Capitan de Navio Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra was the most important Spanish naval officer on the Northwest Coast in the eighteenth century. Serving from 1774 to 1794, he participated in the search for the Northwest Passage and, with George Vancouver, endeavoured to forge a diplomatic resolution to the Nootka Sound controversy between Spain and Britain. The most complete study of Bodega and his epoch yet written, "At the Far Reaches of Empire" is an absorbing narrative of eighteenth-century empire building.