Captain George Vancouver RN (June 22, 1757 – May 10, 1798) was an officer in the British Royal Navy, best known for his Vancouver Expedition maritime exploration of the North America's northwestern Pacific Coast regions, including the coasts of contemporary Alaska, British Columbia, Washington and Oregon. He also explored the Hawaiian Islands and the southwest coast of Australia.

Vancouver Island, Canada; the cities of Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and Vancouver, Washington, U.S.; and Mount Vancouver on the Yukon/Alaskan border; are named after him.

Vancouver's first naval service was as a midshipman aboard HMS Resolution, on James Cook's second voyage (1772 – 1775) searching for Terra Australis. He also accompanied Cook's third voyage (1776 – 1778), this time aboard Resolution's sister ship, HMS Discovery and the first European sighting and exploration of the Hawaiian Islands. Upon his return to Britain in 1779, Vancouver was commissioned as a lieutenant and posted aboard the sloop HMS Martin surveying coastlines.

In the late 1780s the Spanish commissioned an expedition to the Pacific Northwest. However, the 1789 Nootka Crisis intervened. Spain and Britain came close to war over ownership of the Nootka Sound on contemporary Vancouver Island, and of greater importance, the right to colonize and settle the Pacific Northwest coast. Roberts and Vancouver joined Britain's more warlike vessels. Vancouver went with Whidbey to the HMS Courageux. When the first Nootka Convention ended the crisis in 1790, Vancouver was given command of HMS Discovery to take possession of Nootka Sound and to survey the coasts.

Departing England with two ships in April, 1791, Vancouver commanded an expedition charged with exploring the Pacific region. In its first year the expedition travelled to Cape Town, Australia, New Zealand, Tahiti, and China, collecting botanical samples and surveying coastlines along the way. Proceeding to North America, Vancouver followed the coasts of present day Oregon and Washington northward. In April 1792 he encountered American Captain Robert Gray off the coast of Oregon just prior to Gray's sailing up the Columbia River.

Vancouver entered the Strait of Juan de Fuca, between Vancouver Island and the Washington state mainland on April 29, 1792. His orders included a survey of every inlet and outlet on the west coast of the mainland, all the way north to Alaska. Most of this work was done from small boats powered by both oars and sail because maneuvering larger sail-powered vessels in uncharted waters was generally impractical and dangerous. Vancouver was the first European to enter Burrard Inlet on June 13, 1792, naming it after his friend Sir Harry Burrard. It is the present day main harbour area of the City of Vancouver beyond Stanley Park. He surveyed Howe Sound and Jervis Inlet over the next nine days. Then, on his 35th birthday on June 22, 1792, he returned to Point Grey, the present day location of the University of British Columbia. Here he unexpectedly met a Spanish expedition led by Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdés y Flores. Vancouver was "mortified" (his word) to learn they already had a crude chart of the Strait of Georgia based on the 1791 exploratory voyage of José María Narváez the year before, under command of Francisco de Eliza. For three weeks they cooperatively explored the Georgia Strait and the Discovery Islands area before sailing separately towards Nootka Sound.

After the summer surveying season ended, in November 1792 Vancouver went to Nootka, then the region's most important harbour, on contemporary Vancouver Island. Here he was to receive any British buildings and lands returned by the Spanish from claims by Francisco de Eliza for the Spanish crown. The Spanish commander, Juan Francisco Bodega y Quadra, was very cordial and he and Vancouver exchanged the maps they had made, but no agreement was reached; they decided to await further instructions. At this time, they decided to name the large island on which Nootka was now proven to be located as Quadra and Vancouver Island. Years later, as Spanish influence declined, the name was shortened to simply Vancouver Island.

In October 1792, he sent Lieutenant William Robert Broughton with several boats up the Columbia River. Broughton got as far as the Columbia River Gorge, sighting and naming Mount Hood.

Vancouver sailed south along the coast of Spanish Alta California, visiting Chumash villages at Point Conception and near Mission San Buenaventura. Vancouver spent the winter in continuing exploration of the Sandwich Islands, the contemporary islands of Hawaii.

The next year, 1793, he returned to British Columbia and proceeded further north, unknowingly missing the overland explorer Alexander Mackenzie by only 48 days. He got to 56°N, but because the more northern parts had already been explored by Cook, he sailed south to Alta California, hoping to find Bodega y Quadra and fulfill his territorial mission, but the Spaniard was not there. He again spent the winter in the Sandwich Islands.

In 1794, he first went to Cook Inlet, the northernmost point of his exploration, and from there followed the coast south to Baranov Island, which he had visited the year before. He then set sail for Great Britain by way of Cape Horn, returning in September 1795, thus completing a circumnavigation.

Vancouver faced difficulties when he returned home to England. The accomplished and politically well-connected naturalist Archibald Menzies complained that his servant had been pressed into service during a shipboard emergency; sailing master Joseph Whidbey had a competing claim for pay as expedition astronomer; and Thomas Pitt, 2nd Baron Camelford, whom Vancouver had disciplined for numerous infractions and eventually sent home in disgrace, challenged him to a duel. Vancouver was attacked in the newspapers and assaulted on the street by Pitt. His career was effectively at an end.

Captain George Vancouver, one of Britain's greatest explorers and navigators, died in obscurity on May 10, 1798 at the age of 40, less than three years after completing his voyages and expeditions. His modest grave lies in St. Peters churchyard, Petersham, Surrey, in southern England.

Vancouver determined that the Northwest Passage did not exist at the latitudes that had long been suggested. His charts of the North American northwest coast were so extremely accurate that they served as the key reference for coastal navigation for generations. Robin Fisher, the academic Vice President of Mount Royal University in Calgary and author of two books on Vancouver, states:

He [Vancouver] put the northwest coast on the map... He drew up a map of the north-west coast that was accurate to the 'nth degree,' to the point it was still being used into the modern day as a navigational aid. That's unusual for a map from that early a time.

Vancouver, however, failed to discover two of the largest and most important rivers on the Pacific coast, the Fraser River and the Columbia River. He also missed the Skeena River near Prince Rupert in northern British Columbia. Vancouver did eventually learn of the river before he finished his survey — from Robert Gray, captain of the American merchant ship that was the first Euroamerican sailing of the Columbia River on May 11, 1792, after first sighting it on an earlier voyage in 1788. However it and the Fraser River never made it onto Vancouver's charts. Stephen R. Bown, noted in Mercator's World magazine (November/December 1999) that:

How Vancouver could have missed these rivers while accurately charting hundreds of comparatively insignificant inlets, islands, and streams is hard to fathom. What is certain is that his failure to spot the Columbia had great implications for the future political development of the Pacific Northwest...."

While it is difficult to comprehend how Vancouver missed the Fraser River, much of this river's delta was subject to flooding and summer freshet which prevented the captain from spotting any of its great channels as he sailed the entire shoreline from Point Roberts, Washington, to Point Grey in 1792. The Spanish expeditions to the Pacific Northwest, with the 1791 Francisco de Eliza expedition preceding Vancouver by a year, had also missed the Fraser River although they knew from its muddy plume that there was a major river located nearby.

Vancouver generally established a good rapport with both Indigenous peoples and European foreigners. Captain Vancouver played an undeniable role in the subsequent series of upheavals and losses in the lives and homelands of the Indigenous peoples of the Americas on the North American Pacific Coast, since his explorations opened up the region to European colonization and occupation. Serious negative impacts on the First Nations and Native American peoples, and their cultures and territories resulted. However, historical records show Vancouver himself enjoyed good relations with native leaders both in Hawaii - where native leaders ceded Hawaii to Vancouver in 1794 - as well as the Pacific Northwest and Alta California. Vancouver's journals exhibit a high degree of sensitivity to natives. He wrote of meeting the Chumash people, and of his exploration of a small island on the Alaskan coast on which an important burial site was marked by a sepulchre of "peculiar character" lined with boards and fragments of military instruments lying near a square box covered with mats. Vancouver states:

This we naturally conjectured contained the remains of some person of consequence, and it much excited the curiosity of some of our party; but as further examination could not possibly have served any useful purpose, and might have given umbrage and pain to the friends of the deceased, should it be their custom to visit the repositories of their dead, I did not think it right that it should be disturbed.

Vancouver also displayed contempt in his journals towards unscrupulous western traders who provided guns to natives by writing:

I am extremely concerned to be compelled to state here, that many of the traders from the civilised world have not only pursued a line of conduct, diametrically opposite to the true principles of justice in their commercial dealings, but have fomented discords, and stirred up contentions, between the different tribes, in order to increase the demand for these destructive engines... They have been likewise eager to instruct the natives in the use of European arms of all descriptions; and have shewn by their own example, that they consider gain as the only object of pursuit; and whether this be acquired by fair and honourable means, or otherwise, so long as the advantage is secured, the manner how it is obtained seems to have been, with too many of them, but a very secondary consideration.

Robin Fisher notes that Vancouver's "relationships with aboriginal groups were generally peaceful; indeed, his detailed survey would not have been possible if they had been hostile." While there were hostile incidents at the end of Vancouver's last season - the most serious of which involved a clash with Tlingits at Behm Canal in southeast Alaska in 1794 - these were the exceptions to Vancouver's exploration of the U.S. and Canadian Northwest coast.

Despite a long history of warfare between Britain and Spain, Vancouver maintained excellent relations with his Spanish counterparts and even feted a Spanish sea captain aboard the tall ship HMS Discovery during his 1792 trip to the Vancouver region.

There has been some debate about the origins of the Vancouver name. It is now commonly accepted that the name Vancouver derives from the expression van Coevorden, meaning "(originating) from Coevorden", a city in the northeast of the Netherlands. This city is apparently named after the "Coeverden" family of the 13 - 15th Century. An alternative theory claims that Vancouver is a misspelling or anglicized version of Van Couwen, a Dutch family name.

In the 16th century, a number of businessmen from the Coevorden area (and the Netherlands in general) did move to England. Some of them were known as Van Coeverden. Others adopted the surname Oxford, as in oxen crossing, which is approximately the English translation of Coevorden. However this is not the exact name of the noble family mentioned in the history books that claim Vancouver's noble lineage: that name was Coeverden not Coevorden.

In the 1970s, Adrien Mansvelt, a former Consul General of the Netherlands based in Vancouver, published a collation of information in both historical and genealogical journals and in the Vancouver Sun newspaper. Mansvelt's theory was later presented by the city during the Expo 86 World's Fair, as historical fact. Mr. Mansvelt's theories, however, are based on many assumptions and possibilities that may be flawed. Genealogy is the study or investigation of ancestry and family history, with undeniable proof of traceability through family lineage of birth, marriage and death records. Mansveld bases his research on no such proof and uses the words "assumed", "possible" and "may" time and again throughout his essay. This problematic information was then used as rock solid proof for Mr. W. Kaye Lamb to write his book A Voyage of Discovery to the North Pacific Ocean and Round the World, 1791 - 1795.

W. Kaye Lamb, in summarizing Mansvelt's unsubstantiated 1973 research, suggests evidence of close family ties between the Vancouver family of Britain and the Van Coeverden family of Holland as well as George Vancouver's own words from his diaries in referring to his Dutch ancestry:

As the name Vancouver suggests, the Vancouvers were of Dutch origin. Popular theory suggests that they were descended from the titled van Coeverden family, one of the oldest in the Netherlands. By the twelfth century, and for many years thereafter, their castle at Coevorden, in the Province of Drenthe, was an important fortress on the eastern frontier. George Vancouver was aware of this. In July 1794, he named the Lynn Canal "after the place of my nativity" and Point Couverden (which he spelt incorrectly) "after the seat of my ancestors". Vancouver's great grandfather, Reint Wolter van Couverden, was probably the first of the line to establish an English connection. While serving as a squire at one of the German courts he met Johanna (Jane) Lilingston, an English girl who was one of the ladies in waiting. They were married in 1699. Their son, Lucas Hendrik van Couverden, married Vancouver's grandmother, Sarah... In his later years he probably anglicized his name and spent most of his time in England. By the eighteenth century, the estates of the van Couverdens were mostly in the Province of Overijssel, and some of the family were living in Vollenhove, on the Zuider Zee. The English and Dutch branches kept in touch, and in 1798 (the date of Vancouver's death) George Vancouver's brother Charles would marry a kinswoman, Louise Josephine van Couverden, of Vollenhove. Both were great-grandchildren of Reint Wolter van Couverden."

George Vancouver also identified a body of land off the Alaskan coast as 'Couverden Island' during his exploration of the North American Pacific coast presumably to honour his family's Dutch hometown of Coevorden. It is located at the western point of entry to Lynn Canal in southeastern Alaska.