History Minutes: Captains Vancouver and Gray

           Columbia in a Squall // OrHi 984

When European sea captains first glimpsed the Northwest Pacific coast, the vast and dense coastal forests caught their attention.  Captain George Vancouver whose British fleet passed near the Oregon shore on April 27, 1792, also noted the change in the character of the water that signified the mouth of a river.  Vancouver was a careful man, however, and he was under orders "not to pursue any inlet or river further than it shall appear to be navigable."  He decided to drop the matter and continue north.

Two days later he encountered a ship, the first he had sighted in eight months.  It was Captain Robert Gray in the Columbia Rediviva heading south.  Gray told Vancouver’s officers that he had passed a river’s mouth with a flow so strong he could not enter.  Vancouver remembered the spot, but even after hearing Gray’s account, he again dismissed the river, if such it was, as being too small to be navigable.

Two weeks later, on the morning of May 11, 1792, Gray saw the same flume of muddy water coming from the shore.  This time he decided to follow it, and the Columbia shot over the bar in five to seven fathoms of water into the broad expanse of Baker Bay.  Gray named the river “Columbia” after his ship.  American statesmen later used Gray’s entrance into the Columbia to support U.S. territorial claims in the Far West.