Colonial Despatches

Neah Bay is located on the Makah People's land reserve, on the northwestern shore of the Olympic Peninsula. It looks out to the Juan de Fuca Strait, just east of Cape Flattery.

Neah Bay has gone by several names: in 1790 the Spanish named it Bahia de Nunez Gaona, after an archbishop; while US traders came to call it Poverty Cove; and it was known as Scarborough Harbour, after HBC captain James Scarborough.1 Perhaps most dramatically, Neah Bay was the site of the beaching and burning of the HBC ship Una in late December, 1852, amidst a conflict between Europeans and, likely, people of the Callam Nation; read Reverend Thomas Boys's histrionic account of the incident here.

• 1. Lynn Middleton, Placenames of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Victoria: Elldee Publishing Company, 1969), 142.