The Adventures of John Jewitt. John Rodgers Jewitt
a few years earlier by the Kwakiools from the other side of the island, in conjunction with the Neshahts of Woody Point. In after days I learned to know these tribes very familiarly, crossing and recrossing the island with or to them, hunting and canoeing with them, in the woods, up the rivers, or on the lakes, and gathering from their lips
"This fair report of them who dwell
In that retirement."
At first sight these "tinkler loons and siclike companie" were by no means attractive. They were frowsy, and, undeniably, they were not clean. But it was only after penetrating their inner ways, after learning the wealth of custom and folk-lore of which they, all unconscious of their riches, were the jealous custodians, that one began to appreciate these primitive folk from a scientific point of view. Even yet, as the writer recalls the days when he was prone to find men more romantic than is possible in "middle life forlorn," it is difficult not to associate the most prosaic of savages with something of the picturesqueness which, in novels at least, used to cling to all their race. For, as the charm of such existence as theirs unfolded itself to the lover of woods and prairies, and lakes and virgin streams, the neglect of soap and of sanitation was forgotten. As Mr. Leland has remarked about the gipsies: "When their lives and legends are known, the ethnologist is apt to think of Tieck's elves, and of the Shang Valley, which was so grim and repulsive from without, but which, once entered, was the gay forecourt of Goblin-land."
In those days little was known—and little cared—about any of the Western tribes, except by the "schooner-men," as the Indians called the roving traders. Their very names were strange to the majority of the Victoria people, and I am told that very few of the colonists of to-day are any better informed. It has therefore been thought fitting that I should go somewhat minutely into the condition of the Indians, at a period when they were more primitive than now, as a slight contribution to the meagre chronicles of a dying race. For if not preserved here, it is likely to perish with almost the last survivor of a little band with whom, during the last two decades, death has been busy.
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