Fuca Pillar is a prominent, rectangular sea stack on the west side of Cape Flattery, about 18 miles (29 km) southwest of Port Renfrew and six miles (10 km) west-northwest of Neah Bay, Washington. It is named for Ioannis Phokas, a Greek maritime pilot in Spanish service better known by the Spanish rendering of his name, Juan de Fuca. In 1592 he claimed to have explored the Strait of Anián; now the Strait of Juan de Fuca, between Vancouver Island and Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, though his claim to have been the first European to see either the strait or the pillar is doubtful. The earliest generally accepted mention of the pillar came in 1788, from John Meares, a navigator, explorer and maritime fur trader best known for provoking the Nootka Crisis of the 1790s, which brought Britain and Spain to the brink of war.

Cape Flattery is the northwesternmost point of the contiguous United States, on the Olympic Peninsula where the Strait of Juan de Fuca meets the Pacific Ocean. It lies within the Makah Reservation and forms the northern boundary of the Olympic Coast National Marine Sanctuary. Captain James Cook named and described it on March 22, 1778, after a break in the coastline “flattered” him with hope of finding a harbor; a hope that proved false. It is the oldest non-Native place name still in use in Washington state.

The first Japanese known to have reached what is now Washington arrived in January 1834, when a dismasted, rudderless ship ran aground near Cape Flattery, possibly at Cape Alava. The vessel, the Hojunmaru, had left its home port of Onoura, on Japan’s southeastern coast, on October 11, 1832, carrying a crew of 14 and a cargo of rice and porcelain on what was meant to be a short run to Edo (present-day Tokyo). A typhoon tore away its rudder and mast, leaving it to drift roughly 5,000 miles across the Pacific for about 14 months. Only three crew members survived: Iwakichi, Kyukichi and Otokichi. Briefly enslaved by the local Makah, they were later taken to Fort Vancouver by William H. McNeill, on the orders of the Hudson’s Bay Company‘s John McLoughlin; the start of a long odyssey that never brought them home. Read more here and here. Explore more of Fuca Pillar and Cape Flattery here: