Colonial Despatches

The Olympic Peninsula juts out from the northwestern tip of Washington State, where Cape Flattery marks the US entrance to the Juan de Fuca Strait. Its name likely originates from the English name for the mountains it contains, the Olympics, the largest of which was marked on British maps from the late 1700s as Mount Olympus, though Spanish Captain Juan Pérez called it El Cero de la Santa Rosalia.1

• 1. Lynn Middleton, Placenames of the Pacific Northwest Coast (Victoria: Elldee Publishing Company, 1969), 153.