Sea of the West

Juan de Fuca was born Ioannis Phokás (Greek: Ἰωάννης Φωκᾶς) in the Ionian Islands of Greece in 1536.

Under sponsorship of the Viceroy of New Spain, de Fuca claimed to have piloted a voyage up the western coast of North America in 1592, reaching a strait into an inland sea at latitude 47°.

The riches of the Pacific were very distant from Europe, such that much treasure and lives had been expended and lost in lengthy and dangerous passage between the two regions.

For hundreds of years, finding a passage from the Atlantic to the Pacific by some means more direct and less treacherous than the Straits of Magellan was high priority for European powers.

[2] Whether based on the de Fuca account or otherwise, a few manuscript maps in the 1600s showed speculative geography that included branches of the Pacific Ocean protruding deeply into the North American continent.

One such map from the late 1630s held by the Yale Center for British Art shows such a branch reaching as close as a few hundred miles from the east coast.

[3] Apparently inspired by these inventions, Guillaume Delisle drew several maps by hand between 1695 and about 1700 that portray such eastern intrusions of the Pacific Ocean.

In April of that year, a short-lived English periodical named Monthly Miscellany, or Memoirs for the Curious published an alleged letter by one Admiral Bartholomew de Fonte.

In that book, he presents diverse cartographic interpretations of the accounts of "Admiral de Fonte and other Spanish, Portuguese, English, Dutch, French, and Russian mariners who have sailed the North Seas, including their commentaries".

For example, in 1762, Benjamin Franklin penned a long analysis of the de Fonte letter, concluding, "If I have conjectured truly, this very Difference is a farther Proof that the Journal is really a Translation from the Spanish, and not, as some have supposed, an English Fiction.

[9] The concept gained another boost in 1768 when mapmaker Thomas Jefferys wrote a treatise called The Great Probability of a North West Passage analyzing the de Fonte letter.

Coming from his explorations of Hawaii in 1778, James Cook sailed to what is now the Oregon coast, along the entire northwest coastline, through the Bering Strait, and into the Chukchi Sea in northern Alaska.

The last original depiction that was intended to convey the reality of the sea appeared in 1790 in John Meares's Voyage Made in the Year 1788 and 1789, From China to the North West Coast of America.

Captain George Vancouver's account of his voyage of 1791–1792, along with his detailed, expert mapping, left no room for doubt: The Sea of the West was a myth.