Resolution Park 1776 / 1778

In the first week of July 1776, the Representatives of the United States of America in general congress assembled at Philadelphia declared their independence from Great Britain, setting out upon a course of constitutional government that carried a new concept of personal and political freedom from the east of North America to the western shores of the continent. In that same week, Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy took command of two ships in Plymouth Harbor, England, and sailed with orders to chart the vast reaches of the Pacific Ocean and find a northwest passage from Europe to Asia around the top of the western hemisphere. His voyages of discovery and scientific survey ranged from the Antarctic to Australasia, from the South Seas and Hawaii to Arctic Alaska, opening the Pacific to the modern era of global navigation and commerce. On June 1, 1778, after sailing north along the American coast in search of the Northwest Passage, Cook's ships Resolution and Discovery lay at anchor in the bay below. After charting the waters and coast of the main channel, he dispatched two boats to examine the arm leading east and, calling it River Turnagain, concluded that no passage to the Atlantic existed there. Documents claiming possession of the land in the name of the king, together with some coins, were sealed in a bottle and buried at Point Possession, 20 miles south on the Kenai Peninsula, and the waterway stretching from this point 150 miles to the open sea thereafter bore the name Cook Inlet.

Anchorage, Alaska · United States