MIGHTY LAND, MIGHTY NAMES
The explorers who gave their names to Pacific Pacififific Northwest places lived lives as great as the region itself.
As throughout the Americas, the place names of the Northwest are a hodgepodge of borrowings from indigenous languages and memorials to the bold explorers who forged the bonds between the Old World and the New. None were bolder than those who braved the treacherous seas and unforgiving climate to carve out a toehold in this great northern land. Look at a map and you’ll see their names. These are their stories.
GEORGE VANCOUVER
Of Dutch parentage, George Vancouver (1757–1798) enlisted in the British Royal Navy at 13. As a young midshipman, he accompanied Captain Cook on his final ill-fated voyage to Hawaii. Decades later, Vancouver was given his own ships — Discovery and Chatham — and entrusted with a long-term mission to explore the Pacific. The Vancouver Expedition circled the world, touching land in South Africa, Hawaii and various ports in Oceania before turning north to explore the Pacific Northwest. Vancouver’s charting of the coastline was remarkably accurate — so much so that it remained the standard for decades. In addition to lending his name to places in North America, Australia and New Zealand, he sent hundreds of scientific specimens home to England and is credited with introducing various species to the New World — including bringing coffee shrubs to Hawaii. Vancouver had a knack for making friends, maintaining cordial relations not only with various indigenous peoples but also with any rival Spanish ships he encountered during the journey. Ironically, though, he was undone by a personal grudge. Among the seamen he commanded was one Thomas Pitt. A disgrace as a sailor, Pitt was flogged on multiple occasions for misconduct, and once clapped in irons. Vancouver eventually dismissed him from the crew entirely. Humiliated, Pitt swore vengeance. When Vancouver retired in 1795, Pitt began a relentless campaign of harassment. Using his wealth and connections — his cousin was incumbent prime minster of Great Britain at the time — Pitt had Vancouver denounced in the press, and even physically attacked him in the street. Vancouver, health ruined by his long service, died just three years after concluding his expedition. He was 40 years old.
JAMES JOHNSTONE
Born in 1759, James Johnstone’s naval career began ingloriously — on the losing side of the Battle of the Chesapeake, which helped decide the American Revolution. Johnstone served as Chatham’s sailing master on the Vancouver Expedition, among a crew filled with names that may sound familiar; Chatham’s first lieutenant was Peter Puget, while Discovery’s sailing master was Joseph Whidbey. Johnstone led numerous surveys to map the channels and inlets of the North American coast. It was dangerous work, conducted from open boats away from the relative safety of Chatham for weeks at a time. Among the dozens of waterways and islands he charted is the Johnstone Strait, a 68-mile channel connecting the Georgia Strait and Queen Charlotte Sound, which George Vancouver named in his honor. After the Vancouver Expedition, Johnstone had a long, distinguished naval career, including a stint protecting British convoys from pirates and privateers. He died in 1823.
VITUS BERING
Though he sailed in service of Peter the Great, cartographer Vitus Bering (1681–1741) was Danish by birth. Peter had ambitions to make Russia an imperial power, and greatly expanded the country’s navy to that end; Bering was one of many foreign mariners to find a place in the Russian fleet. In 1725, Bering was tapped to lead an expedition into uncharted northern waters to investigate theories of a land bridge between Asia and North America. Taking a small crew, Bering undertook the arduous threeyear voyage — most of which was spent traveling the 6,000 miles from St. Petersburg to the port of Kamchatka in the Russian Far East. Enduring brutal winters and shortages of men and supplies, Bering finally sailed north in 1728; he spent only a few months at sea charting the Russian coastline before determining that there was open water — his namesake sea and strait — between Russia and Alaska. Upon returning, Bering proposed a large-scale exploratory mission of the New World. This voyage, too, was fraught with difficulties even before sailing; funds intended to improve port facilities along the route were misappropriated, and the operation ran disastrously over budget. After seven years of preparation, the expedition’s three ships took to sea in 1740, making a brief landfall at Mount Saint Elias a year later. Separated by storms during the return journey, the ships charted and explored islands in the Alexander, Kodiak and Aleutian archipelagoes. Bering’s flagship was wrecked on an uninhabited island near Kamchatka, and the crew were stranded for ten months. Scurvy and starvation took a terrible toll, wiping out 31 of the 77 sailors — including Bering himself — before the survivors escaped on a boat built from scavenged wreckage. A memorial marks his gravesite on what is today called Bering Island.
ALEXANDER BARANOV
Alexander Andreyevich Baranov — who gave his name to Baranof Island, on which the city of Sitka sits — is remembered as “the first governor of the Alaskan territory.” But Baranov (1747–1819) was neither an elected official nor a political appointee. His time as “Chief Manager” (his official title) came during a period when European nations vied for control of the north using corporations as their proxies. Baranov escaped his lower-class upbringing near St. Petersburg to build a career as a trader on the Siberian frontier. When already in his mid-40s, with a wife and children to support, he accepted a five-year contract managing a furtrading concern on Kodiak Island. During the sea voyage from Siberia, he was shipwrecked; he and his crew wintered over on Unalaska Island among the Aleut, arriving at Kodiak the following spring in Aleut-built boats. During his tenure, Baranov built up the outpost’s supply lines and founded several new settlements. In 1799, his employer’s firm was absorbed into the newly established Russian-American Company, a venture sponsored by the imperial crown to pursue trade and colonization; Baranov was appointed the RAC’s first Chief Manager. With a fleet of ships and a paramilitary force at his disposal — and with St. Petersburg half a world away — Baranov held near-absolute authority over Russian America, which encompassed the Alaskan panhandle along with parts of California and Hawaii. Baranov’s 18-year reign saw the Russian Empire expanding its footprint in the New World. But these years were also marked by violent conflict with his Tlingit neighbors; Baranov himself survived several assassination attempts by his habit of wearing a chainmail shirt beneath his clothes. There were also recurring supply shortages, especially after the Russians lost their Hawaiian outposts. Baranov was recalled to Russia in 1818 but never made it home; he fell ill during the return voyage and died at age 70 on a layover in Indonesia.
DIONYSIUS ZAREMBO
Few biographical details have come down to us about Lieutenant Dionysius Zarembo, who lent his name to a large island in Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago. A Polish-born employee of the RAC, Zarembo commanded the company’s ship Chicaghof. By the time Zarembo came to the archipelago, 30 years after Baranov’s death, relations with the Tlingit had improved, and treaties with the U.S. and the U.K. had granted the company a monopoly on the fur trade in the unincorporated territories of the Pacific watershed; but the RAC still engaged in territorial disputes with rival corporate interests. In 1834, Zarembo made overtures to the Tlingit to build a fortification near the current site of Wrangell — the first permanent European settlement on that island — as defense against incursions from the British-backed Hudson Bay Company (HBC). He named the fort Redoubt St. Dionysius, after his eponymous saint. Shortly after the fort was established, an HBC party attempted to stake out a trading post on the Stikine River, but was turned back by Zarembo. A standoff developed. With British and Russian ships massing, armed conflict seemed inevitable until the Tlingit intervened to resolve the crisis, proclaiming their ancestral right to the fur trade and reaffirming their alliance with Zarembo. Though it has no permanent population, Zarembo’s namesake island boasts a mineral spring whose waters, bottled and sold, were a popular tonic at the turn of the 20th century — a curious ending for a shadowy figure in the history of the north.