Humboldt Bay - History

History

Captain Jonathan Winship is credited with the first recorded entry into Humboldt Bay by sea in June 1806. In 1849, an expedition of seven men led by Josiah Gregg attempted to find an overland route to the Pacific ocean. They left from the gold town of Weaverville for the 150-mile trek to the sea. Because of the density of the redwood forests and because Gregg stopped frequently to measure latitude and the size of the trees the expedition averaged only two miles a day. The party was near starvation when they emerged on the coast where they discovered what is now known as Humboldt Bay. After stocking up on food the party walked to San Francisco to report their discovery of the bay. In March 1850, two ships, the General Morgan and the Laura Virginia, were sent to the bay from San Francisco. After considerable initial difficulty due to waves breaking heavily over shifting sands of the bar crossing, the ships entered the bay. The members of the Laura Virginia company named the bay after Alexander von Humboldt, a noted German naturalist.

Read more about this topic:  Humboldt Bay

Famous quotes containing the word history:

    A great proportion of the inhabitants of the Cape are always thus abroad about their teaming on some ocean highway or other, and the history of one of their ordinary trips would cast the Argonautic expedition into the shade.
    Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)

    If you look at the 150 years of modern China’s history since the Opium Wars, then you can’t avoid the conclusion that the last 15 years are the best 15 years in China’s modern history.
    J. Stapleton Roy (b. 1935)

    Postmodernism is, almost by definition, a transitional cusp of social, cultural, economic and ideological history when modernism’s high-minded principles and preoccupations have ceased to function, but before they have been replaced with a totally new system of values. It represents a moment of suspension before the batteries are recharged for the new millennium, an acknowledgment that preceding the future is a strange and hybrid interregnum that might be called the last gasp of the past.
    Gilbert Adair, British author, critic. Sunday Times: Books (London, April 21, 1991)