In 1792, when the United States was in its infancy and the Spanish empire still claimed the American continents’ entire Pacific coast, a Spanish naval officer named Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra sailed from his base at San Blas, Mexico, to the Nootka Peninsula, on the west coast of present-day Vancouver Island, British Columbia. One of three surviving contemporary copies of the journal Bodega kept of that voyage, and of his posting at Nootka Sound, is in the Manuscript Division. The journal, which has been published in its original Spanish and in English translation, is a valuable record of the landscape, plants, creatures, and people Bodega saw at Nootka, and while traveling up the coast. It also documents competing Spanish, British, and Native claims over Nootka Sound and its most valuable contribution to the China trade, sea otter skins.[1]
Bodega was born in 1743, the same year as Thomas Jefferson, in Lima, Peru. In 1789, after a period in Spain, he was appointed as commandant of Spain’s naval department at San Blas, Mexico, and sailed to his new post with the viceroy of New Spain, Count Juan Vicente Güémez Pacheco de Padilla Horcasitas y Aguayo Revillagigedo (1740-1799). Revillagigedo chose Bodega to help resolve a struggle between Britain and Spain over control of Nootka Sound and its valuable sea otters. This struggle, known as the Nootka Crisis, began in 1789 when Spain seized ships belonging to a British fur trader at Nootka. It was resolved by the Nootka Convention between Britain and Spain on October 28, 1790. In 1792 Bodega sailed up the Pacific coast from San Blas to Nootka to meet with British naval officer George Vancouver (1757-1798) to implement the terms of the Nootka Convention on behalf of Spain.[2]
The journal records Bodega’s meetings with Vancouver and with representatives of the people they called the Nootka, now known as the Nuu-chah-nulth, including Maquinna (died ca.1825-1827), the region’s dominant political leader.[3] The Nuu-chah-nulth, who had inhabited the area for at least four thousand years, probably encountered Europeans for the first time in 1774 when Spanish ship captain Juan Perez arrived at Nootka Sound. In 1778, Britain’s Captain James Cook visited, and by 1792, British, American, Portuguese, and other trading ships regularly came and went. Among these were the