Namer of Names: Get to know Capt. George Vancouver

Everyone in this part of the world knows his name, and most of us have had to clear up at least a little bit of visitors' endless name confusion with a certain Canadian city. But surprisingly few locals know anything much about the historical sailor and explorer our town was named for: Capt. George Vancouver.

"The reason you haven't heard much about him is, he was bad at office politics," said Vancouver resident Kevin Spaeth, an amateur historian and self-educated George Vancouver expert. George Vancouver, Spaeth said, was the greatest explorer and sailor of his age - a record-setter when it comes to covering vast distances as well as naming and claiming landmarks for Great Britain - but he also made some powerful enemies who managed to shrink his larger-than-life reputation before his death.

After Spaeth moved to Vancouver in 2017, it didn't take him long to discover a small yet personally significant coincidence about his new hometown's origin story: he and George Vancouver share the same birthday. On June 22, Spaeth will be 51. If George Vancouver was still around, he'd turn 269 years old that day.

That incidental fact is all Spaeth needed to become intrigued about George Vancouver and develop his own biographical birthday lecture, which he has delivered for the past four years on June 22 to private audiences. He provided birthday party pizza, too.

If You Go

What: George Vancouver Day lecture

When: 7:30 p.m. June 22

Where: Kiggins Theatre, 1011 Main St., Vancouver

Tickets: $20 or $15 for students

On the web: https://www.kigginstheatre.com/

There's no pizza this time, but on June 22 Spaeth will take his latest lecture to Kiggins Theatre in downtown Vancouver. The ticketed event aims to raise money for nonprofit Metropolitan Performing Arts, a theater school and company which Spaeth's son is involved with. Metropolitan recently moved from midtown Vancouver to a vacant downtown building, thereby completing a Main Street "arts triangle" - along with nearby Magenta Theater and the Kiggins - that many have dreamed of.

"I've always been big into history," said Spaeth, who earned an anthropology degree at Seton Hall University in his native New Jersey. He participated in some archaeological digs at New Jersey's Monmouth Battlefield, the site of the one of the largest and longest battles of the American Revolution. After college, Spaeth spent years living in Long Beach, Calif., where he delved into history by costuming himself as a long-ago resident and hosting cemetery tours for the Historical Society of Long Beach.

"Wherever you go, wherever you live, you've got to research the local history," he said.

Peter and friends

Capt. George Vancouver is famous for "putting so many places on the map," Spaeth said.

According to HistoryLink, the online Washington state encyclopedia, Vancouver displayed a notable passion for naming places he discovered - whether he was the actual discoverer or not. While exploring the Northwest coast in 1792, HistoryLink says, Vancouver "named every island, mountain, waterway, and point of land in sight, including previously recorded Spanish landmarks."

The tally of local names bestowed by Vancouver stands at 75, according to HistoryLink.

Born to a middle-class British family in 1757, Vancouver entered the Royal Navy as a young teenager, and eventually sailed on famed explorer James Cook's second and third epic voyages in the 1770s - the second a three-year global circumnavigation that included reconnaissance of South Pacific islands, and the third an even longer, four-year voyage that aimed, but failed, to discover a "Northwest Passage" between the Atlantic and Pacific oceans. On that voyage, midshipman Vancouver would have had plenty of opportunity to admire and study the Northwest coast that he would return to years later as a ship's captain. The voyage came to an infamous end when it made its second stop in Hawaii, where Cook was killed as hostilities broke out between his sailors and locals. Vancouver played a key role in continuing the expedition and getting it back to England.

Vancouver became a Navy lieutenant. In 1790 he was given command of two ships, the Discovery and the Chatham, and dispatched on a military and diplomatic expedition to the Northwest coast, where England and Spain had recently skirmished over navigation rights, trade routes and ownership of one very large island. The conflict was resolved peacefully and Vancouver continued pursuing his other main charge: surveying and mapping the entire coast, which he did in meticulous detail.

International dynamics eventually shifted as England and Spain formed an alliance against France. Vancouver and a friendly Spanish commander exchanged maps and cordially agreed to name that large island after the both of them - "Quadra and Vancouver Island" - but as Spanish influence in the area eventually waned, "Quadra and" was dropped from the name.

During his Pacific Northwest explorations, Vancouver slung new names at "every prominence and waterway within view," HistoryLink says, including Mount Rainier, Mount Baker, Hood Canal, Port Townsend, Port Orchard and Vashon and Whidbey islands - all of which seem to have been titled for his favorite colleagues, underlings, personal friends, patrons and heroes back home. These included a favored lieutenant, Peter Puget. It does not appear that any thought was given to the Indigenous names that already existed.

Vancouver crossed paths with Capt. Robert Gray, who claimed to have discovered and mapped the major river we now call Columbia. (The river was already called Wimahl -"Big River"- by the Chinookan-speaking peoples who lived beside it, but Gray renamed it after his ship, the Columbia Rediviva.) Intrigued and skeptical, Vancouver led his expedition to the mouth of the river in autumn 1792, but he struggled and failed to get the large Discovery across the complicated and hazardous bar. The expedition's smaller sister vessel, the Chatham, made it across and sailed several miles upriver. Then its crew moved into smaller boats and rowed. They managed to make it about 100 miles inland, pitching a camp near today's town of Camas and likely exploring all the way to Rooster Rock and a sandy point in the river that their commander, Lt. William Broughton, named for his commander: Point Vancouver. (He also named Mount Hood after a British admiral.)

Oddly, there's no surviving Point Vancouver along the river today, and no definitive answer about exactly where it used to be. It might be Washougal's Cottonwood Beach. It might be a little farther upriver.

Claims and complaints

How did our city acquire its name? The closest George Vancouver came to here was the Pacific Coast. The Hudson's Bay Company fort that first affixed his name to this place wasn't established until decades later, in 1825.

But Vancouver's name was much admired for the epic voyages he undertook and the maps he made, which remained essential tools for explorers in his wake, including Lewis and Clark.

The Hudson's Bay Company was an empire-building project of the British government, and the name of its fort was strategically selected by company official George Simpson to emphasize the empire, according to HistoryLink: at a time when Great Britain, the young United States and other global powers were flexing their exploratory muscles and laying competing claims to North American land, invoking the name of a celebrated British explorer for a large, well-protected fort was a way of reminding the world that Britain's claims on the whole Northwest region were proud and inflexible.

Of course, those claims didn't last (with Britain ceding the fort, and the whole area, to the U.S. in 1846). And neither did George Vancouver, who died in difficult circumstances within a few years of his North American explorations. He may have been reasonably friendly with Indigenous tribes, Spaeth said, but the naval commander and explorer could deal pretty harshly with his own seamen. After his expedition ended, bitter complaints about his leadership arose, some from powerful, well-connected naval officers and shipboard scientists who'd sailed with him. Allegations of bad behavior hit the press. One of Vancouver's most hardened enemies - a sailor he'd flogged, imprisoned and fired from the expedition - stalked and assaulted him on a London street corner.

Vancouver's health declined. His official cause of death in 1798 isn't known. But we do know that he was only 40 years old. Today, opinions vary about the dozens of British names that Vancouver imposed on local places that already had Indigenous names.

"He was the greatest explorer and adventurer of the 'age of sail,' " said Spaeth. "He was more accomplished than Cook or Magellan. He literally put this place on the map."

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