Lieutenant W. R. Broughton (commanding HMS Chatham),James Johnstone (Master), Archibald Menzies (surgeonaturalist) and the survey of the San Juan Archipelago, 1792

摘要

Captain George Vancouver's report to the Admiralty, published in the account of his 1790-1795 expedition, failed to give sufficient notice to the importance of Lieutenant William Broughton's boat survey investigations of the San Juan islands. In fact, in that publication, it was dismissed in a few lines of text (appearing as five lines of print in Lamb's re-published edition of 1984). Only the first survey of the islands, made on 18-22 May 1792, gets a mention. That of Johnstone's later visit (with Menzies)from the Birch Bay anchorage on 18-19 June was omitted. An account of Johnstone's second investigation of San Juan Archipelago is found in no other source than in Menzies's own unpublished journal. The present author has attempted to address the imbalance and suggests a logical sequence by which Johnstone could have visited those islands not surveyed on the earlier occasion.