The European merchants, however, who engaged in this lucrative branch of commerce, confined their visits to stations on the coasts, where the natives brought from the interior the produce of their hunting expeditions; and even in respect of the coast itself, very little accurate information was possessed by Europeans, before Vancouver's survey. Vancouver, as is well known, was despatched in 1791 by the British government to superintend, on the part of Great Britain, the execution of the Convention of the Escurial, and he was at the same time instructed to survey the coast from 35° to 60°, with a view to ascertain in what parts civilised nations had made settlements, and likewise to determine whether or not any effective water communication, available for commercial purposes, existed in those parts between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans.
The popular belief in the existence of a channel, termed the Straits of Anian, connecting the waters of the Pacific with those of the Atlantic Ocean, in about the 58th or 60th parallel of latitude, through which Gaspar de Cortereal, a Portuguese navigator, was reported to have sailed in 1500, had caused many voyages to be made along the coast on either side of North America during the 16th and 17th centuries, and the exaggerated accounts of the favourable results of these voyages had promoted the progress of geographical discovery by stimulating fresh expeditions. In the 17th century, a narrative was published by Purchas, in his "Pilgrims," professing that a Greek pilot, commonly called Juan de Fuca, in the service of the Spaniards, had informed Michael Lock the elder, whilst he was sojourning at Venice in 1596, that he had discovered, in 1592, the outlet of the Straits of Anian, in the Pacific Ocean, between 47° and 48°, and had sailed through it into the North Sea. The attention of subsequent navigators was for a long time directed in vain to the rediscovery of this supposed passage. The Spanish expedition under Heceta, in 1775, and the British under Cook, in 1778, had both equally failed in discovering any corresponding inlet in the north-west coast, doubtless, amongst other reasons, because it had been placed by the author of the tale between the parallels of 47° and 48°, where no strait existed. In 1787, however, the mouth of a strait was descried a little further northward, between 48° and 49°, by Captain Barclay, of the Imperial Eagle, and the entrance was explored in the following year by Captain Meares, in the Felice, who perpetuated the memory of Michael Lock's Greek pilot, by giving it the name of the Straits of Juan de Fuca. Meares, in his observations on a north-west passage, p. lvi., prefixed to his Voyage, published in 1790, states that the American merchant sloop the Washington, upon the knowledge which he communicated, penetrated the straits of Fuca in the autumn of 1789, "as far as the longitude of 237° east of Greenwich," (123° west,) and came out into the Pacific through the passage north of Queen Charlotte's Island. Vancouver's attention was directed, in consequence of Captain Meares' report, to the especial examination of this strait, and it was surveyed by him, with the rest of the coast, in a most complete and effectual manner. A Spanish expedition, under Galiano and Valdés, was engaged about the same time upon the same object, so that from this period, i. e., the concluding decade of the last century, the coast of Oregon may be considered to have been sufficiently well known.