16 Some Considerations Regarding the Origin of Oregon’s Name

John B. Horner in his 1919 book Oregon: Her History, Her Great Men, Her Literature, wrote that Jonathan Carver gave this name to the River of the West in 1778, two years before the Declaration of Independence. He said that he had heard in 1766 that the river was named like this by 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. Thus, according to some authors, the name comes from the oregano plant, which grew in abundance in that area of the Pacific coast; American settler and writer Hall J. Kelley, a strong advocate of the United States settlement in Oregon in the decades of 1820 and 1830, said 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 ‘a place of abundance.’ Bishop Blanchet, from the catholic missions in Washington and Oregon, argued that Oregon came from the Spanish word orejón, because of the great ears that the Spaniards saw that the Indians had. The poet Joaquín Miller said that the term Oregon came from the Spanish words aura and agua, a poetic reference to the rains for which the Oregon coast is famous. The popular history of Oregon relates the term Oregon with Aragon, because of Spanish King Ferdinand of Aragon; and finally, it has also been proposed that the term Oregon comes from the French word ouragan, which means ‘hurricane.’

At the beginning of this research we were very surprised to discover that the last name of Sebastian Vizcaíno’s wife, the first Hispanic explorer to navigate up to 43 degrees latitude, was Orejón. We knew then that Magdalena Orejón, Vizcaíno’s wife, was the daughter of Juan Martínez and Isabel Yllescas Orejón, and 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 being considered a caballero hijodalgo of King Don Juan, with merced de armas. Therefore all his descendants were hijosdalgo and notorious nobles from the village of Torrijos. Doña Magdalena de Orejón also had two brothers, 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 the confirmatory letter of hidalguía of her brother Francisco, written in Mexico City in 1597, and which had been presented as proof in favor of her brother and 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 that can be consulted in the digital collection of the World Digital Library.

However, although we were very impressed by the coincidence between Magdalena’s last name and the name of the Oregon territory, discovered by her husband, to this day, there is no definitive conclusion that allows researchers to state that the name of Oregon may come from Magdalena’s last name. Firstly, because none of the relations that were written about the trip of Vizcaíno mentions any territory by such a name. Secondly, because the maps elaborated by the cosmographer Enrico Martínez, after the return of the expeditionaries to the port of Acapulco, collect said toponymy. Therefore, it could be concluded that the relationship between the surname of the wife of Sebastián Vizcaíno is more of an interesting historical coincidence than a causality regarding the toponymy of said territory. However, researchers do not want to completely reject a possible relationship between the last name of Vizcaíno’s wife and that of the Oregon Territory just because they have not found any document from the time in which said toponymy appears.

It should be remembered that maps, in addition to having a geographical reading to know the characteristics of the territories and the disposition of the continents, seas and oceans, have also 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 territories. As such reflection throughout history, they have served to reaffirm the domains and the might of nations, since in them geographical possessions were outlined and sovereignty was proclaimed.

In the case of the Americas, from the outset, the Casa de Contratación in Seville was in charge of developing all the cartography of the newly discovered territories, which originally had an eminently nautical character. Sailors on their trips took notes of the tides, the currents, the winds, produced charts, derrotas and diaries of navigation. They tried to gather all the possible data with which they then elaborated 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 relations and diaries was passed to the cartographers established in Seville, who had the mission of incorporating it into the Padrón Real. This Padrón was said to be a kind of universal nautical chart where, with the maximum of secrecy, the progress of the discoveries and the routes of navigation were recorded. Through the different expeditions it was attempted to obtain a database of cartographic data that was then represented in that Royal Padrón: a nautical map with courses and navigation data that allowed the pilots to find their destinations, which was continuously updated after the different expeditions.

The influence of cartography within the Hispanic Origins of Oregon

That map, which was until 1573 eminently nautical, then began to incorporate inland data from the newly discovered territories, reflecting the new worlds that were being revealed and the changes in the geography known until then. It was supposed to be preserved as the best kept secret. Even since the first years of the Hispanic presence in America, secrecy was absolute, and Philip II, in 1582, even ordered that all reports and maps gathered in the Indies should not be published and that access to them should be restricted. The orders were clear not only to anyone who had a direct relationship with the drawing of maps, but also to sailors and pilots, who 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 away any map, diary or derrotero that they carried on board. Secrecy was not only limited to maps but also to any aspect, no matter how minimal, related to the art of sailing.

This desire to keep maps or geographic charts in secret responded to strategic calculations, a position that not only Philip II defended, but which also had been adopted by the previous monarchs. Even by the Portuguese kings, who already since the end of the 15th century tried to restrict access to the records of the courses of their ships, and to any other type of map or navigation chart. Thus, the maps, which were understood as the cartographic representation of the kingdom’s domains, were treated as if they were a state secret. 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 graphic 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, since many chronicles were written from the early days of the Conquest, there was a tacit visual silence that had its zenith in Philip II’s criterion of concealment of any cartographic information. This zeal in the elaboration of maps made them difficult to revise, and the traditional resistance of the Hispanic Monarchy to print this type of documentation and disseminate cartographic information continued over the 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 removed from the public domain.

While for Hispanic Monarchy cartography was official, and its monopoly belonged to the Kings, it was not the same in other countries like Holland 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 of Italian, French, German or Dutch presses, the Hispanic Monarchy was characterized by a stealth policy due to colonial competition interests. This explains the almost absolute lack of printing of marine, and even terrestrial, charts during several centuries.

At last, within the reformist policies of the Bourbons, begun in the time of Philip V, the subject of scientific development was addressed, including the creation of modern and effective cartography, to provide more precise knowledge about the overseas territories. In the Americas, this policy also responded to the permanent state of threat from 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 recognize the entire American coast of the Pacific Ocean, from Cape Horn to Alaska.

Despite the lack of knowledge that we have of many of the maps produced by Hispanic cartographers throughout the 16th and 17th centuries, what does seem clear is that the name Oregon never appeared on the preserved maps, derroteros or nautical charts of the Hispanic sailors who knew the west coast of the American continent and which are still being studied today. The name of Oregon probably was never heard by Hispanic authorities, either after the Vizcaíno expedition of 1602, 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 way to refer to the North-West American coast over time was as follows: Contra-costa del Mar del Sur al Norte, in the Juan Rodríguez expedition in 1542; Coasts of the Californias or Northern Coasts of the South Sea on the first expedition of Vizcaíno in 1596; Western Coast of New Spain or Coast and Ports of the South Sea. During the second expedition of Vizcaíno, that of 1602; when the Conde de Lacy, lieutenant general and Spanish ambassador to the courts of Sweden and Russia, writes from Saint Petersburg in March 1773 about the Russian expeditions of the years 1741 and 1764, he says that all the land that extends to the 75 degrees is California. In the 1775 Heceta expedition the territory is referred as the Northern Coasts and Seas of the Californias; in the Arteaga and De la Bodega expedition of 1779 they refer to the Pacific Northwest Coast as the Northern Coasts and Seas of California or the Northern Coast of California; in the expeditions of 1790 they continue to name the region as the Northern coast of California; for his part, Alejandro Malaspina collects in his politico-scientific journey that the Northwest Coast of the American continent is the Northern Coast of New Spain; and, finally, in the documentation relating to the Hispanic Pacific Northwest until the withdrawal of Nutka, it is said to be the Northwest Coast of the Pacific in North America.

Nor was Oregon collected as the name for those territories in the Hispanic sailors’ relations and diaries about the Northwest Coast of the American continent during the 16th, 17th and 18th centuries. These sailors did write down in their texts some data both on the existence of the oregano plant in certain areas known during their navigations, and on the fact that the natives of those territories bore their ears to carry in them large earrings. Thus, 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 used tendrils made of bone in their ears. A little further south, at 44 degrees and 55 minutes, Fray Tomás de la Peña Saravia, a religious 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). Although it would not be until a year later, in 1775, when Bruno de Heceta wrote concrete news about the existence of the oregano plant in the lands of the Northwest, specifically in the port La Trinidad, in 41 degrees and 7 minutes. The friar Miguel de la Campa 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 a green color and smell that pleases the eyes and nose, among which one could see oregano. Further north, in the Rada Bucareli, in 47 degrees and 24 minutes, Friar Miguel wrote in his Journal that the women pierced their noses and put a ring on them, and also that the men made many holes in the ears and from them hung many small shells of various colors.

As for the river of the west that John B. Horner speaks of in his book about Oregon, Hispanic cartographers did not collect its existence, but they should have known of a map produced in 1722 by French cartographer Guillaume Delisle, entitled Carte d’Amerique, in which appears the entrance discovered by Martín de Aguilar, situated at a latitude of 45 degrees on the Cabo Blanco de San Sebastián; and inland, toward the east, Delisle located a river that stretched westward and which he named as Grande Reviere Coulant a l´Oueste (Great river that runs westwards), this being perhaps the first cartographic reference to the legendary river of the west.

The Hispanic authorities also had news of a map drawn up at the Saint Petersburg Academy of Sciences in 1754 by the German historian and ethnologist G.F. Müller, entitled Nouvelle carte des découvertes faites par des vaisseaux russiens aux côtes innues de l’Amérique septionale avecles païs adiacente, in which appears a river called river of the west (with toponymy in French, R. de L’Ouest). This river also corresponds to the one that flows into the bay that Martín de Aguilar arrived in 1603, with head near L. Winnipeg (Lake Winnipeg). Other relevant maps that Hispanic authorities probably knew were the Map of North America entitled in French Carte de l´Amérique Septentrionale, elaborated by the geographer and cartographer Jacques Nicolas Bellin in 1755; the Simplified Map of the Northern Ocean, which Bellin elaborated in 1766, based on the discoveries made by the Russians, and in which the river of the west reappears (R. de l’Oueste), next to the entrance that Martín de Aguilar discovered in 1603. Thus, neither in the maps elaborated by Hispanic cartographers, nor in the maps produced in France and Russia in the 18th century does, the name of Oregon appear. The name of the area that appears on the maps of that time is the one of the Río del Oeste, which flows into the bay discovered by Martin de Aguilar 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 birth or head of the Ourigan River in 47 degrees. 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 of Ourigan River does not appear. Instead, that same river, whose head the Map situated in Pikes Lakes, is called the river of the west; its mouth is the one discovered by Aguilar, placed a little below the latitude of 44 degrees.

Jonathan Carver studied topography and cartography techniques during the Franco-Indian war (1754-1763). He was hired by the American Major Robert Rogers (organizers of the Rogers’ Rangers) to carry out the aforementioned expedition and try to find a waterway west to the Pacific Ocean. Therefore, the fact that the term Ourigan appears on his maps associated to a river is because it was Robert Rogers the first American to write down the name of Oregon in 1765, 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 Ouragon. 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. For his part, the Scottish Alexander Mackenzie, while also trying to find the Northwest Passage as well, became the first European to explore the upper parts of the Tacoutche Tessé River, or Salmon River, in 1793. He believed it was the Columbia River when in reality it was 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 in1801, Mackenzie called this river the Columbia River.

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. This map was published in different years, with additions or extensions; thus, in the one published in 1802, the cartographer writes the name of the Oregan River between 43 and 44 degrees latitude, next to the mouth discovered by Martin of Aguilar, between Cape Mezari and Saddle Hill.

The mapping of Arrowsmith is clearly plagued with errors, among many others that of confusing the Oregon River in the north with the Colorado River in the southwest. His singular error, according to the German naturalist and explorer Alexander Von Humboldt in his Politic Essay on the Kingdom of New Spain published in 1827, was the result of a bad interpretation or even clumsiness, since Arrowsmith confused the Spanish word origen, which means spring, beginning or roots of a thing, with the Indian word origan. 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 dominions 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 New Spain scientist José Antonio de Alzate y Ramírez, in which the words in Spanish “Río Colorado, o del Norte, cuyo origen se ignora” appeared at the crossing 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, dated 1767 and dedicated to the wise members of the Royal Academy of Sciences, in the digitized archives of the National Library of France. We can also read the words that gave rise to the error of Arrowsmith on a map called the Mapa de la Nueva España, preserved in the Museo Naval of Madrid. Those same words also appear on yet another map, dated 1772, and entitled Map of the Provinces of Ostimuri, Sinaloa, Sonora and Others surrounding and Part of California, which can be found in the Biblioteca Digital Mexicana.

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, or Del Norte, River as a result of an error reading the map of José Antonio de Alzate. In turn, Mackenzie apparently was also wrong, because he believed that the Tacoutche Tesse was the real Columbia River, when the river he had discovered was the Fraser, a very limited river that has its mouth in the Georgia Strait.

The Lewis and Clarke influence in THE HISTORY OF Oregon

It was not until the expedition of Meriwether Lewis and William Clarke that the Americans first reached the Pacific Ocean by land, beginning the race west. The discovery trip of Lewis and Clarke had the support of President Thomas Jefferson himself who was convinced of the westward expansion after the purchase in 1803 of Louisiana (which had been ceded by Spain to Napoleon in 1800, with the promise that it would not be delivered to another country; however, it was sold due to the economic needs Napoleon had to continue with its military actions in Europe) and looking for a route that would link the already extensive US territory with the Pacific coast. Jefferson sponsored 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 through the Columbia, Oregon, Colorado or any other river able that could offer a direct and feasible fluvial 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 and also the information provided by Humboldt, who, as a seasoned scientific traveler, assisted himself 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 Cabo Desilusión (Cape Disappointment), at the mouth of the Columbia River in the majestic South Sea or Pacific Ocean, Clarke noted in his Journal: ‘Ocean in view! Oh!, the joy! During this trip, which lasted several years, from 1804 to 1806, the expedition members began negotiations 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, and to whom they told that they were going to take possession of their lands on behalf of the United States. 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, since Spain would not give up 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 is available on the Library of Congress webpage and which situates the Columbia River next to Cape Disappointment. 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 American settlers, traders, and hunters who displaced, marginalized, infected with their diseases, or directly killed the Sioux, Hidatsa and Shoshone tribes, the same who had enabled the success of the Lewis and Clark venture.

Both from the Lewis and Clark expedition along the Missouri River, and from those carried out by fellow American Zebulon Montgomery Pike (1806-1807) through the northern lands of New Spain, from St. Louis to Arkansas and the Rockies, the then viceroys of New Spain, Félix Berenguer de Marquina and José de Iturrigaray Aróstegui, had news, thanks to the Marquis of Casa Calvo, ambassador of Spain in Philadelphia. Both viceroys, understanding that they had not been informed nor asked for the necessary permits for the explorers to traverse the northern territories of the viceroyalty, considered that these American expeditions were invading the territory of New Spain, and issued orders to the different northern governors to send detachments in search of them and intercept them. The first patrols failed to find Lewis and Clarke, but those that were later dispatched to arrest Pike did manage to locate and even stop him.

A few years after the Lewis and Clarke expedition, in 1817, another American, the 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. It was with this poem that its author achieved literary fame, and also the one that made him one of the most famous poets of his century. In any case, there were so many confusions in the maps made in the late 18th and early 19th centuries, that in 1820 the English botanist Thomas Nuttall, a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, published the work Nuttall’s Journal, where he collected the observations he had made during an 1819 trip through the territory of Arkansas and noted that in the maps of North America from 20 years earlier, there were great inaccuracies, such as the fact of assuming that the waters of the west, almost from the heads of the Mississippi and the San Lorenzo rivers, they must have been collected by a fabulous Oregan or river of the west, a stream of great extension which 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.

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, and which 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 it 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.

To end this chapter on the origin of the name of Oregon, we should also briefly discuss the possibility that this term is related to the Aragonese by King Fernando de Aragón, as it seems that popular history collects. In the first place, we must remember that this king died in 1516, so there were still many years left for the Hispanic explorers to arrive in their navigations to the Pacific Northwest latitudes. And, 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, was through the Mediterranean, where the kingdom of Aragon incorporated a series of important territories, until the taking of Constantinople by the Turks in 1543 was 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. But, 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 “The Forbidden Ones in the Migration to the Americas,” this goes back to the first years of the colonial period and the historiographical discussion reaches even today.

The documentation preserved in historical archives regarding the presence of the Spanish in America, they are not called Aragonese; the term generally used was that of Castilians, and also that of Christians, and even, as we have seen throughout this investigation, the natives of the different northern areas called them in different ways, such as Guacamal, in the San Diego area, and Taquimines, in the Bahía de los Fuegos, but never Aragonese.

Final observations on the Hispanic Origins of Oregon

We do not want to end this chapter of our historical approach to the presence of Hispanics in the state of Oregon, as well as to the exploration trips that they made along the Northwest Coast of the American continent, without pointing out that there was an entry called Port of Aragon on said 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 Bay of the Glaciers). It was located at 58 degrees and 38 minutes, as we can see on the map titled Spherical Chart of the Reconnaissance Made on the N.W. coast of the Americas between the parallels of 57 degrees and 60 degrees 30 minutes of N. latitude by the Corvettes Descubierta and Atrevida of the Royal Navy (1791), which can be in the digitized funds 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 Rioja, Granada, Aragón and Castile.

FIGURE 14. Spherical Chart of the Reconnaissance Made on the N.W. coast of the Americas between the parallels of 57 degrees and 60 degrees 30 minutes of N. latitude by the Corvettes Descubierta and Atrevida of the Royal Navy, Malaspina Expedition, 1791.^[1]