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Nootka Sound and its memories.

Among the many inlets which we entered on the cruise which has enabled me to edit this narrative of a less fortunate predecessor, was Nootka Sound. No portion of North-West America was more famous than this spot, for once upon a time it was the former centre of the fur trade, and a locality which more than once figured prominently in diplomatic correspondence. Indeed, so associated was it as the type of this part of the western continent, that in many works the heterogeneous group of savages who inhabit the entire coast between the Columbia River and the end of Vancouver Island was described as the "Nootka-Columbians." More than one species of plant and animal attest the fact of this Sound having been the locality at which the naturalist first broke ground in North-West America. There are, for instance, a Haliotis Nutkaensis (an ear shell), a Rubus Nutkanus (a raspberry); and a yellow cypress, which, however, attained its chief development on the mainland much farther north, bears among its synonyms that of Chamcæcyparis Nutkaensis. For though it is undeniable that Ensign Juan Perez discovered it as early as 1779, and named it Port San Lorenzo, after the saint on whose day it was first seen, this fact was unknown or forgotten, when, four years later, Cook entered, and called it King George Sound, though he tells us it was afterwards found that it was called Nootka by the natives. Hence arose the title it has ever since borne, though this was an entire mistake on the great navigator's part, since there is no word in the Aht language at all corresponding to Nootka, unless indeed it is "Nootche," a mountain, which not unlikely Cook mistook for that of the inlet generally. The proofs of the presence of earlier visitors were iron and other tools, familiarity with ships, and two silver spoons of Spanish manufacture, which, we may take it, had been stolen from Perez's ship. The next vessel to enter the Sound was the Sea Otter, under the command of Captain James Hanna, who made such a haul in the shape of sea-otter skins that for many years Nootka was the great rendezvous of the fur-traders who cruised as far north as Russian America—now Alaska—and, like Portlock, Dixon, and Meares, charted and named many of the most familiar parts of the British Columbian coast. Meares built the North-West America by the aid of Chinese carpenters in Nootka Sound in the winter of 1788–89, this little sloop being the first vessel, except a canoe, ever constructed in the country north of California.

The lucrative trade done by the English and American traders, some of whom, disposing of their furs in China, sailed under the Portuguese flag and fitted out at Macao as the port most readily open to them, determined the Spaniards to assert their rights to the original discovery. This was done by Don Estevan Martinez "taking possession" of the Sound, seizing the vessels there, and erecting a fort to maintain the territory against all comers. A hot diplomatic warfare ensued, the result of which was the Convention of Nootka, by which the Sound was made over to Great Britain; and it was while engaged on this mission of receiving the Sound that Vancouver, conjointly with Quadra, the Spanish commander, discovered that the region it intersects is an island, which for a time bore their joint names, but by general consent has that of Vancouver only attached to it nowadays.

This was in the year 1795. Being now indisputably British territory, Nootka and the coasts north and south of it became more and more frequented by fur-traders, who found, in spite of the increasing scarcity of pelts, and the higher prices which keener competition brought about, an ample profit in buying tolerably cheap on the American coast and selling very dear to the Chinese, whose love for the sea-otter continues unabated. Many of these adventurers were Americans—hailing, for the most part, from Boston. Hence to this day an American is universally known among the North-Western Indians as a "Boston-man," while an Englishman is quite as generally termed a "Kintshautsh man" (King George man), it being during the long reign of George III. that they first became acquainted with our countrymen. Their barter was carried on in knives, copper plates, copper kettles, muskets, brass-hilted swords, soldiers' coats and buttons, pistols, tomahawks, and blankets, which soon superseded the more costly "Kotsaks" of sea-otter until then the principal garment, though the women wore, as they do still at times (or did when I knew the shore), blankets woven out of pine-tree bark. Rum also seemed to have been freely disposed of, and no doubt many of the outrages which early began to mark the intercourse of the brown men and their white visitors were not a little due to this, and to the customs, ever more free than welcome, in which it is the habit of the mariner to indulge when he and the savage forgather. At all events, the natives and their foreign visitors seem to have come very soon into collision. Indeed, it was seldom that a voyage was completed without some outrage on one or both sides, followed by reprisals from the party supposed to have been wronged. Thus part of the crew of the Imperial Eagle, under the command of Captain Barclay,[23] who discovered and named in his own honour the Sound so called, were murdered at "Queenhythe,"[24] south of Juan de Fuca Strait, which Barclay was amongst the first to explore, or rather to rediscover. At a later date, namely, in 1805, the Atahualpa of Rhode Island was attacked in Millbank Sound, and her captain, mate, and six seamen were killed. In 1811 the Tonquin, belonging to John Jacob Astor's romantic fur-trading adventure, which is so well known from Washington Irving's Astoria, was seized by the savages on this coast, and then blown up by M'Kay, the chief trader, with the entire crew and their assailants. The scene of the catastrophe has been stated to be Nootka, but other commentators have fixed upon Barclay Sound, and as late as 1863 an intelligent trader informed me that some ship's timbers, half buried in the sand there, were attributed by the Indians to some disastrous event, which he believed to have been the one in question.[25] I am, however, now inclined to think that in crediting Nahwitti, at the northern end of Vancouver Island, with this notable event in the early history of North-West America,[26] Dr. George Dawson has arrived at the truth.

To this day—or until very recently—the Indians of the North-West coast are not accounted very trustworthy, and at the period when I knew them they were suspected of killing several traders and of looting more than one small vessel, acts which earned for them frequent visits from the gunboats at Esquimault, and in several instances the undesirable distinction of having their villages shelled when they refused to give up the offenders—generally a difficult operation, since it meant pretty well the entire village.

INDIAN ENCAMPMENT NEAR THE LANDING-STAGE, ESQUIMAULT.

John Jewitt and the capture of the "Boston" in 1803.

But the most famous of all the piracies of the Western Indians is that of which an account is contained in John Jewitt's Narrative. The ostensible author of this work was a Hull blacksmith, the armourer of the Boston, an American ship which was seized while lying in Nootka Sound, and the entire crew massacred, with the exception of Jewitt, who was spared owing to his skill as a mechanic being valuable to the Indians, and John Thompson, the sail-maker, who, though left for dead, recovered, and was saved by the tact of Jewitt in representing him to be his father. This happened in March 1803, and from that date until the 20th of July 1805, these two men were kept in slavery to the chief Maquenna or Moqulla, when they were freed by the arrival of the brig Lydia of Boston, Samuel Hill master. During this servitude, Jewitt, who seems to have been a man of some education, kept a journal and acquired the Aht language, though the style in which his book is written shows that in preparing it for the press he had obtained the assistance of a more practised writer than himself. Still, his work is a valuable contribution to ethnology. For, omitting the brief but excellent accounts by Cook and Meares, it is the earliest, and, with the exception of Mr. Sproat's lecture, the fullest description of these Indians. It is indeed the only one treating specially on the Nootka people, with whom alone he had any minute acquaintance. Some of the habits he pictures are now obsolete, or greatly modified, but others—it may be said the greater number—are exactly as he notes them to have been eighty-six years ago. Besides the internal evidences of its authenticity, the truth of the adventures described was vouched for at the time by Jewitt's companion in slavery; and though there is no absolute proof of its credibility, it may not be uninteresting to state that, thirty years ago, I conversed with an American sea captain, who, as a boy, distinctly remembered Jewitt working as a blacksmith in the town of Middleton in Connecticut. When the book was first published, in the year 1815, several editions appeared in America, and at least two reprints were called for in England, so that the Narrative enjoyed considerable popularity in the first two decades of the century. Writing in 1840, Robert Green Low, Librarian to the Department of State at Washington, characterises it as "a simple and unpretending narrative, which will, no doubt, in after centuries, be read with interest by the enlightened people of North-West America." Again, in 1845, the same industrious, though not always impartial, historian remarks that "this little book has been frequently reprinted, and, though seldom found in libraries, is much read by boys and seamen in the United States." As copies are now seldom met with, this is no longer the case, though on our cruise in 1863 it was one of the well-thumbed little library of the traders, one of whom had inherited it from William Edy Banfield, whose name has already been mentioned (p. 25). This trader, for many years a well-known man on the out-of-the-way parts of the coast, furnished a curious link between Jewitt's time and our own. For an old Indian told him that he had, as a boy, served in the family of a chief of Nootka, called Klan-nin-itth, at the time when Jewitt and Thompson were in slavery; and that he often assisted Jewitt in making spears, arrows, and other weapons required for hostile expeditions. He said, further, that the white slave generally accompanied his owner on visits which he paid to the Ayhuttisaht, Ahousaht, and Klahoquaht chiefs. This old man especially remembered Jewitt, who was a good-humoured fellow, often reciting and singing in his own language for the amusement of the tribesmen. He was described as a tall, well-made youth, with a mirthful countenance, whose dress latterly consisted of nothing but a mantle of cedar bark. Mr. Sproat, who obtained his information from the same quarter that I did, adds that there was a long story of Jewitt's courting, and finally abducting, the daughter of Waughclagh, the Ahousaht chief. This incident in his career is not recorded by our author, who, however, was married to a daughter of Upquesta, an Ayhuttisaht Indian.

Apart, however, from Jewitt not caring to enlighten the decent-living puritans of Connecticut too minutely regarding his youthful escapades, it is not unlikely that Mr. Banfield's informant mixed up some half-forgotten legends regarding another white man, who, seventeen years before Jewitt's captivity, had voluntarily remained among these Nootka Indians. This was a scapegrace named John M'Kay,[27] an Irishman, who, after being in the East India Company's Service in some minor medical capacity, shipped in 1785 on board the Captain Cook as surgeon's mate, and was left behind in Nootka Sound, in the hope that he would so ingratiate himself with the natives, as to induce them to refuse furs to any other traders except those with whom he was connected. This man seems to have been an ignorant, untruthful braggart, who contradicted himself in many important particulars. But entire credence may be given to his statement that in a short time he sank into barbarism, becoming as filthy as the dirtiest of his savage companions. For when Captain Hanna saw him in August 1786, the natives had stripped him of his clothes, and obliged him to adopt their dress and habits. He even refused to leave, declaring that he had begun to relish dried fish and whale oil—though, owing to a famine in the Sound, he got little of either—and was well satisfied to stay for another year. After making various excursions in the country about Nootka Sound, during which he came to the conclusion that it was not a part of the American continent, but a chain of detached islands, he gladly deserted his Indian wife, and left with Captain Berkeley in 1787. To "preach, fight, and mend a musket" seems to have been too much for this medical pluralist. His further history I am unable to trace, though, for the sake of historical roundness, it would have been interesting to believe that he was the same M'Kay who twenty-four years later ended his career so terribly by blowing up the Tonquin, with whose son I was well acquainted.

In all of these transactions the head chief of Nootka, or at least of the Mooachahts, figures prominently. This was Maquenna or Moqulla (Jewitt's Maquina), who, with his relative Wikananish, ruled over most of the tribes from here to Nettinaht Inlet. He was a shifty savage, endowed with no small mental ability, and, though at times capable of acts which were almost generous, untrustworthy like most of his race, and when offended ready for any act of vindictiveness. Wikananish was on a visit to Maquenna when the Discovery and Resolution entered the Sound, and among the relics which Maquenna kept for many years were a brass mortar left by Cook, which in Meares's day was borne before the chief as a portion of his regalia, and three "pieces of a brassy metal formed like cricket bats," on which were the remains of the name and arms of Sir Joseph Banks, and the date 1775—Banks, it may be remembered, being the scientific companion of Cook. In every subsequent voyage Maquenna figures, and not a few of the outrages committed on that coast were due either to him or to his instigation. Some, like his attempt to seize Hanna's vessel in 1785, are known from extraneous sources, and others were boasted of by him to Jewitt. The last of his proceedings of which history has left any record, is the murder of the crew of the Boston and the enslavement of Thompson and Jewitt, and in the narrative of the latter we are afforded a final glimpse of this notorious "King."[28]

Changes since Jewitt's time.

When I visited Nootka Sound in 1863, fifty-eight years had passed since the captivity of the author of this book. In the interval many things had happened. But though the Indians had altered in some respects, they were perhaps less changed than almost any other savages in America since the whites came in contact with them. Eighty-five years had passed since Cook had careened his ships in Resolution Cove, and seventy since Vancouver entered the Sound on his almost more notable voyage. Yet the bricks from the blacksmith's forge, fresh and vitrified as if they had been in contact with the fire only yesterday, were at times dug up from among the rank herbage. The village in Friendly Cove—a spot which not a few mariners found to be very unfriendly—differed in no way from the picture in Cook's Voyage; and though some curio-hunting captain had no doubt long ago carried off the mortar and emblazoned brasses, the natives still spoke traditionally of Cook and Vancouver, and were ready to point out the spots where in 1788 Meares built the North-West America and the white men had cultivated. Memories of Martinez and Quadra existed in the shape of many legends, of Indians with Iberian features, and of several old people who by tradition (though some of them were old enough to have remembered these navigators), could still repeat the Spanish numerals. And the head chief of the Mooachahts in Friendly Cove—vastly smaller though his tribe was, and much abridged his power—was a grandson of Maquenna, called by the same name, and had many of his worst characteristics. This fact I am likely to remember. For he had been accused of having murdered, in the previous January, Captain Stev of the Trader, and since that time no whites had ventured near him. He, however, assured us that the report was simply a scandal raised by the neighbouring tribes, who had long hated him and his people, and would like to see them punished by the arrival of a gunboat, and that in reality the vessel was wrecked, and the white men were drowned. At the same time, among the voices heard that night at the council held in Maquenna's great lodge, supported by the huge beams described by Jewitt, were some in favour of killing his latest visitors, on the principle that dead men tell no tales. But that the Noes had it, the present narrative is the best proof.

So far as their habits were concerned, they were in a condition as primitive as at almost any period since the whites had visited them. Many of the old people were covered only with a mantle of woven pine bark, and beyond a shirt, in most cases made out of a flour sack, a blanket was the sole garment of the majority of the tribesmen. At times when they wanted to receive any goods, they simply pulled off the blanket, wrapped up the articles in it, and went ashore stark naked, with the exception of a piece of skin round the loins. The women wore for the most part no other dress except the blanket and a curious apron made of a fringe of bark strings. All of them painted hideously, the women adding a streak of vermilion down the middle division of the hair, and on high occasions the glittering mica sand, spoken of by Jewitt, was called into requisition. Their customs—and I had plenty of opportunities to study them in the course of the years which followed—were in no way different from what they were in Cook's time. No missionary seemed ever to have visited them, and their religious observances were accordingly still the most unadulterated of paganism. Jewitt's narrative is, however, as might have been expected, very vague on such matters; and, curiously enough, he makes no mention of their characteristic trait of compressing the foreheads of the children, the tribes in Koskeemo Sound squeezing it, while the bones are still cartilaginous, in a conical shape—though the brain is not thereby permanently injured: it is simply displaced.

Since that day, the tribesmen of the west coast of Vancouver Island have grown fewer and fewer. Some of the smaller septs have indeed become extinct, and others must be fast on the wane. They have, however, eaten of the tree of knowledge, and the gunboats have now little occasion to visit them for punitive purposes. Missionaries have even attempted to teach them better manners. The Alberni saw-mills have long been deserted, though other settlers have taken possession of the ground, and several have squatted in Koskeemo Sound, in the hope that the coal-seams there might induce the Pacific steamers to make that remote region their headquarters. Finally, an effort is being made to induce fishermen from the West of Scotland to settle on that coast. There is plenty of work for them, and the Indians nowadays are very little to be feared. Indeed, so far from the successors of Moqulla and Wikananish menacing Donald and Sandy, they will be ready to help them for a consideration; though a great deal of tact and forbearance will be necessary before people so conservative as the hot-tempered Celts work smoothly with a race quite as fiery and quite as wedded to old ways, as the Ahts among whom John Jewitt passed the early years of this century.

R. B.