Francisco de Eliza
Spanish naval officer, navigator, and explorer
1759 CE to 1825 CE
Francisco de Eliza y Reventa (1759 – February 19, 1825) was a Spanish naval officer, navigator, and explorer.
He is remembered mainly for his work in the Pacific Northwest.
He was the commandant of the Spanish post in Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island, and led or dispatched several exploration voyages in the region, including the Strait of Juan de Fuca and the Strait of Georgia.
World
Northern Oceania
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Kendrick, leaving immediately, arrives in Marvinas Bay on July 12.
Martínez had been replaced by Francisco de Eliza, but that causes no real problems.
Kendrick and Gray had been instructed to purchase as much land as they could from natives in the region.
Kendrick does so on at least two occasions, including on August 5, 1791, when he purchases eighteen square miles (forty-seven square kilometers) from a native tribe, near latitude 49°50′N, this purchase occurring while Gray had completed his voyage and since returned to the Northwest Coast.
Kendrick builds a small fort called Fort Washington in Clayoquot Sound in late August.
Gray builds his own winter quarters on the sound, Fort Defiance.
He continues trading furs, returning to Macau in December.
The Chinese refuse to buy his furs this year because of a quarrel with the Russians.
Robert Gray had set sail from Boston for the northwest coast again in the Columbia on September 28, 1790, reaching his destination in 1792.
Gray and John Kendrick had rejoined each other for a time, after Gray's return to the region.
On this voyage Gray, though he is still a private merchant, is sailing under papers of the United States of America signed by President George Washington.
Gray had put in at Nootka Sound on June 5, 1791, and wintered at a stockade his crew built and named Fort Defiance.
Over this winter, the crew has built a forty-five-ton sloop named Adventure, which is launched in the spring with Gray’s first mate, Robert Haswell, in charge.
He sails as far north as the Queen Charlotte Islands during this voyage.
Gray and the Columbia sail south once April comes, while the Adventure sails north.
After wintering on Vancouver Island, Gray sets sail again on April 2, 1792 when he leaves the trading post of Clayoquot.
As he departs, Gray orders the destruction of the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) village of Opitsitah (Opitsaht).
The attack is in retaliation for insults he thought he had endured and in response to rumors of a plot against his men, conceived by some local natives and a Sandwich Islander of his own crew.
The plot may have been real, but might equally have been a misunderstanding.
The village of Opitsaht, which consists of about two hundred houses with much carved work—a "fine village, the Work of Ages", according to Gray's officer John Boit, is "in a short time totally destroy'd".
Fortunately, it is deserted at the time.
John Boit, the keeper of his own ship's log, writes that Gray had let his passions go too far. (In 2005, descendants of Gray will formally apologize for the destruction of Opitsaht.)
The Spanish explorers Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés enter and anchor on June 14, 1792, in the north arm of the Fraser River, becoming the first Europeans to find and enter it.
The existence of the river, but not its location, had been deduced during the 1791 voyage of José María Narváez, under Francisco de Eliza.
The Bostonian trader John Kendrick had eventually found someone who would buy his furs in March 1792, but problems with the weather had forced him to remain in Macau until the spring of 1793.
He sails back and forth between the Sandwich Islands and Clayoquot Sound until October, 1794, after a brief reunion with his son John Kendrick, Jr., who commands a Spanish ship called the Aranzazú.