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 plored the numerous inlets which penetrate the continent between Fuca's Strait and Alaska. While a portion of the work in Puget Sound waters had been done before Vancouver arrived by the Spanish explorers Quimper, Eliza, Galieno and Valdez, and while the great Spanish explorer Cuadra was so closely associated with himself that he called the island north of Fuca's Strait Vancouver and Cuadra's Island, yet to Vancouver is due the credit for combining into one system the results of many separate explorations and for giving the world an intelligible view of northwest coast geography as a whole.

Vancouver had been instructed by the Admiralty to secure accurate information concerning any waterway that might help to connect the northwest coast, for commercial purposes, with Canada, and the admiralty suggested to him that such a waterway might perhaps be found by entering Fuca's Strait and the sea into which it must lead. They say: "The discovery of a near communication between any such sea or strait, and any river running into or from the Lake of the Woods would be particularly useful." This supposed river, flowing into the western sea near Nootka Sound, from the Lake of the Woods, or thereabouts, was an idea which the government had derived from the Montreal fur traders who as early as 1784-5 were anxious to explore to the Pacific and who sent in memorials fortified by fanciful maps based upon their own conjectures or upon the equally indefinite guesses of the Indians,