Many years ago—when America was in the midst of war, when railways across the continent were but the dream of sanguine men, and when the Pacific was a faraway sea—the writer of these lines passed part of a pleasant summer in cruising along the western shores of Vancouver Island. Our ship's company was not distinguished, for it consisted of two fur-traders and an Indian "boy," and the sloop in which the crew and passengers sailed was so small, that, when the wind failed, and the brown folk ashore looked less amiable and the shore more rugged than was desirable, we put her and ourselves beyond hail by the aid of what seamen know as a "white ash breeze." Out of one fjord we went, only to enter another so like it that there was often a difficulty in deciding by the mere appearance of the shore which was which. Everywhere the dense forest of Douglas fir and Menzies spruce covered the country from the water's edge to the summit of the rounded hills which here and there caught the eye in the still little known, but at that date almost entirely unexplored interior. Wherever a tree could obtain a foothold, there a tree grew, until in places their roots were at times laved by the spray. Beneath this thick clothing of heavy timber flourished an almost equally dense undergrowth of shrubs, which until then were only known to us from the specimens introduced from North-West America into the European gardens. Gay were the thickets of thimbleberry[1] and salmonberry[2] wherever the soil was rich, and for miles the ground was carpeted with the salal,[3] while the huckleberry,[4] the crab-apple,[5] and the flowering currant[6] varied the monotony of the gloomy woods. In places the ginseng, or, as the woodmen call it, the "devil's walking-stick,"[7] with its long prickly stem and palm-like head of great leaves, imparted an almost tropical aspect to scenery which, seen from the deck of our little craft, looked so like that of Southern Norway, that I have never seen the latter without recalling the outer limits of British Columbia. On the few flat spits where the sun reached, the gigantic cedars[8] and broad-leaved maples[9] lighted up the scene, while the dogwood,[10] with its large white flowers reflected in the water of some river which, after a turbulent course, had reached the sea through a placid mouth, or a Menzies arbutus,[11] whose glossy leaves and brown bark presented a more southern facies to the sombre jungles, afforded here and there a relief to the never-ending fir and pine and spruce.

A more solitary shore, so far as white men are concerned, it would be hard to imagine. From the day we left until the day we returned, we sighted only one sail; and from Port San Juan, where an Indian trader lived a lonely life in an often-beleaguered blockhouse, to Koskeemo Sound, where another of these voluntary exiles passed his years among the savages, there was not a christened man, with the exception of the little settlement of lumbermen at the head of the Alberni Canal. For months at a time no keel ever ploughed this sea, and then too frequently it was a warship sent from Victoria to chastise the tribesmen for some outrage committed on wayfaring men such as we. The floating fur-trader with whom we exchanged the courtesies of the wilderness had indeed been despitefully used. For had he not taken to himself some savage woman, who had levanted to her tribe with those miscellaneous effects which he termed "iktas"? And the Klayoquahts had stolen his boat, and the Kaoquahts his beans and his vermilion and his rice, and threatened to scuttle his schooner and stick his head on its masthead. And, moreover, to complete this tale of public pillage and private wrong, a certain chief, to whom he applied many ornate epithets, had declared that he cared not a salal-berry for all of "King George's warships." So that the conclusion of this merchant of the wilds was that, until "half the Indians were hanged, and the other half badly licked, there would be no peace on the coast for honest men such as he." Then, under a cloud of playful blasphemy, our friend sailed away.

For if civilisation was scarce in the Western Vancouver of '63, savagedom was all-abounding. Not many hours passed without our having dealings with the lords of the soil. It was indeed our business—or, at least, the business of the two men and the Indian "boy"—to meet with and make profit out of the barbarous folk. Hence it was seldom that we went to sleep without the din of a board village in our ears, or woke without the ancient and most fish-like smell of one being the first odour which greeted our nostrils. In almost every cove, creek, or inlet there was one of these camps, and every few miles we entered the territory of a new tribe, ruled by a rival chief, rarely on terms with his neighbour, and as often as not at war with him. More than once we had occasion to witness the gruesome evidence of this state of matters. A war party returning from a raid on a distant hamlet would be met with, all painted in hideous colours, and with the bleeding heads of their decapitated enemies fastened to the bows of their cedar canoes, and the cowering captives, doomed to slavery, bound among the fighting men. Or, casting anchor in front of a village, we would be shown with pride a row of festering skulls stuck on poles, as proof of the military prowess of our shifty hosts.

These were, however, unusually unpleasant incidents. More frequently we saw little except the more lightsome traits of what was then a very primitive savage life, and the barbarous folk treated us kindly. A marriage feast might be in progress, or a great "potlatch," or merrymaking, at which the giving away of property was the principal feature (p. 82), might be in full blaze at the very moment we steered round the wooded point. Halibut and dog-fish were being caught in vast quantities—the one for slicing and drying for winter use; the other for the sake of the oil extracted from the liver, then as now an important article of barter, being in ready demand by the Puget Sound saw-mills. Now and then a fur-seal or, better still, a sea-otter would be killed. But this is not the land of choice furs. Even the marten and the mink were indifferent. Beaver—which in those days, after having been almost hunted to death, were again getting numerous, owing to the low prices which the pelts brought having slackened the trappers' zeal—would often be brought on board, and a few hides of the wapiti, the "elk" of the Western hunter, and the black-tailed deer which swarm in the Vancouver woods, generally appeared at every village. The natives are, however, essentially fish-eaters, and though in every tribe there is generally a hunter or two, the majority of them seldom wander far afield, the interior being in their mythology a land of evil things, of which wise men would do well to keep clear. Even the black bear, which in autumn was often a common feature of the country, where it ranged the crab-apple thickets, was not at this season an object of the chase. Like the deer and the wolves, it was shunning the heat and the flies by summering near the snow which we could notice still capping some of the inland hills, rising to heights of from five thousand to seven thousand feet, and feasting on the countless salmon which were descending every stream, until, with the receding waters, they were left stranded in the upland pools. So cheap were salmon, that at times they could be bought for a cent's worth of "trade goods," and deer in winter for a few charges of powder and shot. A whale-hunt, in which the behemoth was attacked by harpoons with attached inflated sealskins, after a fashion with which I had become familiar when a resident among the Eskimo of Baffin Bay, was a more curious sight. Yet dog-fish oil was the staple of the unpicturesque traffic in which my companions engaged; while I, a hunter after less considered trifles, landed to roam the woods and shores for days at a time, gathering the few flowers which bloomed under these umbrageous forests, though in number sufficient to tempt the red-beaked humming-bird[12] to migrate from Mexico to these northern regions, its tiny nest being frequently noticed on the tops of low bushes.

But, after all, the most interesting sight on the shore was the people who inhabited it. They were the "Indians," whom my friend Gilbert Sproat afterwards described as the "Ahts,"[13] for this syllable terminates the name of each of the many little tribes into which they are divided. Yet, with a disregard of the laws of nomenclature, the Ethnological Bureau at Washington has only recently announced its intention of knowing them officially by the meaningless title of "Wakashan." They are a people by themselves, speaking a language which was confined to Vancouver Island, with the exception of Cape Flattery, the western tip of Washington, where the Makkahs speak it. In Vancouver Island, a region about the size of Ireland, three, if not four distinct aboriginal tongues are in use, in addition to Chinook Jargon, a sort of lingua franca employed by the Indians in their intercourse with the whites or with tribes whose speech they do not understand. The Kawitshen (Cowitchan) with its various dialects, the chief of which is the Tsongersth (Songer) of the people near Victoria, prevails from Sooke in the Strait of Juan de Fuca, northwards to Comox. From that point to the northern end of the island various dialects of the Kwakiool (Cogwohl of the traders) are the medium in which the tribesmen do not conceal their thoughts. The people of Quatseno and Koskeemo Sounds, owing to their frequent intercourse with Fort Rupert on the other side of the island, which at this point is at its narrowest, understand and frequently speak the Kwakiool. But after passing several days entirely alone among these people, I can vouch for the fact that this dialect is so peculiar that it almost amounts to a separate language. However, from this part, or properly, from Woody Point southwards to Port San Juan, the Aht language is entirely different.

The latter locality,[14] nearly opposite Cape Flattery, on the other side of Juan de Fuca Strait, the most southern part, and the only one on the mainland where it is spoken, is the special territory of the Pachenahts. When I knew them, they were, like all of their race, a dwindling people. A few years earlier, Grant had estimated them to number a hundred men. In 1863 there were not more than a fifth of that number fit to manage a canoe, and the total number of the tribe did not exceed sixty. War with the Sclallans and Makkahs on the opposite shore, and smallpox, which is more powerful than gunpowder, had so decimated them that, no longer able to hold their own, they had leagued with the Nettinahts, old allies of theirs, for mutual defence. Quixto, the chief, I find described in my notes as a stout fellow, terrible at a bargain, very well disposed towards the whites, as are all his tribe, the husband of four wives, an extraordinary number for the Indians of the coast, and reputed to be rich in blankets and the other gear which constitutes wealth among the aborigines of this part of the British Empire. In their palmy days they had made way as far north as Clayoquat Sound and the Ky-yoh-quaht-cutz in one direction, and with the Tsongersth to the eastward, though that now pusillanimous tribe had generally the best of them. Their eastern border is, however, the Jordan River, but they have a fishing station at the Sombria (Cockles), and several miles up both the Pandora and Jordan Rivers flowing into their bay. Karleit is their western limit.

The Nettinahts[15] are a more powerful tribe; indeed, at the period when the writer of this book was a prisoner in Nootka Sound, they were among the strongest of all the Aht people. Even then, they had four hundred[16] fighting men, and were a people with whom it did not do to be off your guard. They have—or had—many villages, from Pachena Bay[17] to the west and Karleit to the east, besides three villages in Nettinaht Inlet,[18] eleven fishing stations on the Nettinaht River, three stations on the Cowitchan Lake, and one at Sguitz on the Cowitchan River itself, while they sometimes descend as far as Tsanena to plant potatoes. They have thus the widest borders of any Indian tribe in Vancouver Island, and have a high reputation as hunters, whale-fishers, and warriors. Moqulla was then the head chief, but every winter a sub-tribe hunted and fished on the Cowitchan Lake, a sheet of water which I was among the first to visit, and the very first to "lay down" with approximate accuracy. Though nowadays—Eheu fugaces, Postume, Postume, labuntur anni!—there is a waggon road to the lake, and, I am told, "a sort of hotel" on the spot where eight-and-twenty years ago we encamped on extremely short rations, though with the soothing knowledge that if only the Fates were kindly and the wind favourable, there were plenty of trout in the water, and a dinner at large in the woods around. In those days most of the Nettinaht villages were fortified with wooden pickets to prevent any night attack, and from its situation, Whyack, the principal one (built on a cliff, stockaded on the seaward side, and reached only by a narrow entrance where the surf breaks continuously), is impregnable to hostile canoemen. This people accordingly carried themselves with a high hand, and bore a name correspondingly bad.

Barclay—or Berkeley Sound—is the home of various petty tribes—Ohyahts, Howchuklisahts, Yu-clul-ahts, Toquahts, Seshahts, and Opechesahts. The two with whom I was best acquainted were the last named. The Seshahts lived at the top of the Alberni—a Canal long narrow fjord or cleft in the island—and on the Seshaht Islands in the Sound. During the summer months they came for salmon-fishing to Sa ha, or the first rapids on the Kleekort or Saman River,[19] their chief being Ia-pou-noul, who had just succeeded to this office owing to the abdication of his father, though the entire fighting force of the tribe did not number over fifty men. As late as 1859 the Seshahts seized an American ship, the Swiss Boy. The Opechesahts, of whom I have very kindly memories, as I encamped with their chief for many days, and explored Sproat Lake in his company, were an offshoot of the Seshahts, and had their home on the Kleekort River, but, owing to a massacre by the now extinct Quallehum (Qualicom) Indians from the opposite coast, who caught them on an island in Sproat Lake, they were reduced to seventeen men, most of them, however, tall, handsome fellows, and good hunters. Chieftainship in that part of the world goes by inheritance. Hence there may be many of these hereditary aristocrats in a very small tribe. Accordingly, few though the Opechesaht warriors were, three men, Quatgenam, Kalooish or Kanash, and Quassoon, a shaggy, thick-set, and tremendously strong individual who crossed the island with me in 1865, were entitled to that rank; and it may be added that the women of this, the most freshwater of all the Vancouver tribes, were noted for a more than usual share of good looks.

The Howchuklisahts, whose chief was Maz-o-wennis, numbered forty-five people, including twenty-eight men. They lived in Ouchucklesit[20] Harbour, off the Alberni Canal; they had also a fishing camp on Henderson Lake, and two or three lodges on the rapid or stream flowing out of that sheet of water, which was discovered and named by me. But they were "bad to deal with."

The You-clul-ahts of Ucluelt Inlet, ruled by Ia-pou-noul, a wealthy man in blankets and other Indian wealth, numbered about one hundred. The chief of the Toquahts in Pipestem Inlet was Sow-wa-wenes, a middle-aged man, who had an easy task, as his lieges numbered only eleven, so that they were thirty years ago on the eve of extinction. The Ohyahts of Grappler Creek were estimated in 1863 to be about one hundred and seventy-five in fighting strength—which, multiplied by four for women and children, would make them, for that region, an unusually strong community. These figures are probably correct, since the man who made the statement was, after living for years amongst them, eventually murdered by the savages,[21] whom he had trusted too implicitly. Kleesheens, a notorious scoundrel, was their chief. In Clayoquat Sound were the Klahoquahts, Kellsmahts, Ahousahts, Heshquahts, and Mamosahts—the last a little tribe numbering only five men. Indeed, with the exception of the Klahoquahts (who numbered one hundred and sixty men) and the Ahousahts (who claimed two hundred and fifty), these little septs, all devoured by mutual hatred, and frequently at war with each other, were even then dwindling to nothingness. But the Opetsahts, though marked on the Admiralty Chart[22] as a separate tribe, are—or were—only a village of the Ahousahts.

In Nootka Sound, the Muchlahts and Mooachahts lived. In Esperanza Inlet were the villages of two tribes—the Noochahlahts and Ayattisahts, numbering forty and twenty-two men respectively, and chiefed at that time by two worthies of the names of Mala-koi-Kennis, and Quak-ate-Komisa, whom we left in the delectable condition of each expecting the other round to cut his and his tribesmen's throats.

North of this inlet were Ky-yoh-quahts, of the Sound of that name (Kaioquat), numbering two hundred and fifty men. To us they were exceedingly friendly, though a trader whom we met had a different tale to tell of their treatment of him. Kanemat, a young man of about twenty-two, was their chief, though the tribe was virtually governed by his mother, a notable lady named Shipally, and at times by his pretty squaw, Wick-anes, and his lively son and heir, Klahe-ek-enes. The Chaykisahts, the Klahosahts, and the Neshahts of Woody Point are the other Aht tribes, though the latter is not included among them by Mr. Sproat. But they speak their language, of which their chief village is its most northern limit.

Everywhere their tribes showed such evident signs of decadence that by this time some of them must be all but extinct. Still, as the whites had not come much in contact with them—though all of them asked us for "lum" (rum), but did not get it, it is clear enough what had been the traders' staple—the "diseases of civilisation" could not be blamed for their decay. Even then the practical extermination of two tribes was so recent that the facts were still fresh in their neighbours' memory. These were the Ekkalahts, who lived at the top of the Alberni Canal, but were all but killed off in the same massacre by which the Opechesahts were decimated. The only survivor was a man named Keekeon, who lived with the Seshahts, most of whom had forgotten even the name of this vanquished little nationality. The other tribe was the Koapinahts (or Koapin-ah), who at that time numbered sixty or seventy people, but at the period to which I refer they were reduced to two adults—a man and a woman—all the rest having been slaughtered 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

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.

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.

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]

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.