The mountains were originally called Sun-a-do by the Duwamish Indians, while the first European to see them, the Spanish navigator Juan Pérez, named Mount Olympus Santa Rosalia, in 1774. But the English captain John Meares, seeing them in 1788, thought he would honor the Greek explorer Juan de Fuca who claimed to have found the fabled Northwest passage nearby by naming the mountain after the mythical home of Greek Gods which is Mount Olympus in Greece. Various names for the mountains were used based on the name Mount Olympus, including the Olympic Range, the Olympian Mountains, and the Olympus Range. Alternate proposals never caught on, and in 1864 the Seattle Weekly Gazette persuaded the government to make the present-day name official, although other names continued to be used.