16 Some Considerations Regarding the Origin of Oregon’s Name

In his 1919 book Oregon: Her History, Her Great Men, Her Literature, John B. Horner writes that Jonathan Carver named the River of the West in 1778, two years before the Declaration of Independence, according to the name he had heard from the Native people who lived near the eastern slope of the Rocky Mountains. He also notes that at least six more explanations have been given about the meaning and origin of the name Oregon.^[1]

According to some authors, the name comes from the oregano plant, which grew abundantly in that area of the Pacific coast. US settler and writer Hall J. Kelley, a strong advocate of US settlement in Oregon in the 1820s and 30s, held that the term Oregon came from the name of a river called Orjon, located in Mongolia. William G. Steel, first president of the Oregon Geographic Council, believed that Oregon came from Oyer-un-gon, a word from the Shoshone language meaning ‘place of abundance.’  Bishop Blanchet, from the Catholic missions in Washington and Oregon, argued that Oregon came from the Spanish word orejón^[2] because the Spaniards considered the Indians’ ears abnormally large. The writer Joaquin Miller said that the term Oregon came from the Spanish words aura and agua,^[3] a poetic reference to the rains for which the Oregon coast is famous. Popular history in the Pacific Northwest relates the term Oregon with Aragon, after Spanish King Ferdinand of Aragon. Finally, it has also been proposed that the term Oregon comes from the French word ouragan,^[4] which means ‘hurricane.’^[5]

When we began digging into this history, we were amazed to discover that the last name of the wife of Sebastian Vizcaíno, the first Hispanic explorer to navigate up to 43 degrees latitude, was Orejón. We knew that Magdalena Orejón, Vizcaíno’s wife, was the daughter of Juan Martínez and Isabel Yllescas Orejón, and a native of the village of Torrijos and the town of Burujón, in Toledo, Spain. Magdalena was also the granddaughter of Bartolomé Sánchez, and great granddaughter of Hernán Martínez, who had obtained the privilege of caballero hijodalgo^[6] from King Don Juan, with merced de armas.^[7] All his descendants, therefore, were hijosdalgo and well-known nobility from the village of Torrijos. Doña Magdalena de Orejón had two siblings, Francisco and Gabriela, and, while her brother used the paternal surname, Martínez, it seems that she preferred to use her mother’s last name, Orejón, as this is how her name appears in Francisco’s confirmatory letter of nobility, written in Mexico City in 1597. The letter was presented as proof in favor of her brother, brother-in-law of Sebastian Vizcaíno, in the face of a lawsuit that had taken him to jail for some debts. This document is part of a beautiful manuscript  available in the digital collection of the World Digital Library.^[8]

However, impressed as we are by the coincidence between Magdalena’s last name and the name of the Oregon territory discovered by her husband, we are far from definitively concluding that the name of Oregon originates in Magdalena’s surname. Neither the accounts written of the journey nor the maps created by cosmographer Enrico Martínez upon their return attribute the name to those territories. As such, we might conclude that the relationship between the surname of Vizcaíno’s wife is more of an interesting historical coincidence than the actual origin of the territory’s name. That said, researchers do not want to completely reject the possibility simply because we have not found any document from the time in which said toponymy appears.

It should be remembered that maps, in addition to their value as sources of geological information regarding territorial characteristics and the layout of land and sea, have always had a political reading. Maps show the extension of domains and, consequently, the need to defend territorial rights. As the Flemish geographer and cartographer Gerardus Mercator said “maps are the eyes of history”; that is, they are a reflection of known lands. As a reflection, they have always served to reaffirm the domains and the might of nations, since in them geographical possessions are outlined and sovereignty is proclaimed.

In the case of the Americas, from the beginning the Casa de Contratación (House of Commerce) in Seville was responsible for developing all cartography of the newly discovered territories, a cartography that since its beginnings had a distinctly nautical character. Sailors on their trips took notes of the tides, the currents, and the winds; they produced charts, derrotas^[9] and diaries of navigation. They tried to gather all the possible data with which they later created a detailed cartography of the coast. The development of maps and geographical charts was thus seen as a fundamental activity for improving expeditions, and all the information collected by the navigators in their accounts and diaries was passed to the cartographers established in Seville, who had the mission of incorporating it into the Padrón Real or Royal Register. This Padrón was  a kind of universal nautical chart where, with greatest secrecy, they recorded the progression of the discoveries and the routes of navigation. Through the different expeditions, they worked to compile cartographic data in a format that was later represented in that Padrón Real: a nautical map with courses and navigation data that allowed the pilots to find their destinations and which was continuously updated throughout future expeditions.

The influence of cartography on the Hispanic Origins of Oregon

Maps, which were until 1573 eminently nautical, began to incorporate data from the interiors of newly discovered territories, reflecting the new worlds that were being revealed as much as the geographical changes known up to that point. It was supposed to be preserved as the best kept secret.  From the first years of Hispanic presence in the Americas, then, secrecy was absolute. Philip II, in 1582, even ordered that all reports and maps gathered on the Indies should not be published and that access to them should be restricted. The orders were clear not only to anyone directly involved with the description and drawing of maps but also to sailors and pilots, who had also received specific instructions for the custody of maps and navigation charts. They knew that if their ships were approached or captured by the enemy, they should destroy or throw overboard any map, diary or courses that they carried on board. Secrecy was not only limited to maps but extended to every aspect, no matter how minimal, related to the art of sailing.

This desire to keep maps and geographic charts in secret corresponded to strategic calculations, a position that not only Philip II but previous monarchs as well, defended. Portuguese kings, too, who since the end of the 15th century had tried to restrict access to the records of ship routes and to any other type of map or navigation chart, defended this position. Thus, the maps, which were understood as the cartographic representation of political domains, were treated as state secrets. Philip II understood at the time that information was power, and therefore did not allow the dissemination of the knowledge acquired about the Indies. As a result of this policy of secrecy, the documents and maps resulting from the expeditions were often forgotten in the archives and libraries that kept them. In addition, many of the maps the monarchs received over the years were kept in the Escorial Library, where they would eventually be destroyed by the fire of 1671.

The secrecy for maps and cartographic documents was such that it could be confused with some obscurantism. Although the Hispanic monarchy, through the expansion of its empire in the Americas, came to know the continent better than any other European nation and even wrote many chronicles from the early days of the Conquest, there was a strategic visual silence that, as we have seen, found its origins in Philip II’s demand for concealment of any cartographic information. This zeal in the creation of maps was difficult to review, and the traditional resistance of the Hispanic monarchy to print this type of documentation and disseminate cartographic information continued for many years. In addition, in the 17th century the continued wars with Dutch, French and other European powers kept Philip III, Philip IV and Charles II on the defensive almost continuously. Thus, in relation to the Indies, both Philip III and Philip IV repeated and even reinforced bans on publishing maps, and those produced after expeditions and discoveries were guarded jealously from the public domain.

While for Hispanic monarchy cartography was official, and its monopoly belonged to the Crown, it was not the same in other countries, like the Netherlands or England. There, map production was largely in the hands of cartographers and private publishers, resulting in an open cartographic market and the production of a large number of maps. Thus, while printing maps from the New World became an obsession for Italian, French, German and Dutch presses, the Hispanic monarchy was characterized by a stealth policy due to colonial competition interests. This explains the near total absence of printing of marine, and even terrestrial, charts for several centuries.

At last, within the reformist policies of the Bourbons begun in the time of Philip V, the subject of scientific development, which included the creation of modern and effective cartography, was addressed, with the goal of providing more precise knowledge about the overseas territories. In the Americas, this policy also responded to the permanent threat of interference by other empires: the Portuguese in the South, the English in the Pacific and the Russians in Alaska. This competition and rivalry with other European powers demanded more and more scientific efforts for the Hispanic monarchy’s defense of its Empire, including the modernization of naval knowledge and technology and improvements in nautical cartography. Therefore, at the end of the 18th century the Spanish Monarchy embarked on an ambitious and costly project to update the cartography of the coasts of its domains. It included the organization of the Astronomical Observatory in Cadiz, the training of officers according to the latest cartographic advances, and the sending to the Americas several expeditions, such as that of Alejandro Malaspina, to examine the entire American coast of the Pacific Ocean, from Cape Horn to Alaska.

Despite the lack of knowledge that we have even today of many of the maps produced by Hispanic cartographers throughout the 16th and 17th centuries due to the historical secrecy, the El Escorial fire of 1671, and the fact that we simply have yet to find everything conserved among the enormous  historical documentation preserved in the  archives, what does seem clear is that the name Oregon never appeared on the preserved maps, courses or nautical charts that were made by the Hispanic sailors who knew the west coast of the American continent and that are still being studied today. The name of Oregon was probably never even heard by Hispanic authorities, neither after the Vizcaíno expedition of 1602 (despite the possible tie-in with his wife’s name), nor after the following expeditions to the northwestern coast of the American continent, since in all these expeditions they never used that name for the discovered territory from 43 degrees latitude up.In fact, the ways to refer to the North-West American coast over time were as follows:

• Contra-costa del Mar del Sur al Norte^[10] in the Juan Rodríguez expedition in 1542.
• Costas de las Californias or Costas del Norte del Mar del Sur on the first expedition of Vizcaíno in 1596.
• Costa Oeste de Nueva España or Costa y Puertos del Mar del Sur during the second expedition of Vizcaíno in 1602.
• When Count of Lacy, lieutenant general and ambassador to the courts of Sweden and Russia, wrote from Saint Petersburg in March 1773 about the Russian expeditions of the years 1741 and 1764, and said that all the land that extends up to 75 degrees latitude was called La California.
• Costas del Norte y Mares de las Californias, so called in the 1775 Heceta expedition.
• Costa del Norte de California in the Arteaga and De la Bodega expedition of 1779 and in the expeditions of 1790.
• Costa Norte de Nueva España in Alejandro Malaspina’s politico-scientific journey to the Northwest Coast of the American continent.
• Costa Noroeste del Pacífico en América del Norte, the final denomination found in documentation relating to that territory until Spain’s retreat from Nootka.

Nor was Oregon registered as the name for those territories in the Hispanic sailors’ accounts and diaries about the Northwest Coast of the American continent during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. These sailors did write down some data both on the existence of the oregano plant in certain areas known during their voyages  and on the fact that the natives of those territories bore their ears to hold large earrings. In the expedition carried out in 1774, Juan Pérez Hernández was struck by the fact that in the Rada de San Lorenzo, at 49 degrees and 30 minutes, Native women and also some men carried earrings made of bone in their ears. A little further south, at 44 degrees and 55 minutes, Friar Tomás de la Peña y Saravia, a religious man who was part of the Pérez Hernández expedition, wrote in his journal that there was a lot of zacate on the coast (from Nahuatl zacatl: grass, fodder). It would not be until a year later, though, in 1775, that Bruno de Heceta would write concrete news about the existence of the oregano plant in the lands of the Northwest, specifically in the port of La Trinidad, at 41 degrees and 7 minutes. Friar Miguel de la Campa, who traveled with Heceta, recorded in his journal that the land was full of grass and many herbs and flowers, including oregano. For his part, the second pilot of the schooner that accompanied the expedition, Francisco Antonio Maurelle, collected in his diary that native men and women carried two bone screws similar to those of the butt of a rifle on the ears.During that same expedition, Maurelle wrote that the land was flooded with wild herbs, like European meadows, with green color and a smell that pleased the eyes and nose, among which was oregano. Further north, in the Rada Bucareli, at 47 degrees and 24 minutes, Friar Miguel wrote in his journal that the women pierced their noses and put rings in them, and that the men made many holes in their ears and from them hung many small shells of various colors.

As for the West River of the West that John B. Horner speaks of in his book about Oregon, Hispanic cartographers did not record its existence.^[11] They must have known of a map produced in 1722 by French cartographer Guillaume Delisle, entitled Carte d’Amerique, in which the entrance discovered by Martín de Aguilar appears, now known as Coos Bay, which is situated at a latitude of 45 degrees on the Cabo Blanco de San Sebastián. Inland, too, toward the east, Delisle located a river stretching westward that he named the Grande Revière Coulant à l´Oueste (Great River That Runs Westward), this being perhaps the first cartographic reference to the legendary River of the West.^[12]

The Hispanic authorities also had news of a map drawn up at the Academy of Sciences in Saint Petersburg in 1754 by the German historian and ethnologist G.F. Müller, entitled Nouvelle carte des découvertes faites par des vaisseaux russiens aux côtes inconnues de l’Amérique septentrionale avec les pais adiacente.^[13] In the map appears a river called the River of the West (with toponymy in French, R. de L’Ouest).^[14] This river also corresponds to the one that flows into the bay at which Martín de Aguilar arrived in 1603, with headwaters near Lake Winnipeg.^[15] Other relevant maps that Hispanic authorities probably knew were the Carte de l´Amérique Septentrionale, elaborated by geographer and cartographer Jacques Nicolas Bellin in 1755;^[16] the Mapa simplificado del Océano Septentrional,^[17] which Bellin created in 1766 based on the discoveries made by the Russians and in which the River of the West (R. de l’Oueste) reappears with the entrance Martín de Aguilar discovered in 1603, now known as Coos Bay.^[18]

Thus, neither in the maps created by Hispanic cartographers nor in the maps produced in France and Russia in the 18th century does the name of Oregon appear. The name noted of that area that appears on maps of that time is the Río del Oeste, which flows into the bay Martín de Aguilar discovered in 1603 (Coos Bay).

When American explorer Jonathan Carver published in 1778 in London the map titled A Plan of Captain Carver’s Travel in the Interior Part of North America in 1766 and 1767, he located the head of the Ourigan River at 47 degrees.^[19] However, in another of the maps resulting from these same trips in which Carver tried to find the Northwest Passage or Anian Strait, a map titled New Map of North America, the name Ourigan River does not appear. Instead, that same river, whose source the map places in Pikes Lakes, is called in this occasion  the River of the West. That source, discovered by Aguilar, was located a little below the latitude of 44 degrees.^[20]

Carver studied topography and cartographical techniques during the French and Indian War (1754-1763). He was hired by fellow North American Major Robert Rogers (organizers of the Rogers’ Rangers) to carry out the aforementioned expedition and try to find a waterway to the West that reached the Pacific Ocean. Therefore, the term Ourigan appears on Carver’s maps associated with a river due to the fact that Robert Rogers was the first North American to write down the name of Oregon in 1765, which he did when applying for license and funding to look for the long-awaited Northwest Passage from the Great Lakes to the mouth of the Mississippi, and from there to a river that the Natives called Ouragan.

A few years later, in 1772, he made a similar exploration request again, but, on that occasion, he used the term Ourigan. It appears that his geographical knowledge of the region derived from the trips made from 1769 to 1772 by the English explorer and trader Samuel Hearne in the Northwest of the continent, who was also looking for the Northwest Passage and, above all, for the mines that some Native peoples had mentioned. Similarly the Scottish Alexander Mackenzie, who was also trying to find the Northwest Passage, became the first European to explore the upper parts of the Tacoutche Tessé River, or the Salmon River, in 1793. He believed it to be the Columbia River, though it was actually the Fraser River. Thus, on the map titled A Map of America Between Latitudes 40 and 70 North and Longitudes 45 and 180 West, Exhibiting Mackenzie’s Track from Montreal to Fort Chipewyan & from Thence to the North Sea In 1789 & to the West Pacific Ocean in 1793, developed in 1801, Mackenzie named this river the Columbia River.^[21]

It is on a map by the English cartographer Aaron Arrowsmith, entitled Map Exhibiting all the New Discoveries in the Interior Parts of North America, dated January 1st, 1795, where the word Oregan first appears.^[22] This map was published in different years, with additions or extensions, but, in the one published in 1802, the cartographer locates the Oregan River between 43 and 44 degrees latitude, (while in the one published in 1811, the Columbia River appears in the same place where the Oregan River had previously been located) next to Coos Bay, between Cape Mezari and Saddle Hill.^[23]

Arrowsmith’s cartographies were clearly plagued with errors, among many others, confusing the Oregon River in the North with the Colorado River in the West. His singular error, according to the German naturalist and explorer Alexander Von Humboldt in his Political Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain published in 1827, was the result of a bad interpretation or even clumsiness, for Arrowsmith confused the Spanish word origen, which means, ‘principle, beginning or roots of a thing,’ with the Indian word origan.^[24] It is important to remember that Humboldt had managed in 1800 to convince the jealous Spanish authorities, who had not allowed any foreigner to enter their domains for almost three centuries, to allow him to make a series of trips and studies in the Americas. The enlightened explorer determined that Arrowsmith had based his map on a previous map of New Spain, published by Novohispano scientist José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez, in which the words in Spanish “Río Colorado, o del Norte, cuyo origen se ignora”^[25] appeared at the intersection of the Gila River and the Colorado River. We can read the words that supposedly gave rise to Arrowsmith’s error by consulting this map of Alzate, the Nuevo Mapa Geographico de la América Septentrional perteneciente al virreinato de México,^[26] dated 1767 and dedicated to the wise members of the Royal Academy of Sciences in Paris, in the digitized archives of the National Library of France.^[27] We can also read the words that gave rise to the error of Arrowsmith on a map called the Mapa de la Nueva España,^[28] preserved in the Museo Naval of Madrid. Those same words also appear on yet another map, dated 1772,  entitled Plano de las Provincias de Ostimuri, Sinaloa, Sonora y demás circunvecinas y parte de California,^[29]  which can be found in the Biblioteca Digital Mexicana.^[30]

It does appear that Arrowsmith confused the Tacoutche Tesse River discovered by Alexander MacKenzie, and which must be the same one that appeared in Robert Rogers’ license request and also on Carver’s map, with the Colorado/Northern River as a result of an error reading the map of José Antonio de Alzate. In turn, Mackenzie apparently was also wrong, for he believed that the Tacoutche Tesse was the real Columbia River, when the river he had discovered was the Fraser, a smaller river that has its mouth in the Georgia Strait.

The influence of the Lewis and Clarke expedition in THE HISTORY OF Oregon

It would not be until the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clark that the Americans first reached the Pacific Ocean by land, beginning the so-called race to the West. The Corps of Discovery, as it was officially termed, had the support of President Thomas Jefferson, who was convinced of westward expansion after the purchase of Louisiana in 1803, and looking for a route that would link the already extensive US territory with the Pacific coast.^[31] Jefferson backed this expedition with very clear instructions: the mission was to explore the Missouri River and those of its main tributaries that could reach the Pacific Ocean, be it through the Columbia, the Oregon, the Colorado or any other river that could offer a direct and feasible water route across the continent and with it expedite commerce with the West Coast. The Lewis and Clark expedition members used the map produced by Arrowsmith in 1802 as well as the information provided by Humboldt, who assisted with the preparations for the expedition. The American explorers went up the Missouri River and then followed the Snake and Columbia rivers to the coast of the Oregon Territory. When they reached Cape Disappointment, at the mouth of the Columbia River in the great South Sea (or Pacific Ocean), Clark noted in his journal: “Ocean in view! Oh what a joy!”^[32] During this trip, which lasted from 1804 to 1806, the expedition members began negotiations both with different Native tribes, who in most cases received them cordially and even helped them during the harsh winters they experienced during the long journey. It is a sad irony that these same hospitable tribes would soon be  informed that the United States was taking their lands. Such claims were being made regardless of the fact that a large part of their journey was made through territory under the jurisdiction of the Viceroyalty of New Spain and the province of Alta California, as Spain would not cede all those territories (the present states of Oregon, Idaho, Montana and Washington) until 1819. In any case, one of the results of this expedition was the gathering of important information about the entire territory that they traveled, including its rivers, mountains, flora and fauna, as well as of the people who lived in them. In addition, it gave rise to the famous Map of Lewis and Clark’s Track, Across the Western Portion of North America from the Mississippi to the Pacific Ocean, by Order of the Executive of the United States in 1804, published in 1810, and which situates the Columbia next to Cape Disappointment.^[33] It was from the journey of these explorers that much more accurate maps of the northwest of the American continent were actually drawn up, maps that opened the door to an avalanche of US settlers, traders, and hunters who displaced, marginalized, infected with their diseases, or directly killed the Sioux, Hidatsa and Shoshone tribes, the same people who had enabled the success of the Lewis and Clark venture.

Both this Lewis and Clark expedition along the Missouri River, and those carried out by the American Zebulon Montgomery Pike (1806-1807), went through the northern lands of New Spain, from St. Louis to Arkansas and the Rockies. The viceroys of New Spain, Félix Berenguer de Marquina and José de Iturrigaray Aróstegui, received news of this, thanks to the Marquis of Casa Calvo, ambassador of Spain in Philadelphia. The viceroys, realizing that neither permission nor permits had been asked of them before these explorers entered their land, considered that these American expeditions were invasions of New Spain, and they issued orders to the different governors to find and intercept them. The first patrols failed to find Lewis and Clark, but those that were later dispatched to arrest Pike did manage to locate and even arrest him.^[34]

A few years after the Lewis and Clark expedition, in 1817, US poet and journalist William Cullen Bryant would write on lines 53 and 54 of his youthful poem Thanatopsis, “where rolls the Oregon and hears no sound,” in reference to the Columbia River.^[35]

Final observations on the Hispanic Origins of Oregon

In 1820, the English botanist Thomas Nuttall, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, published Nuttall’s Journal, in which he collected his observations from  an 1819 trip through the territory of Arkansas. He noted that in the maps of North America from 20 years earlier, there were great inaccuracies, such as the assumption that the waters of the west, almost from the heads of the Mississippi and the San Lorenzo rivers, must have been united by a fabulous “Oregan” or “River of the West,” a great waterway that no European had ever seen, whose existence depended on Native rumors, and which, after crossing about half the continent, was supposed to flow into the Pacific somewhere near the latitude of 43 degrees.^[36]

In fact, as we have been able to verify throughout this investigation, in the maps of the early 19th century, when placing the river that should be the Columbia at latitude of 46 degrees, on numerous occasions they confuse it with the one that empties into the Pacific on latitude of 43 degrees, that is to say, the one discovered by Martín de Aguilar in 1603 that appears on French and Russian maps of the second half of the 18th century as the River of the West. Finally, in 1822, when Virginia Congressman John Floyd participated in the creation of the Oregon Territory, he called the river Wauaregan, which in the Native Algonquian languages ​​means ‘Beautiful Waters.’ Perhaps it could be the Indian word that Robert Rogers had heard and included in his 1765 petition, since Algonquian languages ​​make up the largest subfamily of the Algic family of Native Americans, extending from the east coast of North America to Alberta in Canada and Coahuila in Mexico.

We should also briefly discuss the possibility that this term is related to the Aragonese and their King Fernando de Aragón. First we must remember that this king died in 1516, leaving many years for the Hispanic explorers to arrive to Pacific Northwest latitudes. Secondly, we must not forget that in the Iberian Peninsula, after the signing of the Treaty of Almizra in 1244, the borders or territorial limits with the Kingdom of Castile were established, which turned the Mediterranean Sea into the natural route of expansion for the Aragonese. Thus, the commercial and territorial expansion of the Aragonese Crown from the end of the 13th century to the end of the 15th reached through the Mediterranean, where the kingdom of Aragon incorporated a series of important territories, until finally Constantinople was taken by the Turks in 1543, followed by a commercial decline in the Mediterranean. This event gave way to the rise of the trade routes of the North Sea and, after the new geographical discoveries in the Americas, of the new Atlantic routes. Although the Aragonese expansion was carried out towards the East, the presence of the said kingdom in America has always been a highly debated subject by historians, since the Castilian Crown always tried to establish a tight control over everything related to the New World. In fact, the controversy around whether the Aragonese could participate and benefit from the discoveries on an equal basis with the Castilians is very old. As historian Esteban Mira Caballos reminds us in his study, “Los prohibidos en la emigración a América,” this goes back to the first years of the colonial period and reaches the historiographical discussion even today.^[37]

We do not wish to delve deeper here into this debated issue, but we do want to conclude by pointing out that the documentation preserved in historical archives regarding the presence of the Spanish in America does not refer to Aragonese; the term generally used was that of Castilians, and also that of Christians, and, as we have seen throughout this investigation, even the Natives of the different northern areas called them by different names, such as Guacamal, in the San Diego area, and Taquimines, in the Bahía de los Fuegos, but never Aragonese.

We do not want to end this chapter without pointing out that there was an entry called Entrada de Aragon on the northwest coast. This was the name with which the 1791 expedition of Alejandro Malaspina baptized the entrance next to the port that Jean-François Galaup, Count of La Pérouse, had called in 1786 the Port of the French (current Lituya Bay or Glacier Bay). It was located at 58 degrees and 38 minutes, as we can see on the map titled Carta Esférica de los reconocimientos hechos en la costa N.O. de América (1791), which can be found in the digitized archives of the Instituto Geográfico Nacional. During the Malaspina trip the expedition members provided names of Spanish territories to different entrances and bays at those latitudes, such as Entrada de Rioja, Entrada de Granada, Entrada de Aragón and Entrada de Castilla.

FIGURE 14. Carta Esférica de los reconocimientos hechos en la costa N.O. de América entre los paralelos de 57 grados y 60 grados 30 minutos de latitud N. por las corbetas Descubierta y Atrevida de la Marina Real (1791), Malaspina Expedition, 1791. [One of the first mappings of the coasts of Alaska].^[38]