One by one the lighthouses at West Point on the starboard side, and at Point-No-Point, Marrowstone, and Point Wilson, on the port, flash their golden messages through the dusk. One by one rise, linger, and fade the dark outlines of Magnolia Bluff, Skagit Head, Double Bluff, and Liplip Point. If the sailing be early in the evening, midnight is saluted by the lights of Port Townsend, than which no city on the Pacific Coast has a bolder or more beautiful situation.
The splendid water avenue—the burning "Opal-Way"—that leads the ocean into these inland seas was named in 1788 by John Meares, a retired lieutenant of the British navy, for Juan de Fuca (whose real name was Apostolos Valerianos), a Greek pilot who, in 1592, was sent out in a small "caravela" by the Viceroy of Mexico in search of the fabled "Strait of Anian," or "Northwest Passage"—supposed to lead from the Pacific to the Atlantic north of forty degrees of latitude.
As early as the year 1500 this strait was supposed to have been discovered by a Portuguese navigator named Cortereal, and to have been named by him for one of his brothers who accompanied him.
The names of certain other early navigators are mentioned in connection with the "Strait of Anian." Cabot is reported vaguely as having located it "neere the 318 meridian, between 61 and 64 degrees in the eleuation, continuing the same bredth about 10 degrees West, where it openeth Southerly more and more, until it come under the tropicke of Cancer, and so runneth into Mar del Zur, at least 18 degrees more in bredth there than where it began;" Frobisher; Urdaneta, "a Fryer of Mexico, who came out of Mar del Zur this way into Germanie;" and several others whose stories of having sailed the dream-strait that was then supposed to lead from ocean to ocean are not now considered seriously until we come to Juan de Fuca, who claimed that in his "caravela" he followed the coast "vntill hee came to the latitude of fortie seuen degrees, and that there finding that the land trended North and Northeast, with a broad Inlet of Sea between 47 and 48 degrees of Latitude, hee entered thereinto, sayling therein more than twenty days, and found that land trending still sometime Northwest and Northeast and North, and also East and Southeastward, and very much broader sea then was at said entrance, and that hee passed by diuers Ilands in that sayling. And that at the entrance of this said Strait, there is on the Northwest coast thereof, a great Hedland or Iland, with an exceeding high pinacle or spired Rocke, like a pillar, thereupon."
He landed and saw people clothed in the skins of beasts; and he reported the land fruitful, and rich in gold, silver, and pearl.
Bancroft and some other historians consider the story of Juan de Fuca's entrance to Puget Sound the purest fiction, claiming that his descriptions are inaccurate and that no pinnacled or spired rock is to be found in the vicinity mentioned.
Meares, however, and many people of intelligence gave it credence; and when we consider the differences in the descriptions of other places by early navigators, it is not difficult to believe that Juan de Fuca really sailed into the strait that now bears his name. Schwatka speaks of him as, "An explorer—if such he may be called—who never entered this beautiful sheet of water, and who owes his immortality to an audacious guess, which came so near the truth as to deceive the scientific world for many a century."
The Strait of Juan de Fuca is more than eighty miles long and from ten to twelve wide, with a depth of about six hundred feet. At the eastern end it widens into an open sea or sound where beauty blooms like a rose, and from which forest-bordered water-ways wind slenderly in every direction.
From this vicinity, on clear days, may be seen the Olympic Mountains floating in the west; Mount Rainier, in the south; the lower peaks of the Crown Mountains in the north; and Mount Baker—or Kulshan, as the Indians named it—in the east.
The Island of San Juan, lying east of the southern end of Vancouver Island, is perhaps the most famous, and certainly the most historic, on the Pacific Coast. It is the island that barely escaped causing a declaration of war between Great Britain and the United States, over the international boundary, in the late fifties. For so small an island,—it is not more than fifteen miles long, by from six to eight wide,—it has figured importantly in large affairs.