- Captain George Vancouver names Port Townsend on May 8, 1792. (historylink.org)
On May 8, 1792, British Royal Navy Captain George Vancouver (1757-1798) names an extensive bay at the northeast corner of the Olympic Peninsula for the Marquis of Townshend, a British general. The “h” is later dropped and the bay is now called Port Townsend. The city of Port Townsend, now the county seat of Jefferson County, is founded in the 1850s at the mouth of the bay and adopts its name.
- May 26th. We started at 5 after some trouble in shoving the boat off the beach, where the tide had left her. As we had the tide with us, we found that we should have no difficulty in reaching our destination (Port Townsend), so we stopped at Marrowstone point and leisurely took our lunch. Starling claimed to be a man of experience, and when we started across Port Townsend bay he insisted that we should sail. None of us were sailors, so we differed with him and judged that the quickest means was rowing. Starling worked the sails for about an hour without any effect. He would not yield, although we laughed and argued, but finally suggested that there was nothing to prevent my furling the sails, if I wanted to.
- They have located claims near here and are living on them with their families waiting for a town to grow up. We walked over to their property, which certainly exceeds anything in Washington or Oregon for beauty and fertility, if they were only disposed to farm. The Olympic range cannot be more than thirty miles to the west. Mount Baker is on the east, and below us lies the harbor [Port Townsend Bay]. Vivid stretches of lawn interrupt the woods and appear on the headlands and islands.
- Voltaire (plato.standford.edu)
François-Marie d’Arouet (1694–1778), better known by his pen name Voltaire, was a French writer and public activist who played a singular role in defining the eighteenth-century movement called the Enlightenment. At the center of his work was a new conception of philosophy and the philosopher that in several crucial respects influenced the modern concept of each. Yet in other ways Voltaire was not a philosopher at all in the modern sense of the term. He wrote as many plays, stories, and poems as patently philosophical tracts, and he in fact directed many of his critical writings against the philosophical pretensions of recognized philosophers such as Leibniz, Malebranche, and Descartes. He was, however, a vigorous defender of a conception of natural science that served in his mind as the antidote to vain and fruitless philosophical investigation. In clarifying this new distinction between science and philosophy, and especially in fighting vigorously for it in public campaigns directed against the perceived enemies of fanaticism and superstition, Voltaire pointed modern philosophy down several paths that it subsequently followed.