Captain George Vancouver led the Royal Navy expeditions to explore this part of the world in the 1790s. His name has been appropriated for three distinct locations. The earliest was Fort Vancouver, established in the 1820s in what was then the Oregon Country, administered jointly by the United States and Great Britain. Today Fort Vancouver has become Vancouver, Washington. After the British had been driven out of Fort Vancouver in the 1840s, they sailed north and built another fort, this time on the large island named Vancouver Island. Finally, in 1886, the city of Vancouver was named and incorporated on the mainland of British Columbia. Today, all three Vancouvers co-exist.
Captain Vancouver didn't like the landscape very much, and saw the mountains as bleak and "sterile." In fact, coastal British Columbia is a temperate rainforest, which means that (at least historically) it was heavily forested, and also that it rains a lot! Often you could paint a picture of this land using only two colors, grey and green: grey for the clouds that hang over it for so much of the year, and green for the vegetation that thrives in this wet climate.
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