38 TRANSACTIONS. 1 897-8. 



He missed Juan de Fuca Straits by being blown to the 

 westward. His next landfall was a place called by him King 

 George's Sound, but which he, later on, suggested should bear 

 the native name of Nootka. There he remained long enough 

 to satisfy himself that the natives were a very superior race, 

 "for," said he, "I must observe that I have nowhere in my 

 several voyages met with any uncivilized nation or tribe who 

 had such notions of their having "a right to the exclusive pro- 

 perty of anything that their country produces as the inhabit- 

 ants of this Sound " — a characteristic of us Canadians to this 

 day, whether at the British Columbian or the Nova Scotian 

 end, with all that is between included. Cook sailed for the 

 mainland where he sighted, on the 2nd May, Mount Edge- 

 combe, well within the territory now claimed by the United 

 States as Alaska. He journeyed along till the 26th. October 

 giving place-names right and left— none of them however in 

 Canadian territory — the few he gave along the Nootka Sound 

 territory not surviving ; " Nootka " has overwhelmed Cook's 

 place-name of King George's Sound ; " Point Breakers " has 

 given way to " Point Maquilla," so named in honor of a 

 native chieftian with whom Meares had dealings in 1786; 

 while "Woody Point" has been re-baptised "Boulder Point" 

 the woods having disappeared and the boulders having become 

 the prominent feature, 



As is quite natural, Vancouver is the greatest name- 

 father of the British Columbian coast. He was one of the 

 early comers. He found an almost virgin soil in which to 

 plant his place-names with every expectation of their taking 

 root. He was engaged in a task that led him, in prosecuting 

 it, to examine the coast very carefully. He was therefore all 

 the time searching the nooks and crannies of the coast. 



On the 8th March, 1791, Capt. George Vancouver receiv- 

 ed instructions, signed by Chatham, Hopkins, Hood and J. T. 

 Townsend, to proceed to the Sandwich Islands, winter there 

 and go in the Spring to the North West Coast of North 

 America to obtain accurate information as to other nations 

 who might have settled there and especially to obtain inform- 

 ation for His Majesty's use in respect to the " water commun- 

 ications, which may tend to facilitate an intercourse, for the 

 purpose of commerce, between the North West Coast and the 

 country upon the opposite side of the continent inhabited by 



