Alaska: Saga of a Bold Land

by Walter R. Borneman

In 1774 as part of this overall plan, Antonio Bucareli, viceroy of New Spain, ordered Juan Josef Perez, a veteran captain who had been ferrying colonists and supplies to the California missions since the founding of San Diego five years earlier, to sail north from Mexico and show the Spanish flag. Perez was to sail the Santiago to a latitude of sixty degrees north and land here and there, claiming the best locations for Spanish settlements. This course would have brought him all the way to Steller’s Kayak Island. But scurvy, as Steller well knew, was more of an enemy in those days than the unknown. Its outbreak and the North Pacific’s typical weather conspired to turn Perez southward well short of his goal. His farthest northerly landfall was somewhere off the western shores of Prince of Wales Island, near what would later be named Bucareli Bay.