archenemy, Queen Elizabeth. Nothing came of Lok and De Fuca's proposals, but it is through Lok's account that the story of Juan de Fuca entered English letters. Controversy Because the only written evidence for De Fuca's voyages lay in Lok's account — researchers being unable to find records of the expedition in Spanish colonial archives — there was long much controversy over his discovery and, indeed, whether he had ever even existed as a real person; several scholars have dismissed Juan de Fuca as entirely fictitious, and the 18th-century British explorer Captain Cook strongly doubted that the strait De Fuca claimed to have discovered even existed (although Cook actually sailed past the Strait of Juan de Fuca without entering it and did stop at Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island). With later English exploration and settlement of the area, however, Du Fuca's claims seemed much more credible. Finally, in 1859, an American researcher, with the help of the U.S. Consul in the Ionian Islands, was able to demonstrate not only that De Fuca had lived but also that his family and history were well known on the islands. While we may never know the exact truths that lay behind the account published by Lok, it must be considered unlikely that the man himself was fictional. Legacy When the English captain Charles William Barkley, sailing the Imperial Eagle in 1787, (re)discovered the strait De Fuca had described, he renamed it the Strait of Juan de Fuca. The Juan de Fuca Ridge and the Juan de Fuca Plate, a tectonic plate underlying much of the coastline he explored, is named for the Strait of Juan de Fuca. Juan de Fuca Provincial Park on Vancouver Island's West Coast is named for the strait, as is the hiking trail of the same name. See also Phokas (Byzantine family) References Further reading A note made by me, Michael Lok the Elder, touching the strait of sea commonly called Fretum Anian, in the South Sea, through the northwest passage of Meta Incognita, in Samuel Purchas, Pilgrims, London, 1625, Vol III, page 849 Memoir, Historical and Political, on the Northwest Coast of North America, Robert Greenhow, 1840, P 174 Memorials of Juan de Fuca, A. S. Taylor, in Hutchings' California Magazine, Sep.-Oct. 1859, pp116-122, 161-167 British Columbia: From the Earliest Times to the Present, Chapter II, The Apocryphal Voyages, pp. 19-31, Ethelbert Olaf Stuart