Martinez chose his ground carefully. On May 15, 1789, he selected Hog Island at the entrance to Friendly Cove for his fortification, a position that commanded the harbor approaches. Within eleven days, his men had emplaced their artillery, then set to work building barracks and a powder magazine. The fort was straightforward in purpose: an artillery land battery designed to defend the harbor and the fledgling settlement of Santa Cruz de Nuca behind it. What it lacked in architectural ambition, it made up for in strategic placement. Any vessel entering Nootka Sound would pass directly under its guns.

Fort San Miguel lived a restless life. Martinez had barely finished it when new orders arrived from Viceroy Flores on July 29, 1789, directing him to abandon everything and return to San Blas. The cannons were loaded back aboard the frigate Princesa, and by October 30, Friendly Cove stood empty. One year later, Pedro de Alberni arrived with 80 Catalan volunteers from the First Free Company of Volunteers of Catalonia to rebuild what Martinez had dismantled. Alberni's task was harder than the original construction. The battery sat atop a rocky island -- tall but cramped -- and his men had to carve embrasures into the stone to support the guns. It took four days just to haul and emplace eight large cannons, with six smaller pieces added afterward. Eight more large guns would not fit, so they were stored ashore.

The fort existed because three empires could not agree on who owned a coastline none of them had settled permanently. New Spain claimed the entire Pacific seaboard by right of prior exploration. Britain's fur traders arrived anyway, and John Meares had operated from Nootka Sound in 1788 under falsified papers. Russia was pressing south from Alaska. Fort San Miguel was Spain's answer -- a physical assertion that this harbor belonged to the Spanish crown. The resulting Nootka Crisis brought Britain and Spain to the brink of war in 1790, a confrontation resolved only through three separate Nootka Conventions negotiated over five years. By the terms of the third convention, signed January 11, 1794, both nations agreed to abandon the sound entirely.

Long before any European aimed a cannon across the cove, this place had a name. The Mowachaht people called it Yuquot, and it served as the summer village of Chief Maquinna and his community. The fort sat near Maquinna's home -- a proximity that was less coincidence than imposition. When the Spanish soldiers finally departed in 1795, the Mowachaht reclaimed their village under Maquinna's leadership. The site today belongs to the Mowachaht/Muchalaht First Nations, whose band government is based at Gold River on Vancouver Island. When the English sailor John R. Jewitt lived at Yuquot as Maquinna's captive between 1803 and 1805, remnants of the Spanish post were still visible, including the kitchen garden the soldiers had planted. The cannons and barracks were gone, but the cabbages endured.