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13 Chapter 1 Furs, Cattle, and Empire: English Cheese in the Pacific Northwest Beginning as early as the fifteenth century a succession of European explorers sailed up and down the west coast of North America, searching for a variety of things including the elusive Northwest Passage, a sea route connecting Europe and Asia. No less a personality than famed English navigator Sir Francis Drake coursed along its shores, some argue as far north as present-day Oregon, in the Golden Hind in 1578. During the succeeding centuries, literally hundreds of European and Russian voyagers including Captains James Cook, John Meares, Bruno Heceta, and George Vancouver maneuvered ships along present-day Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and Alaska, mapping numerous now-familiar points of geography and claiming them in the names of their respective countries. One of the less-discussed aspects of this era of exploration is that most of these far-flung oceangoing expeditions regularly carried a variety of livestock including cattle, sheep, and goats. These animals are important for our purposes because they are the most commonly raised for milk production, and in order to make cheese one must first have milk. Housing animals on board ship made a certain amount of practical sense at the time since lack of food on the high seas was a potentially life-threatening issue and living, breathing animals represented a relatively sustainable food supply. Goats in particular were common cargo, convenient because of their small size and because they served as a source of both meat and fresh milk. Eighteenth-century English explorer Captain James Cook famously carried a well-traveled milk goat with him on his ship Endeavour that had already been around the world once with Cook’s colleague Captain Samuel Wallis and his crew on the Dolphin. Likewise, Nancy the goat accompanied American Captain Robert Gray on several trips, including the one during which he found and named the Columbia River. Her death at sea in 1791 just prior to reaching the Columbia was significant enough to be noted in a crewman’s journal: “Between the hours of 3 and 4 pm, departed this life our dear friend Nancy the Goat having been the Captain’s companion 14 CHAPTER 1 on a former voyage around the Globe . . . She was lamented by those who got a share of her Milk!!” (emphasis in the original). While for the most part oceangoing animals remained on board, explorers sometimes dropped off goats or sheep at convenient grassy spots during their travels, leaving the animals to survive and forage on their own. Theoretically, the same ship or perhaps another from the same nation could return to the spot in the future and replenish their food supplies. The feral Arapawa goats of New Zealand are considered to be descendants of goats originally released by Captain Cook on his voyages; Hawaii’s Big Island still suffers the effects of destructive feral goats, pigs, and sheep, descendants of those originally introduced by Cook and his contemporaries. International interest in the Pacific coast of North America surged during the eighteenth century as Europeans competed for access to and control over its rich store of natural resources. By the late 1700s Spain, then a dominant world power, moved to stake a claim, motivated in part by the Russians, who were already actively exploring along the Bering Strait near present-day Alaska. The Spanish vessel Santiago anchored in Nootka Sound on the west side of Vancouver Island in 1774; not to be outdone, British ships followed suit and Nootka developed into a port of call and fur-trading center for a variety of nations that was active for several decades. Nootka also became home to the region’s first resident cattle, goats, and sheep, which arrived on Spanish ships in 1789. Historians believe that some of those livestock were later transported to the short-lived Spanish encampment at Nuñez Gaona, founded in 1792 and abandoned soon after at what is now called Neah Bay, on the northwestern tip of the Olympic Peninsula—the first European settlement in what would later become the state of Washington. Since cows, sheep, and goats are not native species to North America and the indigenous peoples of the area did not raise domesticated animals for food, the introduction of these animals was a potent harbinger of European expansionist aspirations in the region. According to the international custom of the period, the first nation to “discover” an area and definitively establish a settlement could claim sovereignty...

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