Everything about George Vancouver totally explained
Captain George Vancouver RN (
June 22,
1757 –
May 12,
1798) was an officer of the British
Royal Navy, best known for his exploration of
North America, including the Pacific coast along the modern day
Canadian province of
British Columbia and the American states of
Alaska,
Washington and
Oregon. He also explored the southwest coast of
Australia. He was born in King's Lynn, Norfolk, in England.
Early career
He traveled to the Pacific aboard
HMS Resolution, on
James Cook's second voyage (1772-1775). It was Vancouver's first naval service. He also accompanied Cook on his third voyage (1776-1779), this time aboard Resolution's sister ship,
HMS Discovery.
Upon his return to Britain in 1779, Vancouver was
commissioned as a
lieutenant. He was then posted aboard the
sloop HMS Martin, on patrol in the
English Channel.
Vancouver next served on the 74-gun
ship of the line,
HMS Fame. The
Fame was involved in the
British victory in the
Battle of the Saintes in 1782.
While serving on the
West Indies station, Vancouver put the
surveying and
cartographic skills he learned under Cook to use surveying
Port Royal and
Kingston Harbour, assisted by
Joseph Whidbey.
In 1789, the Royal Navy was planning another voyage to the Pacific, to further survey the valuable South Pacific whaling grounds. It was to be commanded by
Henry Roberts, another of Captain Cook's
protégés, with Vancouver as his second in command and Whidbey as
sailing master. A new vessel was purchased for this expedition and named
HMS Discovery after Cook's ship.
However, the crisis of the
Great Spanish Armament intervened, as Spain and Britain came close to war during the
Nootka Crisis, over ownership of
Nootka Sound and, of greater importance, the right to settle the Northwest American Coast. Roberts and Vancouver joined Britain's more warlike vessels (Vancouver going, with Whidbey, to
HMS Courageux). When the first
Nootka Convention ended the crisis, Vancouver was given command of
Discovery to take possession of
Nootka Sound and survey the coast.
In October 1792, he sent Lieutenant
William Robert Broughton with several boats up the
Columbia River. Broughton got as far as the
Columbia River Gorge, sighting and naming
Mount Hood.
After a visit to Spanish
California, Vancouver spent the winter in further exploration of the
Sandwich Islands (Hawaii).
The next year, he returned to
British Columbia, and proceeded further north. He got to 56°N, but because the more northern parts had already been explored by Cook, he sailed south to California, hoping to find Bodega y Quadra and fulfill his mission, but the Spaniard wasn't there. He again spent the winter in the Sandwich Islands.
In 1794, he first went to
Cook Inlet, the northernmost point of his exploration, and from there followed the coast south to
Baranov Island, which he'd visited the year before. He then set sail for
Great Britain by way of
Cape Horn, returning in September 1795, thus completing a
circumnavigation.
Return to England and death
Vancouver faced difficulties when he returned home. The politically well-connected Naturalist
Archibald Menzies complained that his servant had been pressed into service during a shipboard emergency; sailing master
Joseph Whidbey had a competing claim for pay as expedition astronomer; and
Thomas Pitt, 2nd Baron Camelford, whom Vancouver had disciplined for numerous infractions and eventually sent home in disgrace, challenged him to a duel. Vancouver was attacked in the newspapers and assaulted on the street by Pitt; his career was effectively at an end. One of Britain's greatest navigators, Vancouver died in obscurity in 1798 at the age of 40 less than three years after completing his voyage. His modest grave lies in St. Peters churchyard,
Petersham,
Surrey, in southern England.
Legacy
Navigation
Vancouver determined that the
Northwest Passage didn't exist at the latitudes that had long been suggested. His charts of the North American northwest coast were so extremely accurate that they served as the key reference for coastal navigation for generations. Robin Fisher, the academic Vice President of
Mount Royal College in Calgary and author of two books on Vancouver, states:
» "He [ie:Vancouver] put the northwest coast on the map...He drew up a map of the north-west coast that was accurate to the nth degree, to the point it was still being used into the 20th century as a navigational aid. That's unusual for a map that early."
Vancouver, however, failed to discover two of the largest and most important rivers on the Pacific coast, the
Fraser River and the
Columbia River. (He also missed the Skeena River near Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia.) Although Vancouver did eventually learn of the Columbia before he finished his survey (from
Robert Gray (sea-captain), captain of the American merchant ship which was the first to sail into the river on May 11, 1792; Gray had first spotted the river on an earlier voyage in 1788) the Fraser never made it onto his charts.
Stephen R. Bown, noted in
Mercator's World
magazine (Nov/Dec 1999) that:
"How Vancouver could have missed these rivers while accurately charting hundreds of comparatively insignificant inlets, islands, and streams is hard to fathom. What is certain is that his failure to spot the Columbia had great implications for the future political development of the Pacific Northwest...."
While it's difficult to comprehend how Vancouver missed the Fraser River, much of this river's delta was subject to flooding and summer
freshet which prevented the captain from spotting any of its great channels as he sailed the entire shoreline from Point Roberts to Point Grey in 1792. The Spanish, who preceded Vancouver in 1791, had also missed the Fraser River although they knew from its muddy plume that there was a major river located nearby.
Aboriginal relations
Vancouver generally established a good rapport with both natives and European foreigners. Despite a long history of warfare between Britain and Spain, Vancouver maintained excellent relations with his Spanish counterparts and even feted a Spanish sea captain aboard the tall ship
HMS Discovery during his 1792 trip to the Vancouver region.
While Captain Vancouver played an undeniable role in the eventual series of upheavals in native life on the North American Pacific Coast since his explorations opened up the Northwest coast to European exploration and the long term negative impact on first nations peoples and their cultures, historical records show Vancouver himself enjoyed good relations with native leaders both in Hawaii - where
King Kamehameha the Great ceded Hawaii to Vancouver in 1794 - as well as the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver's journals exhibit a high degree of sensitivity to natives: he once wrote of his exploration of a small island on the Alaskan coast on which an important burial site was marked by a sepulchre of "peculiar character" lined with boards and fragments of military instruments lying near a square box covered with mats. Vancouver states:
» This we naturally conjectured contained the remains of some person of consequence, and it much excited the curiosity of some of our party; but as further examination couldn't possibly have served any useful purpose, and might have given umbrage and pain to the friends of the deceased, should it be their custom to visit the repositories of their dead, I didn't think it right that it should be disturbed.
Vancouver also displayed contempt in his journals towards unscrupulous western traders who provided guns to natives by writing:
» I am extremely concerned to be compelled to state here, that many of the traders from the civilised world have not only pursued a line of conduct, diametrically opposite to the true principles of justice in their commercial dealings, but have fomented discords, and stirred up contentions, between the different tribes, in order to increase the demand for these destructive engines....They have been likewise eager to instruct the natives in the use of European arms of all descriptions; and have shewn by their own example, that they consider gain as the only object of pursuit; and whether this be acquired by fair and honourable means, or otherwise, so long as the advantage is secured, the manner how it's obtained seems to have been, with too many of them, but a very secondary consideration.
250th anniversary commemoration
On Friday
June 22,
2007, the City of Vancouver in Canada organized a celebration at the
Vancouver Maritime Museum to remember the 250th anniversary of Vancouver's birth. The one-hour festivities included the presentation of a massive 63 by 114 centimetre
carrot cake, the firing of a gun salute by the
Royal Canadian Artillery's 15th Field Regiment and a performance by the Vancouver Firefighter's Band.
Vancouver's mayor,
Sam Sullivan, officially declared
June 22 2007 to be "George Day". The
Musqueam native elder Larry Grant who also attended the festivities acknowledged that some of his people might disapprove of his presence here but noted:
"Many people don't feel aboriginal people should be celebrating this occasion...I believe it has helped the world and that's part of who we are. That's the legacy of our people. We're generous to a fault. The legacy is strong and a good one, in the sense that without the first nations working with the colonials, it [B.C.] wouldn't have been part of Canada to begin with and Britain would be the poorer for it."
Origins of the family name
There has been some debate about the origins of the Vancouver name. It is now commonly accepted that the name Vancouver derives from the word
van Coevorden, meaning "from
Coevorden", a city in the northeast of the
Netherlands. An alternative theory claims that Vancouver is a
misspelling or
anglicized version of
van Couwen, a Dutch
family name.
In the 18th century, a number of businessmen from the Coevorden area did move to England. Some of them were known as
van Coevorden. Others adopted the surname
Oxford, as in
oxen crossing, which is approximately the English translation of
Coevorden.
In the 1970s, Adrien Mansvelt, a former
Consul General of the Netherlands based in Vancouver, published a collation of information in both historical and genealogical journals and in the
Vancouver Sun newspaper. Mansvelt's theory was later presented by the city during the
Expo '86 World's Fair, as
historical fact.
W. Kaye Lamb, in summarizing Mansvelt's 1973 research, observes clear evidence of close family ties between the Vancouver family of Britain and the van Couverden family of Holland as well as George Vancouver's own words from his diaries in referring to his Dutch ancestry:
As the name Vancouver suggests, the Vancouvers were of Dutch origin. They were descended from the titled van Coeverden family, one of the oldest in the Netherlands. By the twelfth century, and for many years thereafter, their castle at Coevorden, in the Province of Drenthe, was an important fortress on the eastern frontier. George Vancouver was aware of this. In July 1794, he named the Lynn Canal 'after the place of my nativity' and Point Couverden (which he spelt incorrectly) 'after the seat of my ancestors.' Vancouver's great grandfather, Reint Wolter van Couverden, was probably the first of the line to establish an English connection. While serving as a squire at one of the German courts he met Johanna (Jane) Lilingston, an English girl who was one of the ladies in waiting. They were married in 1699. Their son, Lucas Hendrik van Couverden, married Vancouver's grandmother, Sarah...In his later years he probably anglicized his name and spent most of his time in England. By the eighteenth century, the estates of the van Couverdens were mostly in the Province of Overijssel, and some of the family were living in Vollenhove, on the Zuider Zee. The English and Dutch branches kept in touch, and in 1798 (the date of Vancouver's death) George Vancouver's brother Charles would marry a kinswoman, Louise Josephine van Couverden, of Vollenhove. Both were great-grandchildren of Reint Wolter van Couverden.
George Vancouver also identified a body of land off the Alaskan coast as '
Couverden Island' during his exploration of the North American Pacific coast presumably to honour his family's Dutch hometown of Coevorden. It is located at the western point of entry to
Lynn Canal in southeastern Alaska.
Others present on Vancouver's voyage
Archibald Menzies, ship's doctor and naturalist on board Vancouver's voyage.
Peter Puget, lieutenant
Zachary Mudge
Robert Barrie
Spelman Swaine
Edward Roberts
Joseph Whidbey
Thomas Manby
Works by George Vancouver
Voyage Of Discovery To The North Pacific Ocean, And Round The World In The Years 1791-95, by George Vancouver ISBN 0-7812-5100-1. Original written by Vancouver and completed by his brother John and published in 1798. Edited in 1984 by W. Kaye Lamb and re-named "The Voyage of George Vancouver 1791 - 1795." W. Kaye Lamb's later analysis of Vancouver's exploration was published by the Hakluyt Society of London, EnglandFurther Information
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