Bellingham Bay is located roughly 25 km south of the Canada-United States border.
It has gone by many other names: Spanish explorers called it “Seno de Gaston”, or
“Gulf of Gaston”, in 1791; Joseph Whidbey, surveying on behalf of
Captain Vancouver in 1792, named it after Sir William Bellingham, a naval storekeeper at the time;
it has had the additional names of “Ballsam Bay” and “Gaston Bay”, and its Indigenous
name, presumably given by the Lummis, is “Tut-segh”.