Spanish explorers, the first Europeans to enter this bay in 1791, named the open, 50-square-mile body of water Seno de Gaston (Gulf of Gaston). The following year, on June 11, 1792, the British under Captain George Vancouver renamed it Bellingham Bay in honor of Sir William Bellingham, controller of British Navy stores who had provisioned the expedition. Across the Northwest and coastal British Columbia, place names still reflect Spanish and British origins, from the Strait of Juan de Fuca to Vancouver, British Columbia. Timber, coal, and fish fueled Bellingham’s early development. 'Blanket' Bill Jarman, a sailor and adventurer who came to the area through the Hudson Bay Company trading post at Victoria, became the first white settler in Whatcom County when he established a claim and settled there with his native wife in 1848. After the California Gold Rush and amid strong demand for lumber following great fires in San Francisco, Henry Roeder and R.V. Peabody formed a partnership, traveled north in 1852, and built a lumber mill where Whatcom Creek meets the bay. By 1858, the hamlet of Whatcom had grown to 100 inhabitants, but it was soon inundated by thousands of fortune seekers after the Fraser River Gold Rush who sought a shortcut to the gold claims up the Fraser River in British Columbia. For a period during the 1850s, mines on and near the shore of Bellingham Bay were the exclusive source of coal shipped to San Francisco. Three ships routinely made the 15-day trip south, returning with goods from California to serve the frontier community. In subsequent decades, the four original towns on Bellingham Bay—Fairhaven, Bellingham, Sehome, and Whatcom—alternately grew and shrank with the fortunes of lumber, coal, mining, colonization, shipping, and railroads, and they ultimately united under the single name of Bellingham in 1904.