhta, the Siberian border town where Russians traded with Chinese merchants, he had gone to Okhotsk where he built his first vessel, the SL PauL The company had its beginnings in the more than 75,000 rubles from the first trading voyage, which was used to build three more vessels.

If the purpose of his next trading venture was to disabuse Catherine II of a well-founded conviction that her fur traders were ruthless in their treatment of the Aleuts, his arrival with two of the three ships at Kodiak Island in 1784 was hardly calculated to change it.

Landing at an anchorage he named Three Saints Bay, Shelikov reaped the whirlwind of hatred sewn by earlier promysloviki in ravishing the Aleut women and killing the men. His overtures of friendship, essential if he were to estab lish a colony in their midst, were spurned. Hostility became open warfare when hundreds of Aleut warriors attacked his stockade at night and in the ensuing battle, fought with spears and arrows against cannon and muskets, suffered heavy casualties before they surrendered.

Shelikov resorted to the expedient of holding chiefs aboard his vessels and taking young women hostage to deter renewed attacks. Gradually, by giving hunting gear to the Aleuts and paying them fairly for their furs, he won their confidence.

As the settlement took shape, he opened a school at which he taught the Russian language and arithmetic, while his wife Natalya taught needlework to girls whose deft fingers soon mastered the extension of basket weaving to embroidery.

7 - Court aristocrats conspired to have Paul 1 assassinated because Russian trade with Britain was threatened by his entry into an alliance with Napoleon and severence of relations with Britain.

From Kodiak, Shelikov expanded to posts on the mainland. He was chagrined when Gerasim Pribilov, in the service of the lebedev-lastochin Compafly, and not one of his own captains discovered the long sought fur seal breeding grounds on the Pribilov Islands in 1786, opening a rich new resource to more than a century of slaughter. Within a year the secret was out and Sh~ likov regained the advantage by secretly enlarging his small share in the rival company.

Shelikov wanted nothing less than an exclusive trading monopoly in Russian America. To this end he repeatedly petitioned Catherine II, assuring her that his company would build the settlements and provide the ships to secure the territory against foreign encroachment.

At court he enlisted the help of the influential Rezanov family, whose son Nikolai contrived to have himself appointed to supervise the welfare of the mis sionary priests from St Petersburg and the Siberian exiles being sent to Alas ka. The interests of the two families in acquiring the monopoly merged after Nikolai married Shelikov's youngest daughter Anna, for both the Shelikov wealth and realization of Nikolais's vaunting ambitions depended upon it.

Shelikov and Catherine II were dead before the shifting pattern of European alliances shaped by Napoleon's campaigns persuaded Paul 1, Catherine's successor, to counter British encroachment in the North Pacific. While Nikolai Restanov successfully solicited support in court circles, Shelikov's widow Natalya quietly bought up smaller companies from Irkutsk to form the United American Company, forerunner of the Russian American Company.

On distant Kodiak Island, Alexander Baranov used his sweeping powers as general manager to secure the Russian American Company's territorial claims against the North West Company's advance overland and to expand Russian influence southward along the coast and outward into the Pacific.
The son of a lowly shopkeeper, Baranov had engaged in various trading pursuits before he came to Shelikov's attention in Irkutsk. Angered by the refusal of the Irkutsk Merchants Guild to admit him to its closed social circles, only his own trading losses and the offer of 10 shares and a five-year contract induced him to become Shelikov's general manager on Kodiak Island in 1790.

Even before he reached the settlement at Three Saints Bay, Baranov's talents as an organizer and negotiator were put to the test. Shipwrecked in the Aleutian Islands en route and subsisting on fish, shelifish and roots, he spent the winter learning the Aleut language and Native ways. In the spring he negotiated with the Aleuts to provide him with three large bidarkas to take his ship wrecked crew to Kodiak.

The shipwreck was just a foretaste of the difficulties he would face. Following Shelikov's practice, he won the confidence of the Aleuts by making payments in iron for each skin brought in during the sea otter hunt. The price the fierce Kenaitze Natives of the mainland exacted for intrusion into their Prince William Sound territory was 10 Aleuts and two Russians killed.

Since the shipwreck of the Three Saints, Baranov had been without a ship and the battle with the Kenaitae convinced him of the need for one. The arrival of the Orel, built at Okhotsk by her British skipper, James Shields, and corn-missioned by Shelikov to take supplies to Kodiak, seemed the answer to his need.

Baranovs's offer was tempting enough to overcome Shields' reluctance to stay at Kodiak. If he would build a ship, he would receive sea oiler skins worth 2,000 rubles for himself and each of the five British seamen in his crew, with a bonus for himself and an additional two full shares for two years of all pelts obtained from new waters.

Disgruntled when he found that the building supplies sent by Shelikov consisted of "half a keg of tar, three kegs of pitch; not a pound of steel, not one nail, and very little iron," Baranov was not to be deterred.
Establishing a shipyard on Blying Sound in 1793, he resorted to the materials at hand - hand-hewn timbers caulked with moss, spruce gum and whale oil for pitch, iron obtained by the Natives over the ancient Bering Strait trade route, whale oil mixed with ochre for paint, and whatever canvas could be pieced together for sails.

Under Shields' direction, improvising as the need arose, a double-decked, three-masted barque took shape and in September, 1794 she was launched as the Felix, later to be sailed by Shields to a jubilant reception at Okhotsk.

Vancouver, charting Prince Williaan Sound in the summer of 1794, formed the opinion from his visits to Russian settlements that the "habits and general conduct of the Russians are not very likely to be adopted by any other maritime nations."

But the source of Baranov's success was his readiness to adapt to Native ways, to accept co-habitation with Native women, as he himself did, and to use the skills that the Native people had devised to survive in a harsh land.

His approach was also a source of his troubles. The missionary priests did not confine their complaints to the fogs and winds of the Aleutians. Their letters to St. Petersburg expressed their sorrow and anger. They were shocked by the carousing of Baranov and his companions. They were dismayed by what to them were the loose morals of the Natives. Their only solace came from the marriages and baptisms they performed among converts to an alien religion.

The exiled Siberian artisans grew rebellious in the loneliness of a land from which they had no escape. learning they were conspiring against him, Baranov confronted them, inviting them to state their grievances openly for his consideration. He argued that whatever they lacked, Alaska offered them opportunities they could never have hoped for in Old Russia. Thousands of kilometres from Old Russia, knowing that transportation in irons to Okhotsk was the alternative, the argument was persuasive.

Baranov's masterstroke, destined to determine the northern coastal boundary of the future British Columbia, was to move his headquarters from Kodiak to Sitka on what is now Baranof Island in ~799.
His decision to build a new fort at Sitka was prompted by reports that American and British ships trading with the Natives there were taking cargoes of sea oiler skins to Canton from islands within Russian territory.

Assembling a fleet of bidarkas, Baranov met with the Tlingit chiefs in their hilltop village and for the customary price of iron, beads, trinkets and liquor bought a harbor site a few kilometres away. He was troubled, however, that some American skippers were trading guns for furs.

In 1802, two years after Fort St. Michael was completed, the Thugits at Sitka and northward along the coast to Yakatut Bay rose against the Russians. Els~ where the attacks were repulsed. At Sitka, the well planned assault overwhelmed the defenders. The ~ingits set the fort on fire and killed most of the Russians. Some Aleuts escaped, but far more were taken captive.

Two American ships in the harbor, the Enterprise and the Alert, rescued some survivors. Others, including women and children who had escaped ca~ ture, were taken aboard a British vessel, the Unicorn, which surprised ~ingit canoes loaded with plundered sea otter skins, seized the furs and set sail to carry word of the attack to Kodiak~~.

Baranov resolved to retake and rebuild the settlement or, as he wrote, "die in the attempt."

The fortuitous arrival of the Neva, commanded by Capt. Yuri Lysianski, determined the outcome of the assault on the fiercely defended Thugit fort near the mouth of Indian River in 1804. One of two new Russian warships circumnavigating the world, she had separated from her sister ship, the Nadesha, to call at Kodiak. Finding that Baranov had left with four ships and a flotilla of bidarkas, Lysianski followed him to Sitka.

The thick log walls of the fort withstood the offshore bombardment from the Neva's guns and Baranov's first assault was repulsed with the loss of 10 men. Then the bidarkas towed the warship through the shallows to bring its guns to bear at close range with deadly effect The Thugit chiefs called for a truce.
Facing them on the hill, Baranov stated his terms: they must release their Aleut prisoners and abandon their hilltop village. The chiefs protested that it was their ancestral home, but Baranov was adamant Three days later the Thugit withdrew under cover of darkness, leaving their dead.

By rebuilding the Sitka settlement as New Archangel, for which he was honored by Tsar Alexander 1, Baranov accomplished his purpose. He had secured the northern coast for the Russian fur ttade and closed it to establishment of British posts.

From Fort McLeod, the North West Company was advancing its posts through the interior in what became known as the 'Columbia enterprise. Beaver were becoming scarce and the company's compelling need was to find new sources west of the Rockies. But the larger purpose was to establish a post at the mouth of the Columbia River as an outlet for the trade with China.

Achievement of that purpose became increasingly important after a U.S. expedition led by Meriwether lewis and William Clark, crossing the continent from St. Louis, reached the mouth of the Columbia in 1805.

Determined to forestall the Americans in building a fort there, the North West Company in 1807 sent a wintering partner, David Thompson, on what proved to be a four-year journey to the Columbia. As a surveyor, astronomer and mapmaker, his work left an enduring record. The urgency of his mission, however, as evidenced by the actions of his partners in Montreal, seems only to have seized him in the last year of his journey.

8 Accounts of the Unicora's role under a Capt Barber differ in particulars but agree that he extorted a ransom from Baranov for the Russians and Aleuts he had rescued.

In 1809, bent on gaining control of the Pacific Northwest fur trade for his own American fur empire, John Jacob Astor offered the North West Company one third of the stock in his newly organized Pacific Fur Company. The North West Company rejected the offer, but Astor did entice five disgrunfled partners to join his company.

By 1810, learning that Astor intended to send a ship, the Ton quin, on a trading voyage around Cape Horn to the Columbia and an overiand party from St. Louis, the North West Company implored the British government to send a ship "to secure the right of possession to Great Britain," pointing out that the ship would probably get to the Columbia before the Ton quin. Britain, embroiled in the Napoleonic wars, took no action.

At the end of his journey, rounding a point with his crew of eight voyageurs and two Iroquois on July 15,1811, Thompson found his American rivals akeady in possession and Fort Astoria under construction. Although the first party of Astor's overland expedition wo~d not reach the new fort until the following January, the Tonquin had arrived on March 25 and sailed again on her ill4ated trading cruise upcoast~~.

From the Fort Astoria base, the Americans aggressively challenged the Canadians by building rival posts throughout the interior. Spokane House, established by Thompson in 1811, found itself in fierce competition to outbid and outwit the Astorians affer they built an adjacent post. And when the Astorians established a post at Kamloops, the North Westers hastened to set up their own post close by.

Reaching northward after his second ship, the Beaver, arrived on the coast, Astor sent his representative, Wilson Price Hunt, to conclude an agreement with Baranov at Sitka whereby supplies would be traded for sealskins, which the Astorians would then ship to Canton.

Despite these initial successes, the loss of the Tonquin at Clayoquot and the failure of the Beaver to return to Fort Astoria, left the post vulnerable when the United States declared war on Britain on June 18, 1812, its expansionist spokesmen openly proclaiming the annexation of the Canadas as their aim.

Fearful of British naval action, Astor appealed unsuccessfully to President James Madison to dispatch a warship to Fort Astoria. The supply ship, the Lark, he sent at the risk of capture was lost at sea and the Astorians awaited her arrival in vain.

The British government, so reluctant to respond to the North West Company's earlier appeals, acted promptly. In March, 1813, a company ship, the Isaac Todd, left Portsmouth for the long voyage around Cape Horn under the protection first of HMS Phoebe and then HMS Raccoon. Word of their coming, conveyed by Nor' Westers who gathered to meet them, left the Astorians with

9 - The Ton quin under Capt. Jonathan Thorne sailed to Clayoquot Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island. While trading with the Native Indians aboard the ship, a dispute over the value of the furs being offered precipitated an attack in which Thorne and most of his crew were killed. Accounts differ, but apparently five surviving crew members reached the cabin and drove the Natives off. Four of the survivors escaped from the ship, although they too were later killed ashore. The frith, severely wounded, waited aboard until the Natives returned the next day and then blew up the ship, killing about 100 of them. The Natives at Claynquot Sound had been the victims of earlier violent encounters with American traders. Capt. Gray, the discoverer of the Columbia Itiver, who wintered there in 1791-92, took his revenge on the Natives for planning to seize his ship, the Colambia, by destroying 200 houses at Opitsaht.

scant choice: either they sold the post to their rivals or suffered its capture by the British.

Six weeks before HMS Raccoon appeared, the Astorian partners sold their Columbian properties for 10 percent above original cost, a total of some $58,000, effectively winding up the Pacific Fur Company on a more profitable note than its operations had produced.

While the war ended Astor's plans for dominating the fur trade with China, Baranov saw it as an opportunity to expand the Russian American Company's trade and influence.

Whenever the news reached him, Napoleon's invasion of Russia only days after the U.S. declaration of war on Britain freed his massed army to march east, had no direct effect on the company's operations. The outbreak of war between the U.S. and Britain, of which he would have learned sooner, threatened the company's trade with American ships plying the coast.

Through 'Boston Men', he let it be known that American ships could use the Russian American Company's flag to carry Russian furs along with their own from Sitka to Canton to avoid capture by British warships. By the end of the war, he had not only expanded Russian trade but used the arrangement to acquire several ships outright.

Baranov's long cherished ambition, promoted by Nikolai Rezanov after he was appointed high chamberlain, was to extend Russia's territorial claims southward to the Spanish colonial boundary around San Francisco and out to the Hawaiian Islands.

Earlier Russian navigators had visited Bodega Bay, about 100 kilometres north of San Francisco and one, Sisoi Slabodchykov, had landed there to take possession. This was the site Baranov chose for his California post after he learned that the Americans were building Fort Astoria.
Beyond asserting Russia's claims on the long coast left open by the Nootka convention, Baranov wanted a source of farm produce for the Russian settlements. The fertile lands above Bodega Bay promised to satisfy that need.~1

To build Fort Rossiya, which became known as Fort Ross, Baranov sent one of his most experienced subordinates, Ivan Kuskov, with a force of some 100 Russians and 80 Aleuts and a contingent of convicts.
Acquiring a site on the Slavyanka, now the Russian River, from the Native Indians for the reputed price of three blankets, two axes, three hoes and an assortment of beads, Kuskov erected a formidable fortified post protected by 30 cannons.

Although they cultivated some land for grain, fruits and vegetables, the skills of the Russians and Aleuts proved to be better suited to hunting than farming. In waters abounding in sea otters, they hunted their prey close to extermination within a decade. And once the profitable fur trade dwindled, the inability of Fort Ross to supply the northern settlements with produce made it an economic liability for the company.

Baranov's equally ambitious plan to gain a foothold for the company in the Hawaiian Islands and establish posts there fell apart after the government concluded that Russia lacked the naval power to secure expansion to the islands against her maritime rivals. The directors of the Russian American Company, however, did not let Baranov forget that the failed venture had cost them 200,000 rubles.

10 - Russian shadows on the British Northwest Coast of North America 1810 1890 by Glynn Barratt ~niversiIy of British CoIllmbia Press, 1983) p.12.

Beset by failing health, disheartened by the setbacks to his plans, the man who consoh.dated the Russian American Company into a great trading monop oly offered no opposition when the directors decided he was no longer capable of managing its affairs. His simple epitaph, after he died at sea in 1819, was written by the poet Fushkin, who noted in his diary: "Baranov is dead. A pity -he was an honest citizen and an intelligent man."

Except for American ships flying the Russian American Company's flag of convenience, possession of Fort Astoria under its new name, Fort George, gave the North West Company unchallenged access to the Chinese market. Its vessel, the Columbia, traded with the Spanish in California, the Russians in California and Alaska and the Hawaiians in Oahu. But the company complained bitterly that restrictions imposed by the East India Company's monopoly over the Chinese trade "caused expenses which the trade could not bear.

Alter 1816 it reverted to an earlier pracfice of shipping furs through a U.S. firm out of a U.S. port to circumvent the East India Company's restrictions. In the past, the port had been New York, Boston or Philadelphia, but by treating the Columbia as U.S. territory, the company got around the restrictions, ship ping its furs from Fort George to Canton through a U.S. firm.

In 1818, the fiction became the reality. The Treaty of Ghent required Britain and the U.S. to return all places taken during the war. The U.S. demanded the return of Fort Astoria and when Britain protested that it had not been seized but acquired in a commercial transaction, the U.S. sent a warship, the Ontario, to occupy the post.

The dispute, ultimately resolved without prejudice to either government's claims in the Oregon Territory, ended in agreement that any part of the territory would "be free and open for the term of 10 years ... to the vessels, citizens and subjects of the two powers...

Fort Astoria had been returned, but the North West Company remained in occupation, a fact that rankled with the expansionists in the U.S. Congress.

The U.S. invasion of Canada had been repelled, former president Thomas Jefferson's easy assumption that it would be "a mere matter of marching" dispelled by a popular resistance that evoked a new sense of Canadian identity. Of the 8,000 regular troops in the British forces, half were raised in the Canadas and another 4,000 militiamen were engaged in the fighting to defend their homeland~"

Despite its failure to win the Canadas, as earlier it had been unable to enlist them in its own war for independence, the U.S. consolidated the concessions it won from the peace to continue its expansionist surge.

Driven by land-hungry settlers, eastern land speculators and southern plantation owners seeking to expand their slave system, the surge overwhelmed the fierce resistance of the Native Indian peoples and broke down the crumbling ramparts of colonial empires.

11 - The Founding of Canado: Beginnings to 1815 by Stanley B. Ryerson (Progress Books, Toronto,
1960) p.312.

In 1803, three years after Napoleon seized the territory from Spain, the U~S. purchased Louisiana from France for $15 million. In 1819, Spain reluctantly conceded Florida, aiready occupied by American settlers, upon payment of $5 million in compensation to Spanish colonial landowners. And that same year Spain ceded to the U.S. all its claims to territory east and north of the 42nd parallel, which was designated as the boundary of Spanish California.

Although it would not be presented for another quarter century, the U.S. was preparing its claim to the whole of the Oregon Territory.

In January, 1821, a committee of the U.S. House of Representatives reporting on a resolution referred to it, submitted its findings on "the situation of the settlements on the Pacific ocean, and the expediency of occupying the Columbian River."

Reporting a bill to authorize occupation of the Columbia River, "a position of the utmost importance," the committee's findings were significant for posing a Russian threat to Spanish California to justify its argument for U.S. expansion to the Pacific coast.

The effect of Russia's pursuit of commerce, the committee asserted, "...has been felt everywhere, no labor, care or expense is avoided to make tributary the four quarters of the globe; forts, magazines seem to arise on that (Asian) coast as if by magic; with an army of a million of men, she sits not only in proud security as it regards Europe, and menaces the Turk, the Persian, the Japanese and Chinese, but even the King of Spain's dominions in North America are equally easy of access and equally exposed to her fearful weight of power..."

To support this argument, the report expounded on the military strength of the settlements Russia had built at New Archangel (Sitka) and Bodega Bay (Fort Ross) for protection of her fur trade with China, asserting that "she has found it expedient to occupy one of the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands which not only enables her to maintain her positions, but to command the whole northern part of the Pacific Ocean."

By establishing a settlement at the mouth of the Columbia, the U.S. "might reap all the benefits of this trade" at a relatively small expense. Citing Meares' use of Chinese artisans at Nootka three decades earlier, the report suggested that "population could be acquired from China, by which the arts of peace would at once acquire strength and influence, and make visible to the aborigines the manner in which their wants could be supplied...

"...it is believed they would willingly, nay, gladly embrace the opportunity of a home in America, where they have no prejudices, no fears, no restraint in opinion, labor, or religion."

Congress voted down the bill, but its aims, encompassed by the concept of Manifest Destiny, were not rejected, merely deferred.

Distant from the travelled sea-lanes and girdled by mountains, British Columbia stood apart from the civilized world until late in the eighteenth century. In the year 1749, no government official in London could have foreseen that it would be desirable to establish a British colony on the north-western seaboard of the North American continent one hundred years later, for no one knew in 1749 that a continuous coastline extended northward from California to Alaska, If the new French maps were accurate, the land mass between 470 and 530 North Latitude was broken by a great "sea of the west" penetrating to the heart of the continent. Perhaps the North West Passage so long sought to shorten voyages to the Orient could be found in this bay: the reward of £20,000 offered to merchant vessels by the British Parliament in 1745 for the discovery of a passage lying west of Hudson Bay still lay unclaimed.

Had the facts been known, there would have been little to encourage a voyage of discovery to the remote region. Off the coast of British Columbia, the Pacific Ocean completely belies the name given to it by Magellan. Whipped by cruel winds, the waters of the sea strike islands that rise as the peaks of sub-merged mountain chains, or attack an indented mainland shoreline, swirling at the base of cliffs and dashing into narrow inlets and straits. Even on summer days fog may obscure rocky headlands or the few stretches of sandy beach on Vancouver Island and the Queen Charlotte Islands. At the base of towering snowcapped mountains surrounding the deep waters of mainland iniets, a coniferous forest soaks up drenching rain precipitated by clouds blown in from the sea; the Aleutian and Kurile Islands, which provide what is almost a land bridge between North America and Asia, are exposed to the full blast of conflicting weather systems. Between islands, and between islands and mainland, rip tides and currents make the navigation of passages hazardous. Shoals used to lie at the mouth of the mighty Fraser River. A coast of indescribable beauty, it offers almost every kind of natural challenge to explorer and mariner. Its products are the products of northern seas and forests, and none of these may be obtained without fortitude and effort.

Farther south, on islands and along coastlines exposed to a warmer sun and bathed by gentler waters, European merchant adventurers had for years been picking up cargoes of gold and silver, pearls, spices, logwoods and silks. The richest harvests were in Spanish hands, for since the days of the Admiral of the Ocean Sea, Spain had extended her control from the West Indies across the Isthmus of Panama, south to Peru and the valley of the Plate, and north to Mexico and California. Annually from the Philippines, the Manila Galleon sailed to Acapulco, carrying delicate Chinese porcelains, multi-coloured silks and fragrant teas to exchange for Mexican and Peruvian gold and silver.

Across the Pacific Ocean, the Portuguese who had been the first to use the Cape of Good Hope route to the Spice Islands, China and Japan, had withdrawn to seaports on the Indian Ocean. The Dutch, still masters of the Asiatic archipelago, controlled the great commerce built on the valuable spiceries. Their explorers had already discovered the shore-lines of Australia, Tasmania and NewZealand, but Dutch maritime power was waning, and no great advantage would be taken of discoveries in the new lands. Eastward, the British East India Company tightened its grip on the India and the China trade and, to the detriment of the French, advanced political control in India. Its vigour contrasted with the weakness of the South Sea Company, its only British competitor trading in Pacific waters. The South Sea Company was now chiefly a financial institution, and had almost ceased to develop the fisheries off the South American coast or to trade in bar iron with the southern Spanish colonies.

As eastern cargoes rose in value, the centre of the British Empire's trade shifted from the Atlantic to the Indian and Pacific Oceans, and interest revived in discovering a new seaway to the Far East. While Spain controlled the Isthmus of Panama, there were only two approaches to the Pacific Ocean for British ships. One, through the Straits of Magellan or round Cape Horn which Elizabethan buccaneers had used to harry Spanish treasure ships and ravage towns-was too lengthy for regular trade; the other, round the Cape of Good Hope, which the ships of the British East India Company used, was legally under the control of the Dutch East Indies Company.

Since the voyages of Luke Fox and Thomas James in 1631, there had been little hope of finding a channel to connect Hudson Bay and the Pacific Ocean. The Hudson's Bay Company's men had been in and around the bay's western shores since 1670, but as yet no servant of the Company had reported the existence of a waterway to the west or to the south. Two further prospects remained to be investigated: a route might be found to the north of Hudson Bay or, what was more likely, the "Mer de L'Ouest" of the French maps might be established for fact. Not even the Admiralty knew that the cartographers, in placing the great bay on their maps, had worked from the fabrications of the Greek pilot Juan de Fuca, who claimed that he had found such a strait between 470 and 480 North Latitude in 1592, and of "Admiral" Bartholomew de Fonte, who had written that a river which he named "Los Reyes" could be entered at 530 North Latitude.
While the British made their plans to launch a new search for the North West Passage, royal orders from Madrid stirred indolent Spanish government officials in Mexico to fresh activity.

The Rim of Christendom had long remained fixed at the SonoraArizona boundary, and little had been done to consolidate Spain's ~osition in Alta California or to make the Spanish Lake secure. No Spanish ship had followed Vizcaino's track of 1603 to the Oregon coast Startled by hearing from the Spanish ambassador at St. Petersburg that Russian fur-traders, promishlenniki, had advanced to the Kurile and Aleutian Islands, Carlos III decided that the time had come to extend northward from San Diego and Monterey the line of militarized posts and Franciscan missions. It would be well, too, for navigators to explore the northern coastline to see if new harbours could be discovered which would be useful for the Pacific commerce. The need for new routes was not so pressing as for the British, but transhipment costs were mounting for tea, which was becoming increasingly important as the main commodity in the China trade. Unloaded from the Manila galleons in Pacific ports, it was too bulky and expensive an article to carry across the Isthmus of Panama for reloading on ships of the Atlantic fleet.

The Russian fur-hunting operations which had aroused the curiosity and uneasiness of the Spaniards and led their king to order a reconnaissance of northern shores, were the incidental result of scientific expeditions which the Imperial Russian government had sent out in 1764 and 1768 to gather information about the lands and the peoples on the eastern fringes of Asia. The Russian drive to the Pacific, starting about 1 ~8o from the Urals, had had sufficient momentum to reach Kamchatka and cross to the Aleutian Islands. In Asia, the Russians failed to gain control of the Amur River, the great waterway leading to the Pacific, but being more realistic than Englishmen and Spaniards, and even Frenchmen who dreamed of discovering new waterways, they resigned themselves to sledding trade goods and furs across Siberian snows.

From the walled and impregnable Chinese Empire which was so reluctant to have its ancient civilization disturbed by contact with a cruder western world, the Russians had gained some commercial privileges. For a while their Emperor's caravans were allowed to go to Pekin; then they were stopped; after an interval private trading was permitted at Kiakhta on the Chinese-Siberian border. It was the desire to develop this
barter trade that attracted fur-hunters to rocky, unwooded islands, infested with Arctic foxes, where, as Vitus Bering found, the sands were too cold to warm a man stricken with scurvy. Something was known of the value of the furs to be found there for survivors of the tragic Bering-Chirikov expedition of 1741 had brought back fine peltries to St. Petersburg. Of the geography of the area, the traders had only a hazy impression: they knew that Bering had proved in 1728 that no land connection exists between Asia and America and that he had discovered Mount St. Elias on the mainland in 1741. But the Bering Sea was still unmapped, and not until Captain Cook's visit to Unalaska Island in 1778 would they realize the fur wealth of Prince William Sound or desire to claim that district for the Russian Crown. Encouraged by lack of official trade regulations, they continued their quiet operations in the face of danger and risk, gradually drawing the Alaskan Islands, and then Alaska itself, into the Asian orbit.

Spain responded to this encroachment into her territorial waters by organizing the Department of San Blas to supervise and outfit expeditions for northern explorations and investigation, and to supply the new California posts. From the warm port of San Blas, the Viceroy of New Spain, Antonio Bucareli y Ursua, Conde de Cordova, sent sailors north through stormy seas to discourage Russian incursions and to chart new coastlines. The first of these expeditions set out in the spring of 1774 under the command of Juan Josef Perez Hernandez, veteran of the Manila-Acapulco run and explorer of the coastline of northern California. As the Santiago approached ~ North Latitude, on July 17, 1774, a Franciscan friar who had joined the expedition at Monterey caught, through fog and lowering skies, the first recorded glimpse of the Queen Charlotte Islands. Tempestuous seas and the sickness of the crew forced the ship to turn back. Sailing south, Perez came on August 8 to a safe anchorage at "San Lorenzo", near the entrance to the body of water which Captain Cook later named Nootka Sound. Here he traded with the natives for furs, but made no landing.

The Santiago went north again in the spring of 1775. Her new commander, Bruno de Hezeta, a naval expert from Spain, decided to return to Mexico when at about 470 North Latitude, he became separated from his consort, the Sonora. Drifting off course, the Santiago sighted mountains on Vancouver Island before she found the coastline near the mouth of the Columbia River. The tiny thirty-six-foot Sonora, commanded by Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, the most intrepid of Spanish explorers in the North Pacific, pushed on until she reached Alaska.

From the two expeditions, the authorities in New Spain gleaned some information about the configuration of a northern coastline. For the most part, only the shore-lines of Vancouver Island, the more northerly islands and part of Alaska had been seen. Interest in searching for the western sea flagged when the ships reported that neither coming nor going had they found the Strait of Juan de Fuca. For the time being, the Viceroy was satisfied with Quadra's act of possession at 57° 20' and with Perez's discovery of a good harbour, and instead of immediately sending another expedition, the government put its efforts into founding a presidio and mission at San Francisco. The knowledge that the northern Indians would exchange furs of fine lustre for trinkets, pieces of cloth or the abalone shells that were so easily obtained at Monterey and at Carmel was not utilized, and until 1789 no action was taken either to make formal claim to Nootka Sound or to plant a colony there.

While Spanish troops and colonists made their way overland from Sonora to San Francisco, Captain James Cook was outfitting ships for his third Pacific voyage. With national pride bolstered by victories over the French in both North America and India, and by new claims to lands in the South Pacific, Parliament in 1776 extended to ships of the Royal Navy opportunity to compete for the reward offered for discovering an entrance to the mid-continent. No one yet suspected that the rebellion of the American colonists would drag Great Britain into a prolonged war which would turn into a contest with France, Spain and Holland. Cook's scientific and exploratory work had been recognized by the Royal Society, and he had aLLracted attention by keeping scurvy under control during his second Pacific voyage. On that voyage, as well as on his third, he used the new Harrison chronometer by which longitude west from Greenwich could be charted more accurately than by lunar observation. The Admiralty supplied him with the obsolescent Resolution, which he had used on his second voyage, and with the Discovery, a sturdy and manoeuvrable Whitby collier, just under 300 tons. All things considered, there seemed every prospect that this expedition would end for all time speculation about the location of the fabled passage to Cathay.

In a leisurely progress towards North America, Captain Cook spent a year in the South Seas. After leaving Tahiti, he discovered some of the Sandwich Islands in January, 1778, and then set sail for New Albion. He reached the Oregon coast just below 45 e North Latitude and, before winds drove him off shore, named Cape Foulweather and Cape Perpetua. On March 22, he named Cape Flattery, but missed the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Once more winds drove him to sea. A week later, he found shelter in Nootka Sound, near Perez's San Lorenzo.

At Resolution Cove, Captain Cook's men "perceived no frost in any of the low ground".1 On the contrary, "vegetation proceeded very briskly". Indians greeted them, paddling canoes "with their utmost strength and activity". One welcoming chief stood in a canoe, wearing a mask and shaking a rattle, and bawling "most vociferously". Sea-otter peltries and other furs were offered to "King George's men". The natives wore nose rings of iron, brass and copper, and had iron chisels and knives, as well as two silver spoons, but Captain Cook could find no evidence of direct contact with other Europeans. Impressed with the friendliness of the Indians, he planned a month's stop-over to caulk the leaking Resolution and to brew spruce beer.

In spite of "manifest indications of an approaching storm", Captain Cook put to sea again on the evening of April 26 and coasted rapidly through strong gales, squalls and rain towards 6o0 North Latitude. On May 9, where the coast turns to the west at Mount St. Elias, he commenced a careful survey and search for a waterway. Briefly, he stopped at Kaye's Island, to place at the foot of a tree on a small eminence a bottle containing the names of his ships, the date of discovery and two silver twopenny pieces of English coin. On completing the exploration of Prince William Sound, he realized on May 17 that he was "upward of 52° leagues westward of any part of Baffin's, or of Hudson's Bay, and whatever passage there may be, it must be, or at least part of it must lie to the north of latitude 72 deg. Who could expect to find a passage or strait of such extent?" By August 9 he was at the narrowest part of Bering Strait, having followed Bering's route north of the chain of Aleutian Islands. In these few weeks, he had proved beyond doubt that no break exists in the Alaskan coastline, and that the Alaskan peninsula is part of North America. No entrance could be found through the ice-pack in Bering Strait or in the Asian side of the Strait. On his return to refit at the Aleutian Islands, he met a Russian trader who informed him that Russians were hunting furs on northern islands.

After Captain Cook's death at the island of Hawaii on February 14, 1779, Captain Charles Clerke carried on exploration during the second season. The ships were again blocked by ice at about 70°, the point reached the year before. Since they had been following the Asian coastline, they turned to examine the Arctic shores of Siberia, but after a short voyage returned to Petropavlovsk.

Captain Cook had done his work thoroughly; no waterway existed north of 60°, and if one existed at all, it must lie in the neighbourhood of 48° or 49°. So long as Great Britain was at war, no ship could be spared for a further search. At last, on January 1, 1790, a commander was appointed for a second naval expedition. The Spanish Armament Crisis delayed his departure; in December, Captain George Vancouver was chosen for a combined diplomatic mission and scientific voyage.

The journals of Captain Cook's last voyage were published in 1784. Disappointment over the great mariner's failure to discover the long-desired sea passage was somewhat offset when it was found that they contained good charts of the North Pacific, remedies for the treatment of scurvy, and substanti~l evidence that the new instruments made navigation safer. Although this information was valuable, much more int~rest was aroused by a fortuitous reference to sea-otter furs, obtainable by barter at Nootka Sound, Prince William Sound and Cook's Inlet, which sold for high prices in China. Within Spain's "closed sea" lay a new and unsuspected treasure trove. Almost immediately British joint stock companies were organized to finance fur-trading ventures to the distant North West Coast. Sea-otter furs purchased at Whampoa from seamen on board the Resolution and the Discovery apparently reached Canton in 1779. In 1783, Pekin obtained peltries from Russian sources. Overnight, the wearing of these lustrous furs became high fashion in China. Merchants clamoured to supply the demands of mandarins and of ladies of quality. The long peltries were used, without piecing, to make full-length mandarin robes. Narrow lengths of furs were wanted to trim exquisitely embroidered silk gowns and to entwine with pearls to make handsome sashes; even the tips of tails were sought to enhance the attractiveness of caps and mittens. Funds obtained from the sales of furs enabled traders to purchase teas, silks, nan-keens and "chinoiserie".

As trans-Pacific commerce emerged, the waters off the western littoral became a zone of international competition. Their proximity to the fur fields and their good fortune in having in their employ the Aleuts, who had mastered the science of killing the shy marine animals by shooting arrows from kayaks, gave the Russians in Alaska the initial advantage in developing the China market. The greater variety of their trade goods, however, soon enabled British traders to persuade the Haida and other northern Indians to barter skins on such favourable terms that they were able to divert importation into China from Kiakhta to Canton. No longer subject to restrictions placed on the China trade by the East India Company, Boston merchants inaugurated a triangular trade between New England, the North West Coast and China. Rivalry to gain the favour of the Indians on the North West Coast intensified as the lines of Russian, British and American private endeavour converged.

Marine fur-traders disregarded Spain's traditional rights in the Pacific Ocean with impunity. Since Elizabeth's time, Englishmen had maintained their right to make settlements at places not in the possession of a civilized nation, and the marauding incursions of Drake and Cavendish, Anson and Byron, had won their applause. Americans were no more inclined than Englishmen to respect a claim that was based on Pope Alexander VI's bull Inter Caetera of 1493, dividing the known world between two great Catholic powers, Spain and Portugal. Private Russian fur-trading companies ignored Spain's monopoly. For their Alaskan operations, they were now trying to enlist the support and protection of the Imperial Russian government.

The most aggressive of British traders were as ready to violate the rights of British companies and to circumvent Chinese regulations as they were to defy Spain. The South Sea Company had sole British right to trade and to fish in an area extending 300 marine leagues west of the shores of North America and South America. In this preserve lay provisioning islands and sea-otter fields. The East India Company had the privilege of exclusive British commerce east of the Cape of Good Hope and the sole British right to purchase tea in China. At Canton, the only Chinese port open to Western Europeans, the expulsion of traders who were not attached to the Company's Factory virtually eliminated private trade after 1780. Chinese regulations interfered with the freedom of enterprise by channelling foreign trade through the Hong merchants. All these restrictions served as an invitation to interlopers.

The journals of Cook's voyage contained a suggestion that the East India Company make the marine fur trade an adjunct of its China trade. Of{icers of the Company had the trade's prospects investigated by licensed private traders. On conditions similar to those of its "Country Trade", the Company permitted two groups of merchants to engage in trading ventures. Early in 178;, the Committee of Directors granted Richard Cadman Etches and a group of London merchants licences for two ships, in return for a bond of £20,000 and a pledge that journals and logs of the voyage would be turned over to the Company.2 After securing a licence from the South Sea Company also and permission from the British government, the King George's Sound Company acquired two large ships, the King George, 320 tons, and the Queen Charlotte, 200 tons, and selected as their captains, Nathaniel Portlock and George Dixon, both of whom had served under Captain Cook. Portlock, the commander of the expedition, was instructed to establish factories at suitable places, King George's Sound (Nootka Sound) being suggested as a "centrical location". He did not carry out this part of the plan. The King George and the Queen Charlotte arrived at Canton in November, 1787, with the largest cargo of furs to reach that port up to that time. Their 2,500 peltries brought only $50,000.8 The ships then freighted Chinese goods to England. Before they arrived, Etches sent two smaller vessels, the Prince of Wales and the Princess Royal, to trade for furs.

Shortly after Etches received his licences, the Council of Bombay agreed to aid James Charles Stuart Strange and his patron David Scott, a Director of the Company, with a ship, soldiers, and guns and ammunition.4 Strange's ships, the Captain Cook, a snow of 350 tons, and the Experiment, 150 tons, sailed from Bombay in December, 1785, and arrived at Nootka, after a number of mishaps, on July 6, 1786. There a young surgeon, John Mackay, was left to winter among the Indians and prepare the establishment of a post during the following season. Returns from this expedition were not sufficiently high to warrant further outlay, so Strange abandoned his plan to build a depot for furs. Losing interest in the fur trade, the East India Company now turned its attention to making the tea trade with England more remunerative.

John Henry Cox, an interloping trader, found that the Company's indifference suited his purpose very well. Cox had been granted special permission to enter Canton in 1782 for a period of three years so that he might dispose of his firm's stock of singsongs" clocks, watches and jewelled toy automata.5 Not long after his arrival, he set up an agency for "Privileged Trade" for East India Company officials and for licensed Country Traders and then purchased two ships to freight cotton and opium from Calcutta to sell to private Chinese merchants. When he heard in 1785 of the profits that Cook's men had made from the sales of sea-otter furs, he interested some of his East India Company friends in the fur trade, and returned to Canton to outfit the first trading-vessel to be sent to the North West Coast. Captain James Hanna was engaged to sail the 6o-ton Sea Otter to Nootka to barter iron bars for furs. There he did a profitable trade; after he used firearms, the Indians near Cook's Friendly Cove parted with 56o peltries which sold for $20,400 on his return to Macao,6 the Portuguese port in Canton Roads. Satisfied with his success, Cox organized the Bengal Fur Company with further assistance obtained in India. John Meares, a retired lieu-tenant in the Royal Navy, joined him in 1786.

The Bengal Fur Company's first ships sailed from Bengal in March, 1786. Meares made his way north in the snow Nootka to Russian posts at Unalaska, and then wintered in Prince William Sound. The following May, Pordock and Dixon found him there, his ships iced in, twenty-three members of his crew dead of scurvy and the rest facing starvation. Portlock provided food and supplies; then instead of seizing the Nootka as the law permitted, exacted a promise of an immediate return to China. After pledging his word and paying a bond, Meares continued trading. His consort, the snow Sea Otter, Captain William Tipping, was lost after leaving Prince William Sound. Hanna returned safely to Canton from his second voyage to Nootka, but with only a small cargo since Strange's ships had preceded him. The Lark, which had sailed from Bengal to join Hanna, was wrecked near Petropavlovsk. The season was a disappointing one for Cox: two ships with 100 hands were lost, and his returns amounted only to $22,000. Another blow was to fall; before 1787 ended, he was expelled from Canton. But his firm continued in existence, his business now being carried on under the protection of foreign flags, first by John Reid, a former member of the Bengal Marine, a naturalized Austrian subject, appointed Austrian Consul, and then by Daniel Beale, a naturalized Prussian subject, appointed Prussian Consul.

Reid and Beale soon victimized Charles William Barkley, a young sea captain who left the service of the East India Company in 1786 to take command of the imperial Eagle, a former East Indiaman of 400 tons. Barkley arrived at Nootka in July, .1787, with his seventeen-year-old bride, the first European woman to reach British Columbia's shores. His ship flew Austrian colours, and as Captain James Colnett, captain of the Prince of Wales, soon discovered, had no licence. Colnett did not embarrass Barkley, since he had found him both courteous and civil, and he was allowed to proceed to Macao with a cargo of 700 skins, valued at $30,000. There he discovered that the owners were ready to sell the vessel in which he had invested £3,000, since they had "found they were not warranted in trading to China and the North West coast, even under the Austrian flag, the change being well known and for what purpose".8 Although he later received some compensation, the fittings and stores which he had laid in the ship at his own expense, as well as his nautical instruments and charts, were turned over to John Meares, "who was in the same employ, though not acknowledged to be so."

In the autumn of 1787, heavy importations of sea-otter furs at Canton depressed market prices. Meares met the challenge of competition by selling the Nootka and with the assistance of merchants living in India bought two new ships. Through a Portuguese resident at Bombay, he acquired Portuguese flags and papers, supposedly to permit his ships to take advantage of lower port charges at Canton. An unidentified organization, "The Merchant Proprietors", formulated instructions which seem to have been intended to protect him against interference by licensed British traders. He now planned to develop the marine fur trade, as the Russians did, from a land base. Ice-free Nootka Sound, where furs were readily available and where John Mackay had resided for a winter without molestation by the Indians, suited his purpose better than remote and inhospitable Prince William Sound.

Meares arrived at Nootka in May, 1788, with European and Chinese artisans, materials for constructing a schooner of 40 tons for coast-wise trade, and lumber to build a shelter. From the famous Indian chief Maquinna he acquired-he later said bought-a "spot of ground"10 on which to erect a house, which was later described as a tolerably strong garrison or place of defence. He found considerable activity in the Sound. The small trading-ships of the Etches company appeared, and at the close of the season, the first American ships, Columbia Rediviva and the [~dy Washington, arrived from Boston. During most of the summer he traded from a centre in Clayoquot Sound which he called Port Cox, and then late in August he was joined at Nootka by his second ship, the Jphigenia, which had been in Alaskan waters. On September 20, the North West America, the first boat built on the North West Coast, was launched. Four days later, he sailed with furs for China, leaving the Iphigenia and the North West America to winter in the Sandwich Islands.

Shortly after Meares's return to Canton, John Etches, who had travelled as supercargo of his company's smaller ships, arrived. Meares lost no time in making an arrangement between the firm of Cox and Beale and a company which had properly licensed ships. John Etches agreed to keep the Princess Royal in the fur trade and to transfer Captain Colneft from the Prince of Wales, which was returning to England with tea, to a new ship, the Argonaut. Colnett was to join Captain William Douglas of the iphigenia at Nootka Sound, and there build a factory, "a Solid establishment, and not one that is to be abandon'd at pleasure".11

Unknown to Meares, other plans were being made to build a post at Nootka. The fourth Spanish northern expedition returned to San Bias in 1788, reporting that it had heard at the Shele-khov post at Three Saints Bay in Cook's Inlet, that the Russians intended to occupy Nootka to forestall English traders. Since Spain had just conceded possession of Prince William Sound to Russia, Florez, the Viceroy of New Spain, decided that action must be taken before there was further loss of territory. Relations with Britain had improved since 1786, but he feared the Russians and suspected that the Americans wanted to obtain a foothold at the only good port so far discovered north of San Francisco.

Esteban Jos~ Martinez was chosen to build the military post. A conscientious pilot and mariner, Martinez had just completed the Alaskan voyage. Fifteen years earlier, he had guided the Santiago safely into the harbour of San Lorenzo, and Perez had named a point to the south of the harbour in his honour. He left San Bias in February, 1789, with a promise that reinforcements would be sent by sea, and that troops, missionaries and colonists would arrive by land. Only part of this support arrived.

Martinez found on his arrival that Nootka Sound had become headquarters for foreign trading-vessels. Jealous of his nation's rights, he had good reason for suspicion when he discovered that one of these, the iphigenia, although obviously commanded by a Britisher, carried papers signed by the Portuguese governor of Macao and sailing orders in Portuguese containing an offensive suggestion as to the treatment of Spanish and British ships. At first he hesitated to take action; then he decided to seize the ship.

When her captain gave security, she was released to sail to China after her furs had been transferred to the American ship Columbia which was standing by. On June 8, the North West America returned from a trading-cruise. She also had Portuguese papers~ and her ownership appeared to be the same as that of the Iphigenia. After seizure, her crew was sent to China on one of the American ships, and she was converted to Spanish service under a new name. By June 24, the gun emplac~ment built by the Spaniards was finished, and the buildings and fort were nearing completion. In an elaborate ceremony, Martinez took possession of Nootka Sound and of "adjoining districts, seas, rivers, ports, bays, gulfs, archipelagoes". Late in the evening of July 2, Captain Colnett arrived from China, passing the licensed Princess Royal as she sailed out of the Sound. Near its entrance, he met Martinez, who was looking for his reinforcements. On being questioned, Colnett claimed that he had authority from the King of England to take possession of the Sound, and instructions from Meares and a group of merchants at Macao to found a colony. The following day, after a quarrel, Martinez seized Colnett's ship, ran up the Spanish flag and removed twenty-nine Chinese workmen. On her return, the Princess Royal was also seized. After sending the Argonaut and the Princess Royal to San Blas as prizes, Martinez did some exploratory work, and then abandoned his settlement on October 31. This proved to be a tactical error, since Spain did not remain in continuous occupation of the site.

During this misadventure, Martinez had been irascible, haughty, and violent. From his point of view, all foreign vessels were engaged in contraband trade, yet he interfered little with American ships which were in the neighbourhood. It was the perfidy of British traders that aroused his ammus. He could hardly have known that the events in which he had played such a large part would focus the attention of the capitals of Europe on a strip of seacoast whose existence had been known only for ten or fifteen years. More important, they would invite scrutiny of Spain's proud assertion, on the grounds of traditional right and exploration, of exclusive sovereignty, navigation and commerce in the Pacific Ocean, and give Britain the opportunity to argue for a principle of possession based on continuous occupation and use.
Through the British charg6 d'affaires at Madrid, an incomplete report of the seizure reached the British government late in January, 1790. On February ii, the Spanish ambassador presented a stiff note, complaining of the invasion of Spain's territorial rights and demanding restraint of British expeditions. Pitt vacillated for a while; then, realizing that the popularity of his administration had waned since the Regency Crisis of 1789, and that British prestige must be maintained in Europe, he decided to take a strong stand.12 On February 26, he asked for a complete restoration of property and satisfaction for the insult to the British flag. About the same time, a report reached England that Spain was garrisoning her North American forts and preparing a fleet of twelve ships of the line.

Before the British government was informed that Madrid had instructed the Viceroy to release the captured vessels as an act of courtesy, John Meares, whose trickery had caused the embrogho, arrived in London to claim indemnity. His Memorial was hurriedly prepared, and printed at government expense. Concealing his firm's illicit activities, he complained bitterly about seizure of British property and harsh treatment of prisoners. When he inflated the figure of his losses, Captain George Dixon, who had not forgotten their meeting in Prince William Sound, could not restrain his indignation. Through pamphlets, he attacked Meares's honesty, his veracity, and even his nautical ability-he was capable, said Dixon, of making only a "butter-pat" of a chart.13

Impressed by Meares's representation, Pitt decided on April 30 to mobilize the Navy. On May 5, after a royal message, the House almost unanimously voted a grant of £2,000,000. Fourteen ships of the line were readied, forts in the colonies prepared, and Holland and Prussia, Britain's allies in the Triple Mliance, were asked for support. British claims were extended to include restoration of property, indemnity for damages, and surrender of Spanish claims to exclusive sovereignty so that all European nations might occupy unsettled areas and trade with the settlements of other nations. On June 24 the Spanish government recognized the British claim to satisfaction as the preliminary to negotiation, but no further progress was made for three months. When it became clear that the Bourbon Coalition had been shattered by the Revolution in France, Pitt threatened war. Finally, on October 28, the two governments reached agreement. Spain's dominion was limited to discoveries secured by treaties and immemorial possession. Buildings and tracts of land on the North West Coast of which British subjects were dispossessed about April, 1789, were to be restored; reparations paid for property destroyed; and the navigation and fishery in the Pacific Ocean opened to British subjects except within ten leagues of the coasts occupied by Spain.14 By subsequent agreement, Meares and his associates received compensation amounting to $210,000.

The actual limits of Spain's possessions still remained to be established. Spaniards had reoccupied Nootka Sound at the height of the crisis, and there they were busy rebuilding the fort of San Miguel. But Spain had waited too long to protect the fringe of her empire: British traders were everywhere in the Pacific, as ready to loot tropical islands of spices and foodstuffs as they were northern reefs and shoals of sea otters. With the British government sponsoring the cause of freer trade, they would invade the trade routes of Spain's royal companies and reduce the volume of Chinese goods that reached Spain through the Philippines. Events in France foretold the doom of special privilege for Crown and Church in European states and colonies; those at Nootka, the doom of commercial monopoly in the Pacific.

For its own subjects, the British government freed trade in the whole Pacific area by limiting the rights exercised by the East India Company. During the Spanish Armament Crisis, British shipping and manufacturing interests, convinced that the charges preferred against Warren Hastings were proof of the East India Company's misrule in India, had pressed for a share in the India trade. This right was recognized in the early years of the nineteenth century. In 1793 Parliament forced the East India Company to grant licences for the fur trade on more liberal terms, and new Nootka Sound Regulations were prepared m 1795. Cox's firm, which, after his death in 1791, continued to do business at Canton as a "Prussian" company, helped to undermine the Company's position in China. Exclusive rights m the China trade were surrendered after 1833.

The war which developed between Britain and France in 1793 prevented integration of the North West Coast's economy into that of the Far East under the auspices of free British trade. British seamen were withdrawn from merchant ships for naval service, and the abandonment of Nootka left British traders without a land base for collecting and processing furs. As American manufacturing expanded and as American traders learned to adjust supplies of trade goods to meet the tastes of the natives, control of the sea-otter trade passed into their hands. The "Boston men", like Colnett, provided the Indians with muskets, powder and shot,15 and encouraged an indiscrinnate slaughter of sea otters. In some instances, they joined forces with the Russians to poach in Spain's California waters. By the close of the Napoleonic wars, the end of the first staple industry of the North Pacific was in sight.

During the five short years that a Spanish governor and Spanish troops occupied Nootka Sound, Spain's long-delayed search for Fuca's Strait and for Fonte's Strait was prosecuted energetically. In 1790, Manuel Quimper used the Princess Royal, which had been returned to Nootka for recovery by Colnett, to chart the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca. In the name of Carlos IV, he took possession of points in Sooke Inlet, in Royal Roads, and on the southern shore of the Strait. In the summer of 1791, Francisco Eliza, commandant at Nootka, with the help of Jos~ Maria Narvaez, investigated Rosario Strait and Haro Strait, Nanaimo harbour and the Gulf of Georgia to Texada Island. Before he heard the results of Eliza's expedition, Conde de Revillagigedo, the new Viceroy of Spain, ordered exanunation of the continental shore-line of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, since he wished to propose, in the interest of restoring amicable relations with Britain, the removal of the Spanish post to a position south of the Strait, and the establishment of a permanent boundary line through the Strait. Dionisio Alcala Galiano and Cayento Valdez left Nootka on June 5, 1792, to carry out this commission. They visited Neah Bay and Esquimalt, and then proceeded from the southern point of Lopez Island to Bellingham Bay and to Boundary Bay. Inside Birch Bay, they saw the lights of a vessel, and as they left Boundary Bay in the early morning hours, they met a longboat containing an English naval officer. Lieutenant Broughton informed them that the British ships Discovery and Chatham were close by. A few days later, they met Captain Vancouver returning by boat from Burrard Inlet.

The Nootka Sound Convention had forced the Admiralty to expand the plans it had originally made for a second naval expedition to the North Pacific. When it became clear that the leader of the expedition would have to assume diplomatic functions, the commander first chosen was replaced by Captain George Vancouver, who had accompanied Captain Cook on his first and last voyages, served with Rodney's fleet in the West Indies and fulfilled his naval duties in Jamaica with distinction. Vancouver was charged with the responsibility of receiving at Nootka restitution of the territories seized by the Spaniards, as well as procuring accurate information about the establishments of foreign nations. He was also to make an accurate survey of the Pacific coastline north from 30º North Latitude to Cook's Inlet, determining its general line and direction and the extent of its considerable inlets, "whether made by arms of the sea, or by the mouths of large rivers, as may be likely to lead to, or by facilitate" communication with lakes in the interior of the continent.

Since this expedition was to complete Captain Cook's work and settle for all time the location of the North West Passage, and since it was to make a show of British naval strength, the Admiralty made elaborate preparations for the voyage. The Discovery, a fully rigged sloop of war, 340 tons, was "copper-fastened, sheathed with plank, and coppered over," supplied with ten four-pounders and six swivels, under the command of Lieutenant W. R. Broughton, had 54 men. The ships carried the best stores of the naval arsenals, fishing seines and large stocks of sauerkraut, the "rob" of lemons and oranges, and the essence of malt and spruce. Vancouver was supplied with chronometers which he was to use in conjunction with lunar observation. Archibald Menzies, a surgeon in the Royal Navy who had visited the Pacific in a fur-trading vessel, went along to collect botanical specimens for King George III's "very valuable collection of exoticx at Kew."

By the time Captain Vancouver reached North America in April, 1792, fur-traders had named coves, islands and capes after their patrons, sponsors and relatives, and had visited all the western inlets between the mouth of the Columbia River and the Queen Charlotte Islands. But their predatory raids of mainland inlets had been too hurried to provide an accurate knowledge of the coastline. Captain George Dixon, however, had established the insular nature of the Queen Charlotte Islands, and Barkley had discovered the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Admiralty was interested in John Meares's story that he, too, had entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and that Captain Robert Gray, in the American sloop Washington, had found a channel leading from the Strait and terminating at Nootka, Sound. Nothing was known in London about the Spanish searches in the neighbourhood of 490 and 530, but the authorities very sensibly advised Vancouver, if he met Spanish ships, to give assistance and make a reciprocal exchange of information.

Captain Vancouver was the very person to chart the intricate coastline of the North West Coast; no one could have been more methodical and painstaking, or more intent on carrying out the letter of his instructions. In order not to lose time, he was told not "to pursue any inlet or river further than it shall appear to be navigable by vessels of such burthen as might safely navigate the Pacific Ocean". His rigid compliance with orders may explain his failure to enter the estuaries of the Columbia, Fraser and Skeena Rivers.

Signs of the Columbia River were seen soon after Vancouver made his landfall on New Albion. Through his desire to take advantage of favourable weather, he did not stop to examine what he recognized as "river-coloured water". To its north he met Captain Gray, who tendered his opinion that a great river existed in the neighbourhood of 46~ North Latitude; but Vancouver was much more interested in obtaining information about the channel through which Gray was said to have travelled to Nootka.

The reconnaissance of the southern shore-line of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, undertaken in open boats, resulted in charting the waters of Puget Sound and islands in the San Juan Archipelago. On the King's birthday, 3une 4, Vancouver went ashore to take possession of the coast north from 390 20' to the Strait of Juan de Fuca, and to claim the interior sea which he named the Gulf of Georgia. By June 12, he had fixed the continental shore as far as Point Roberts. The following day he named Point Grey. Between the two points, the small open boats had been forced by a shoal almost into the middle of the gulf, and Vancouver retained the impression that the space between them was occupied by "a swampy flat, that retires several miles, before the country rises to meet the rugged snowy mountains". Through two small openings, he thought only canoes could navigate. He went on to enter Burrard Inlet, and from there proceeded up Howe Sound and Jervis Inlet. As his men were rowing back to Point Grey on the morning of June 22, they observed a brig and a schooner wearing Spanish colours.

Vancouver "experienced no small degree of mortification" in learning that Spaniards had visited "the external shores of the guiph", but he was comforted by their failure to chart minute features of extensive arms and inlets. The Sutil and the Mericana seemed to him to be "the most ill calculated and unfit vessels that could possibly be imagined for such an expedition", but the conduct of their commanders was "replete with that politeness and friendship which characterizes the Spanish nation". He exchanged information with them and arranged for a joint expedition northward. The four ships proceeded north through Malaspina Channel and worked together until July 13, when the Spaniards left to examine the mainland coastline, and Vancouver continued through Discovery Passage and Johnstone Strait to Queen Charlotte Sound. He was examining the labyrinthine windings of Fitzhugh Sound, Burke Channel and south Bentinck Arm, when he decided to abandon the survey and proceed to Nootka to meet his supply ship and to negotiate with Bodega y Quadra, now commandant of San Blas, who was awaiting him.

Quadra and Vancouver spent the last days of August exchanging civilities and permitting a warm friendship to develop between them. when they started to negotiate, however, they found their opinions too divergent for agreement. Working from Martinez's reports and from supporting evidence supplied by American traders, Quadra was convinced that Spain had nothing to deliver up and no damage to make good. Without prejudice to Spain's legitimate rights, he offered to surrender the houses and garden belonging to Meares's men, promising that Nootka would be Spain's last and most northerly settlement and that the territory north of it would be open for the use and commerce of both parties. Vancouver, who believed Meares's statements that he had purchased territory in 1788 and subsequently taken possession of the Strait of Juan de Fuca, could not be satisfied with retrieving a mere plot of land. When an impasse was reached, both men decided to make reference to their governments. To indicate his high personal regard for Quadra, and to commemorate their meeting on what he now knew to be an island, Vancouver named it "Quadra and Vancouver".

Lieutenant Broughton carried Vancouver's request for further instructions to England. On his way, he located the Columbia River, which Gray, who had called in at Nootka late in August to repair his ship, said he had discovered and entered on May ii. Broughton crossed the bar, and after sounding and observing the river for too miles, took possession for Britain.

Captain Vancouver went south to visit the Spanish post at San Francisco and to winter in the Sandwich Islands. In March, 1793, he was back at Nootka Sound, ready to continue his surveys. His men went north along the mainland coast to Portland Canal, taking soundings in inlets where their lines were often too short to plumb the deep waters. No sign could be found of a waterway. Spanish names were placed on the charts as a courtesy to Jacinto Caamano, who had explored the neighbourhood of 53°, searching for the Strait of Fonte.

After another winter in the Sandwich Islands, Vancouver returned for his final season in North American waters. The Alaskan surveys completed his work. The last hope of finding intercontinental communication was shattered; the existence of a whole new region proven. As yet, no navigator or seaman cared to discover what lay beyond the heads of inlets, but the maps would have to be redrawn to replace the great "sea of the west" with an unbroken coastline.

During Captain Vancouver's absence from England, Britain and Spain had devekped more friendiy relations. The execution of King Louis XVI engendered such dread in both countries of the spread of revolutionary ideas, that they concluded a commercial, defensive and offensive alliance in May, 1793. At Madrid, the views of Revillagigedo gradually acquired merit, and Spain decided to withdraw her outpost from Nootka Sound.

On March 23, 1795, a British and a Spanish commissioner met at Nootka Sound for the brief ceremony of restoring British buildings and unfurling the British flag as a sign of possession. British and Spanish nationals, it had been agreed, would in future only visit there and erect temporary buildings. The two countries would work together to prevent any other power from establishing sovereignty.

The Spanish fort where the Volunteers of Catalonia had maintained the courtly tradition of Castile was now dismantled. There they had known long winters of rain, frost and snow, but in summer, the deep forests had been fringed with an abundance of wild roses, elder trees and aramanth.17 They had lived in harmony with the natives, unaware that the social and economic pattern of Indian life was being changed by the impact of the white man's values.

Skilful mariners, avaricious traders, restrained diplomats and well-drilled troops had all approached British Columbia's shores from the sea, but none had remained as permanent settlers. Nootka, the centre of off-shore trading where events had taken place that had almost plunged all Europe into war, was abandoned to the natives. Spain was in retreat in the Pacific Ocean; Great Britain and the United States, the centres of a dynamic and expanding commercialism, on the advance; and Russia, through the Russian-American Company and that Company's informal alliances with American traders, holding its line. More profitable fur markets than Canton would be discovered, and when they were, the trans-Pacific bond would weaken.

Until desire for profit spurred men on again, no European would return to Galiano's Sasamat, the Indian River of Burrard Inlet, where "the enormous masses of the mountains [are] clad with pines and crowned with snow, which when it melts forms most lovely cascades".18

Chronology

1492 Columbus reaches the new world.

1497 John Cabot explores the mouth of the St. Lawrence.

1498 Vasco Da Gama rounds the Cape of Good Hope and goes on to India.

1519 Cortez in Mexico. Magellan sets out with five ships to cir cumnavigate the world.

1522 The Victoria, sole survivor of Magellan expedition, becomes first ship to
circumnavigate the world.

1534 Jacques Cartier explores the Bay of Chaleur.

1540 Spanish explorers see the Grand Canyon.

1579 Drake lands briefly in California.

1592 Juan de Fuca sees Strait??

1608 Samuel de Champlain founds Quebec.

1620 Pilgrim Fathers settle in Massachusetts.

1639 Russians reach the Pacific at Okhotsk.

1682 La Salle descends the Mississippi.

1725 First expedition under Bering.

1733 Second expedition under Bering sets out.

1741 Bering and Chirikof reach North America; death of Bering.

1771 Samuel Hearne reaches the Arctic Ocean along the Coppermine River.

1774 The Santiago (Juan Perez) reaches the Queen Charlottes from San Blas, later
anchors near Nootka.

1775 Second Spanish expedition to the northwest coast.

The Santiago under Juan Perez and Sonora under Quadra land and take possession in Pacific northwest.
Sonora later reaches Alaskan waters.
1776 Spanish found settlement at San Francisco.

Publication of Adam Smith's Wealth of Nations; foreshadows era of free enterprise.

1778 The Resolution (James Cook) and Discovery (Charles Clerke) at Nootka in March and April. They later search for Northwest Passage in Alaskan waters.

1779 Death of Cook at Hawaii February 14.

Third Spanish expedition to the northwest coast; Arteaga and Quadra in Prince William Sound; they take possession at two locations.
1780 Resolution and Discovery return to British waters.
1784 Official publication of Cook's third voyage.

Russians found first settlement in the new world at Kodiak Island.
1785 James Hanna reaches Nootka in the Sea Otter.
1786 Hanna's second voyage.

James Strange reaches Nootka with the Captain Cook (Henry Laurie) and Experiment (John Guise).

John Mackay left at Nootka. The ships explore Prince William Sound and go on to the far east.

Sea Otter (William Tipping) and Nootka (John Meares) arrive on the northwest coast from India.

King George (Nathaniel Portlock) and Queen Charlotte (George Dixon) arrive on the northwest coast from the British isles.

La Perouse on the northern coast in l'Astrolabe and La Boussole

1787 Portlock and Dixon rescue Meares in Prince William Sound, later go on to the far east.

Captain Charles Barkley reaches Nootka in the Imperial

Eagle; John Mackay comes on board. Later Barkley discovers the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Washington and Columbia leave Boston in the fall for Nootka via Cape Horn.

Prince of Wales (James Colnett) and Princess Royal (Charles Duncan) arrive at Nootka from the British isles.

1788 Felice (John Meares) and Iphigenia (Captain Douglas) arrive at Nootka from the
far east in May. Meares erects a building at Friendly Cove.

Robert Duffin, a subordinate of Meares, enters the Strait of Juan de Fuca.

Launching of the North West America at Nootka in September. Felice; Iphigenia and North West America leave for Hawaii at the end of the season.

Washington (Robert Gray) and Columbia (John Kendrick) arrive at Nootka, later winter on the northwest coast.

Princesa (Esteban Martinez) and San Carlos (Lopez de Haro) sail from San Blas to Prince William Sound; they visit a Russian settlement on Kodiak island and take possession for Spain at two places in Alaskan waters.

Prince of Wales and Princess Royal leave for China at the end of the season.

1789 Princesa (Martinez) and San Carlos (Lopez de Haro) leave San Blas in February to take possession of Nootka.

Washington (Gray) explores the entrance to the Strait of Juan de Fuca in March; the Columbia (Kendrick) remains at Nootka.

Iphigenia (Douglas) and North West America arrive at Nootka from Hawaii in April.

Princess Royal (Thomas Hudson) and Argonaut James Colnett) leave China for Nootka.

Princesa and San Carlos arrive at Nootka in May.

The Spanish construct Fort San Miguel. Iphigenia seized by Martinez, later released.

North West America returns to Nootka from trading cruise in June and is seized by Martinez, who renames her Santa Gertrudis Ia Magna.

1789 Gray and Kendrick exchange commands; Gray takes Columbia on to the far east, followed later by Kendrick in the Washington.

Martinez takes formal possession of Nootka in June.

Princess Royal (Hudson) arrives at Nootka in June, is later escorted out of port by the Spanish.

Argonaut (Colnett) arrives at Nootka from the far east in July, with orders to found a permanent British trading post. Is arrested by Martinez and his ship seized.

Princess Royal returns to Nootka; is seized by Martinez and sent to Mexico in charge of Narvaez, with Captain Hudson and his men on board as prisoners.

Colnett leaves for Mexico as a prisoner on board the Argonaut, now under Spanish officers.

San Carlos also goes south.

Aranzazu arrives at Nootka with orders for a Spanish withdrawal from the area.

Outbreak of the French Revolution on July 14.

Fair American enters Nootka under Thomas Metealfe in October, is seized by Martinez.

Martinez launches Santa Gertrzelis.

Martinez leaves for San Bias in Princesa, accompanied by Santa Certrudis and Fair American.

Spanish fort at Nootka abandoned.

The Columbia reaches Canton late in the year.

1790 Washington arrives in the far east in January.

Fair American released early in the year by the Spanish, sails for Hawaii.

Word of capture of British ships reaches London; beginning of diplomatic quarrel with Spain.

Massacre of natives by Eleanora (Simon Metcalfe) at Hawaii in February.

Attack on Fair American by natives of Hawaii; death of Captain Thomas Metcalfe.

Martinez leaves San Blas in February with Concepcio, San Carlos and captured Princess Royal, now renamed Princesa Real.

In April, Martinez re-occupies and fortifies Nootka with Catalonian volunteers under Pedro Alberni.

In May, Fidalgo begins exploration of Alaskan waters in San Carlos.

In June, Manuel Quimper explores the Strait of Juan de Fuca in the Princesa Real; takes possession at Sooke, Royal Roads, Neab Bay and New Dungeness; returns to San Blas in November.

In July, Colnett and his ship released by the Spanish; he leaves San Blas with Hudson for Nootka in the Argonaut. Later he trades on the northwest coast and then goes on to the far east.

In August, the Columbia reaches Boston; leaves again for Nootka in September.

In October, First Nootka Convention signed by Spain and Britain; Spain agrees to return captured ships and restore some land at Nootka to British sovereignty.

Sources:

Griffin, Harold, 1999. Radical Roots: The Shaping of British Columbia. Commonwealth Fund: Vancouver, British Columbia.

Ormsby, Margaret A. 1958. British Columbia: A History. Macmillan Company of Canada: Vancouver, British Columbia.

Pethick, Derek, 1976. First Approaches to the Northwest Coast. J. J. Douglas Ltd.: Vancouver, British Columbia.