DIXON, GEORGE, naval officer and maritime fur-trader; baptized 8 July 1748 in Kirkoswald, Cumberland, England, the son of Thomas Dixon; m. Ann —, and they had one daughter; d. 9 Nov. 1795 in St George, Bermuda.

George Dixon, an armourer in the Royal Navy according to a warrant dated 16 April 1776, joined the Discovery on the same day. In July he sailed for the Pacific on Captain James Cook’s third voyage of exploration. As an armourer Dixon was a skilled mechanic, with the rating of petty officer first-class, whose duty it was to assist the gunner in keeping the ship’s arms in order. The Discovery was at King George’s Sound (Nootka Sound, B.C.) in March and April 1778 and touched at other places along the northwest coast before returning to England in 1780. The voyage must have sparked in Dixon an interest in discovery, for in August 1784 he wrote to Sir Joseph Banks*, the influential president of the Royal Society of London, to suggest the mounting of an overland expedition, with himself as “astronomer,” to cross North America via Quebec and the Great Lakes. Nothing came of this venture, perhaps because of, as he himself observed, the “troubled state” of America.

Cook’s voyage had initiated the maritime fur trade in sea otter pelts with China [see James Hanna]. In 1782 Dixon and Nathaniel Portlock*, a shipmate on the Discovery, were engaged by William Bolts, a director of an Austrian rival to the East India Company, to join an expedition aboard the ship Cobenzl that would take on furs in Nootka Sound and sell them in China. Portlock had described Bolts as a “feeble effort of an imprudent man,” and when his enterprise collapsed, Dixon and Portlock became partners in Richard Cadman Etches and Company, commonly called the King George’s Sound Company, one of several commercial associations formed to prosecute the trade. In 1785 the company fitted out two vessels, the King George and the Queen Charlotte, and a licence to trade on the northwest coast was purchased from the South Sea Company, which held the monopoly for the Pacific coast. Portlock was given command of the King George and of the expedition, Dixon command of the Queen Charlotte. William Beresford, the trader assigned to the expedition, wrote that Dixon and Portlock had been chosen for their ability as navigators, their knowledge of the Indigenous peoples and of the best trading spots, and because they were “men of feeling and humanity, and pay the most strict attention to the health of their ships companies, a circumstance of the utmost consequence in a voyage of such length.”

The vessels left London on 29 Aug. 1785 and arrived at Cook Inlet (Alas.) the next July. There the party traded with the Indigenous peoples before sailing to winter in the Sandwich (Hawaiian) Islands. In the spring of 1787 they sailed to Prince William Sound (Alas.), where they met another British trader, John Meares*, whose ship had been iced in. Meares’s crew was in great disorder, either from scurvy, as he claimed, or from “uncontrolled application to spirituous liquors,” as Beresford later charged. Dixon and Portlock lent aid but exacted from Meares, who was trading illegally within the bounds of the South Sea Company’s monopoly, a bond not to trade on the coast.

From Prince William Sound, Dixon, having separated as planned from Portlock, sailed south to trade. He came across a large archipelago, which he named the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii, B.C.). Although Captain Robert Gray*, of the American sloop Lady Washington, was to call these islands after his own ship in 1789, British possession of the coast allowed for the continuance of Dixon’s appellation. Dixon sailed along the western shores of the islands, named Cape St James (on Kunghit Island), and then went up their eastern coasts as far as Skidegate. Along the way he purchased a large number of sea otter pelts from the Haida, trading at one time with the village of the chief Koyah. Dixon reached Nootka Sound in mid August, only to find that he had been preceded by captains James Colnett* and Charles Duncan, who had obtained most of the furs. Since Portlock failed to appear at Nootka, Dixon steered for the Sandwich Islands and China. He sold his furs there and then returned to England in September 1788.

Although there is no record that Dixon was ever again at sea, he retained an interest in the exploration of the northwest coast of America and the search for a northwest passage. In 1789 he met with both the hydrographer Alexander Dalrymple and Evan Nepean, an influential government official, and in July he urged on the latter Dalrymple’s plan for a settlement on the northwest coast to prevent the Russians, Americans, or Spaniards from establishing themselves there. Dixon was afraid that if the government did nothing, the coast and its trade would be lost to Britain, “and in consequence of that Loss the Traders both from Hudson’s Bay and Canada will find themselves in a bad neighbourhood.” In October he wrote to Banks regarding the expedition being outfitted under the command of Captain Henry Roberts and George Vancouver, offering suggestions about the type of vessels that should be used and the best place to establish a settlement on the northwest coast. The opinions of Christopher Middleton* and Cook to the contrary, Dalrymple still believed in the existence of a northwest passage, and he persuaded the Hudson’s Bay Company to explore once more the west coast of Hudson Bay. In May 1790 the company entrusted the expedition to Charles Duncan. Dixon, who was to accompany him, was instructed to take the expedition inland from the Dubawnt and Yathkyed lakes (Nu.) to the Pacific by way of Great Slave Lake. For some reason Dixon’s part of the journey was subsequently cancelled, and he did not accompany Duncan.

Dixon had published A voyage round the world; but more particularly to the north-west coast of America . . . in London in 1789. He wrote the introduction and the appendix, but the body of the text consists of a series of letters written by Beresford. Meares published an account of his voyages of 1788 and 1789, which included a jab at Dixon’s self-aggrandizement for having named Dixon’s Entrance — the strait that marks the maritime boundary between British Columbia and Alaska — after himself. Dixon responded with a pamphlet criticizing its many inaccuracies and Meares’s penchant for claiming other people’s discoveries. It also noted that it had been Joseph Banks who had named the strait after Dixon. There followed a minor pamphlet war between the two men, from which Dixon emerged the victor.

It has been suggested that Dixon taught navigation at Gosport and wrote The navigator’s assistant . . . , published in 1791. Dixon moved to Bermuda with his wife, Ann, in 1794 and became a silversmith and jeweller, a trade he was said to have learned at Newcastle upon Tyne in the years before he went to sea. Ann died later that year while giving birth to a daughter. Before he died, Dixon was a vocal advocate for the creation of a maritime academy in Bermuda, publishing a pamphlet on the matter and submitting to Governor Henry Hamilton a proposal for such an institution. Dixon died in St George on 9 Nov. 1795 and was buried there three days later, in St Peter’s Anglican churchyard. A skilled navigator and successful trader, he rose from obscurity to become an important figure in the history of the northwest coast.

Barry M. Gough