Several previous voyages of exploration, including those…
1791 CE
Britain is especially interested in improving its knowledge of the Southern Pacific whale fisheries, and in particular the location of the strategically positioned Australia, New Zealand, the legendary Isla Grande, and the Northwest Passage.
A new ship is purchased, fitted out, and named HMS Discovery after one of Cook's ships.
Her captain is Henry Roberts and Vancouver his First Lieutenant.
Plans change when the adventurer John Meares reported that the Spanish had impounded his ship and hundreds of thousands of pounds' worth of goods at Nootka Sound.
Although it is now known that his claims of loss were somewhat exaggerated, Britain had recently beaten Spain at war and seemed ready to resume hostilities; Parliament had readied the fleet in the Nootka Crisis.
Roberts and Vancouver left Discovery to serve in the Channel Fleet while Discovery became a depot ship for processing victims of the press gang.
The Spanish had capitulated in the Nootka Sound Convention, whose terms resulted in inconsistent instructions for the British and Spanish officers sent to implement them.
Vancouver has returned to as the expedition's commander.
According to his orders, he is "to receive back in form a restitution of the territories on which the Spaniards had seized, and also to make an accurate survey of the coast, from the 30th degree of north latitude northwestward toward Cook's River; and further, to obtain every possible information that could be collected respecting the natural and political state of that country."
These explorations are in part to discover water communication into the North American interior (whether a Northwest Passage or, more likely, navigable rivers) and to facilitate the researches of the expedition's politically well-connected botanist, Archibald Menzies.
Following the mutiny on the Bounty, the Admiralty had ordered the precaution that ships not make such long voyages alone; therefore the armed tender HMS Chatham is assigned to the expedition.
The chartered merchant ship, Daedalus, will rendezvous at Nootka Sound a year later with supplies.
The expedition is supposed to take two or three years.