Barclay especially, while on profits bent as their main issue, incidentally made discoveries of considerable value. Barclay, sailing from Nootka in July, 1787, discovered a passage between Cape Flattery and the land he had just left, which we know as Vancouver Island but supposed at that time to be the mainland. The next year Meares ordered his lieutenant Robert Duffin to explore that passage which now was traced for the distance of several leagues. The passage lay only one degree north of the fabled strait of Juan de Fuca and while, unlike that creation of a sailor's fancy, it did not in fact connect the two great oceans, no one knew what it might lead into and its discovery revived the most active geographical speculation.
Men began to see that Cook's voyage after all left many things unsettled. The great navigator had located Cape Flattery and Nootka Sound, after which he had sailed to the Alaska coast without so much as suspecting that he had been running past a succession of great islands instead of along the continental coastline. That fact was now becoming clear, and the new found strait suggested a sea of indefinite extent in that latitude, eating into the continent.
The Nootka Sound Controversy. The new geographical problems raised by the work of the maritime fur traders, in themselves would have justified a new British exploring expedition under government auspices. Another circumstance tending to the same result was the now celebrated Nootka Sound Controversy of 1789–1790. This arose over the attempt of Spain,
