The Adventures of John Jewitt. John Rodgers Jewitt
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.
FOOTNOTES:
[1] Rubus Nutkanus.
[2] Rubus spectabilis.
[3] Gaultheria Shallon.
[4] Vaccinium ovatum.
[5] Pyrus rivularis.
[6] Ribes sanguineum, now a common shrub in our ornamental grounds.
[7] Echinopanax horridum.
[8] Thuja gigantea, a tree which to the Indian is what the bamboo is to the Chinese.
[9] Acer macrophyllum.
[10] Cornus Nuttallii.
[11] Arbutus Menziesii.
[12] Selasphorus rufus. It is one of one hundred and fifty-three birds which I catalogued from Vancouver Island (Ibis, Nov. 1868).
[13] Scenes and Studies of Savage Life (1868), by the Hon. G. M. Sproat, late Commissioner of Indian Affairs for British Columbia.
[14] "Pachena" of the Indians.
[15] Or, as they call themselves in their dialect of the Aht, "Dittinahts." Nettinaht is a white man's corruption.
[16] A few years earlier they were estimated at a thousand.
[17] "Klootis" of the Indians.
[18] Known to them as "Etlo."
[19] They were not permitted this privilege until the whites came to Alberni in August 1860.
[20] Though the orthography of these names is often incorrect, and not even phonetically accurate, I have, in order to avoid the mischief of a confusion of nomenclature, kept to that of the Admiralty Chart.
[21] This was the Banfield who acted as Indian agent in Barclay Sound. He was drowned by Kleetsak, a slave of Kleesheens, capsizing the canoe in which he was sailing, in revenge for a slight passed upon the chief. I went ashore at the Ohyaht village in the same canoe, and was asked whether I was not afraid, "for Banipe was killed in it." There was also a story that the capsize was an accident.
[22] It may be proper to state in this place that the interior details of that chart are, with very few exceptions, from my explorations. But the map on which they were laid down by me has been so often copied by societies, governments, and private individuals without permission (and without acknowledgment), that the author of it has long ceased to claim a property so generally pillaged. The original, however, appeared, with a memoir on the interior—"Das Innere der Vancouver Insel"—which has not yet been translated, in Petermann's