Colonial Despatches

Griffin Bay cuts a jagged shoreline along southeast edge of San Juan Island. While on his 1840-41 expedition, Wilkes had named the bay Ontario Roads, after a ship of the same name that fought in the War of 1812.1

Captain Henry Richards charted it as Griffin Bay in the late 1850s,2 but it had another early name of Man of War Harbour, a name arguably apt, as it was Charles John Griffin, an HBC man, whose pig raided a potato patch of a US citizen, who shot the pig, thus inciting what would come to be known as the Pig War.3

• 1. Robert Hitchman, Place Names of Washington (Tacoma: Washington State Historical Society, 1985), 113.
• 2. Edmond S. Meany, Origin of Washington Geographic Names (Seattle: University of Washington Press, 1923), 104.
• 3. Hitchman, Place Names of Washington, 113.