Spain and Britain came close to war over ownership of the Nootka Sound on contemporary Vancouver Island, and of greater importance, the right to colonize and settle the Pacific Northwest coast.

When the first Nootka Convention ended the crisis in 1790, Vancouver was given command of Discovery to take possession of Nootka Sound and to survey the coasts.

For three weeks they cooperatively explored the Georgia Strait and the Discovery Islands area before sailing separately towards Nootka Sound.

While at Nootka Sound Vancouver acquired Robert Gray's chart of the lower Columbia River.

Gray had entered the river during the summer before sailing to Nootka Sound for repairs.

* Canada Post issued a pair of 14-cent stamps to mark the 200th anniversary of Captain Cook's arrival at Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island on 26 April 1978.

The island was originally named Quadra's and Vancouver's Island in commemoration of the friendly negotiations held by Spanish Commander of the Nootka Sound settlement Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, and British Naval Captain George Vancouver on Nootka Sound in 1792, to find a solution to the Nootka Crisis.

They were among the first Pacific peoples north of California to come into contact with Europeans, as the Spanish, Americans and British attempted to secure control of Pacific Northwest and the trade in otter pelts, with Nootka Sound becoming a focus of these rivalries.

Vancouver Island came to the attention of Britain after the third voyage of Captain James Cook, who spent a month during 1778 at Nootka Sound, on the island's western coast.

The island's rich fur trading potential led the fur-trader John Meares to set up a single-building trading post near the native village of Yuquot ( Friendly Cove ), at the entrance to Nootka Sound.

For this purpose the British Naval Captain George Vancouver was sent to Nootka Sound in 1792.

In 1778 English mariner Captain James Cook visited Nootka Sound on Vancouver Island and also voyaged as far as Prince William Sound.

During the second expedition they met the American captain Robert Gray near Nootka Sound.

Upon entering Nootka Sound, they found William Douglas and his ship the Iphigenia.

In 1790 the Spanish sent three ships to Nootka Sound, under the command of Francisco de Eliza.

The expedition returned to Nootka Sound by August 1791.

Alessandro Malaspina, sailing for Spain, explored and mapped the coast from Yakutat Bay to Prince William Sound in 1791, then sailed to Nootka Sound.

As of the Nootka Conventions, the last in 1794, Spain gave up its exclusive a priori claims and agreed to share the region with the other Powers, giving up its garrison at Nootka Sound in the process.

Competition between Spain and the United Kingdom over control of Nootka Sound led to a bitter international dispute around 1790, called the Nootka Crisis, which was settled with the Nootka Conventions of the 1790s, when Spain agreed to abandon its exclusive claims to the North Pacific coast.

Spain gave up its claims of exclusivity via the Nootka Conventions of the 1790s.

In the Nootka Conventions, which followed the Nootka Crisis Spain granted Britain rights to the Pacific Northwest, although it did not establish a northern boundary for Spanish California, nor did it extinguish Spanish rights to the Pacific Northwest.

However, despite these claims, the English did not establish a colonizing presence on the west coast of North America until the late 18th century in the form of the explorations and asserted claims of Captains Cook and Vancouver and the associated Nootka Conventions, shortly after, the establishment of the Columbia Fur District of the Hudson's Bay Company and its headquarters at Fort Vancouver.

The Nootka Conventions of the 1790s, carried out in part by George Vancouver and his Spanish counterpart Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, prevented the dispute from escalating to war.

Although the Nootka Conventions theoretically opened the Pacific Northwest coast from northern California to Alaska to British colonization, the advent of the Napoleonic Wars distracted any efforts towards this ( as recommended by Vancouver at the time ) and the proposed settlement colony in the region was to be abandoned.

The Hudson's Bay Company, the remaining British presence in the region, was averse to settlement and any economic activity other than its own, such that settlement and resource development did not take place to any degree until the Fraser Canyon Gold Rush of 1858, which formalized British claims on the mainland still residual from the Nootka Conventions into the Colony of British Columbia.

War between Spain and Great Britain over control of the Pacific Northwest was averted by the three Nootka Conventions, signed in 1790, 1793, and 1794.

The United States argued that it acquired the Spanish rights to exclusive ownership of the Pacific Northwest as far north as Alaska, even though Spain had in fact relinquished any claim to exclusive rights as a result of the Nootka Conventions.

In 1791 he was appointed Spanish commissioner to negotiate and administer the implementation of the Nootka Conventions at Nootka Sound.

The Spanish-British Nootka Conventions of the 1790s ended Spanish exclusivity and opened the Northwest Coast to explorers and traders from other nations, most notably Britain, Russia, and the fledgling United States.

Spain ceded their rights north of the 42nd Parallel to the United States by the 1819 Adams-Onís Treaty, ( but not possession, which was disallowed by the terms of the Nootka Conventions ).

The two nations came close to war in the ensuing Nootka Crisis, but the issues were resolved peacefully with the first Nootka Convention in 1790, in which both countries recognized the other's rights to the area.

In 1786 Jean-François de La Pérouse, representing France, sailed to the Queen Charlotte Islands after visiting Nootka Sound but any possible French claims to this region were lost when La Pérouse and his men and journals were lost in a shipwreck near Australia.

Some 30-40 men were employed as shipwrights at Nootka Sound in what is now British Columbia, to build the first European-type vessel in the Pacific Northwest, named the North West America.

Negotiations to settle the dispute were handled under the hospitality of a powerful chief of the Mowachaht Nuu-chah-nulth of Nootka Sound, Maquinna.

The Nuu-chah-nulth were previously called the Nootka.

The two parent species would not likely cross in the wild as their natural ranges are more than 400 miles apart, but in 1888 the hybrid cross occurred when the female flowers or cones of Nootka Cypress were fertilised by pollen from Monterey Cypress.

His younger brother John Naylor ( 1856 – 1906 ) resultantly inherited Leighton Hall, and when in 1911 the reverse hybrid of the cones of the Monterey Cypress were fertilised with pollen from the Nootka, that hybrid was baptised ' Leighton Green.

Its name derives from its discovery on the lands of a First Nation of Canada, the Nuu-chah-nulth of Vancouver Island, British Columbia, who were formerly referred to as the Nootka.

The terrified women ran up the mountains, but turned into Nootka Cypress trees when they were out of breath.

The Iphigenia Nubiana and North West America were to join the Argonaut and Princess Royal at Nootka Sound.

On a 1788 voyage to Alaska, Esteban José Martínez had learned that the Russians were intending to establish a fortified outpost at Nootka Sound.

Plans were laid for Nootka Sound to be colonized.

The other two ships were American, the Columbia Rediviva and the Lady Washington, which had wintered at Nootka Sound.

For this purpose Vancouver and Bodega y Quadra were sent to Nootka Sound in 1792.

Britain and Spain were both free to use Nootka Sound as a port and erect temporary structures, but, " neither ... shall form any permanent establishment in the said port or claim any right of sovereignty or territorial dominion there to the exclusion of the other.

Although the Nootka Crisis originally revolved around the issue of sovereignty and the northern limits of New Spain, the basic issues were left unresolved.

In 1987, Orky 2 along with another female named Nootka 4 were involved in an accident that injured trainer John Sillick.

Sillick's back, leg, and pelvis were broken when Orky landed on top of him ; the accident was attributed to another trainer not realizing that Sillick was riding Nootka in the same area that Orky was instructed to breach.

The two American ships were left alone, although Martínez captured a third American ship, the Fair American, when it arrived at Nootka Sound in the fall of 1789.

After 1786, English mariners frequently sailed to Nootka Sound ; in 1803 the crew of the American ship Boston were almost all killed by these Indians.