The Golden Spruce: A True Story of Myth, Madness, and Greed

by John Vaillant

  The following afternoon, as the flames rise around the sealed black box, the people continue to sing. For a long time the box seems to sit in the fire as if it were comfortable there, but in time some cracks begin to show. As the box becomes fully engaged, a bag is passed, and one by one the people break out of the circle to sprinkle tobacco on the flames and reveal their private thoughts to the man they loved and admired. As if on cue, a bald eagle alights in the top of a nearby spruce, and for a moment she and the carved eagle atop the adjacent pole neatly bracket the chief’s house. But nothing here is new to her, and after a time she leans forward and, with a few downward thrusts of heavy wings as broad as a man is tall, she finds a draft, locks into it, and glides away. Shortly afterward, a strange thing happens: all at once, the top and sides of the box spontaneously lift off and fall to the side. It is hard to explain this in any structural or thermodynamic way, but it happens suddenly and, for a brief moment, the mask stares out from the pit, engulfed and yet untouched by the fire. The geisha-white face shines around the scarlet lips as flames burst from the eyes, mouth, and nostrils. When, at last, the heat becomes too much and the finely carved cheeks split beneath each eye, they do so simultaneously, along the grain, and it looks to some as if the mask is weeping molten tears. What is the carver feeling at this moment, before the chin and forehead give way and his labours crumble into glowing embers? What is happening in the hearts and bellies of Skilay’s children and the sombre chief as the dim shadow of a grizzly bear holding an empty canoe clocks slowly across the ground?

  BY MIDAFTERNOON SKILAY’S POLE is finished and, with the paint still wet, the men gather to move it to his house. It is shockingly heavy—frighteningly so: the pole is three-and-a-half metres around and weighs six-and-a-half tons. Once again, the hole left by Skilay yawns open. He has always been the one to supervise the pole raisings. Will the pole still rise without him? Will this be the time someone gets killed? The first steps are awkward: a leg is almost crushed; decisions are made, not by an experienced leader, but by the group, in the same way that a school of fish decides to turn in a particular direction. Different leaders emerge and then recede and, in this way, with Eagles on one side and Ravens on the other, the pole finds its way to the grave-sized hole next to Skilay’s house. But the hardest part is yet to come; manoeuvring this giant statue into a standing position will be brute proof of the people’s devotion—the most difficult thing anyone there will do for a long time. One reason Skilay’s pole is so heavy is that it is a solid cylinder, not a hollowed-out half-pole like so many others. And unlike those lighter poles, this one is deeply carved, not only from top to bottom but all the way around. As with the weight and complexity of a gold bracelet, these details are all indicators of Skilay’s stature, and of his family’s wealth. The fact that his pole was carved by one of the best living carvers on the coast is further evidence of Skilay’s position in the tribe.

  Ten heavy ropes as thick as a wrist are tied around the upper third of the pole. Care is taken not to damage the delicate hummingbird, or the heavy beak of the eagle that protrudes lower down; the dorsal fin of the wolf-headed blackfish that swims the length of the pole must also be treated with care (a human face peers from its blow-hole). At the base of the pole, nestled securely between the eagle’s wings, wearing a tall spruce root hat and holding a canoe paddle, is the Steersman himself.

  The ropes radiate out from the horizontal pole like ribbons in a primordial maypole dance, and sturdy planks have been laid on angle to guide the butt into place. There are dozens of people holding each line, waiting for instructions, and it is now that a leader emerges. Standing on top of the pile of excavated sand and dirt is Skilay’s son, a young man doing his best to rise to a daunting occasion. He gives the call to haul back and the crowd surges toward the beach; the lines go taut and the pole grinds stubbornly across the ground. This is how it would have been to haul a whale ashore by hand. With another mighty heave, the far end of the pole lifts slightly and the butt slides down into the hole, splintering the planks as it goes. The sound is almost sickening, and it brings home the gravity of the task at hand; the crowd is so large and dense that if the pole should fall or roll, someone, maybe a number of people, will certainly be crushed or killed. But now there is no turning back, and carefully, arduously, the pole is hauled upright. There comes at last a moment when the pole is centred in its hole, supported only by the people who surround it, that it becomes clear to some what it means to be Haida—and plain to all how many hands it takes to resurrect a tree.

  CHAPTER FIVE

  Wildest of the Wild

  The Haida at Kiusta saw it first as a white spot on the horizon that slowly grew larger. The people were afraid and donned their dancing costumes. They began to dance to drive it away, but it continued to approach. The spot became a giant web, and in the distance they saw spiders crawling up and down the webbing. As the web came closer they could see it was attached to a boat, but no ordinary boat, for it appeared to have wings which flapped up and down in unison against the water. The spiders, it turned out, resembled human beings, except they had white faces. The Kiusta people believed the Santla ga haade—the ghost land people—had returned from the dead.

  —William Matthews, former chief of Old Masset, via Margaret Blackman

  The fierce character of the natives would, however, render any attempts at permanent settlements, unless in strong parties, dangerous. In one sentence, to conclude, these islands are more interesting to the geographer than to the colonist; to the miner they may be valuable, but to the agriculturalist they are useless.

  —from THE HAIDAH INDIANS OF QUEEN CHARLOTTE’S ISLANDS, a report by James Swan, 1873

  FOUR YEARS BEFORE Captain Cook arrived on the Northwest Coast, a Spanish explorer named Juan Pérez Hernández weighed anchor at Monterey, California, then the northern limit of Spanish settlement, and sailed north into aqua incognita. His mission: to claim the entire Northwest Coast for Spain. Poor weather and fog kept Pérez’s eighty-two-foot corvette Santiago well offshore for the entire trip, and after five weeks of wandering through the heaving miasm of the North Pacific, the crew was dangerously low on food and water and showing signs of scurvy. As a result, they were forced to turn back well short of their goal of the 60th parallel—then the southern limit of Russian settlement in North America. By all accounts the voyage was a dismal failure, save for one historic encounter. Posterity was the last thing on these sailors’ minds when, on July 18, 1774, a lookout spotted land. What lay before them was not the mainland of the recently expanded New Spain, as their captain supposed, but a minor island in an uncharted archipelago. Without knowing it, Juan Pérez and his crew had discovered what would come to be known as the Queen Charlotte Islands.

  While probing the coastline of what is now Langara Island, the Santiago was met offshore by a number of Haida canoes; as the paddlers sang, a shaman aboard the lead canoe scattered eagle down upon the water in front of the mysterious craft. Two priests aboard the Santiago admired the natives’ pleasant manner as well as their surprisingly fair skin and rosy cheeks; they also noted that one of the canoes held a spear tipped with iron. Where, they wondered, had these pagans acquired such a sophisticated item? It wasn’t clear whether this weapon was for spearing otters or enemies, but the Haida seemed friendly and some informal trading began, in the course of which they eagerly invited the sailors to come ashore. One hundred kilometres southeast of their position stood the golden spruce. By now the tree would have been about seventy-five years old and thirty metres tall. One can only wonder what the Spaniards, so obsessed with precious metals and so willing to see heavenly portent in every twitch of the landscape, would have made of a golden tree in a green forest. We will never know because the wind died and a strong current bore the ship away. This may have been for the best: up until this time, no explorer who set foot on the northwest coast had ever made it back to his ship.

  This was only one of the reasons the Northwest Coast was such a late
addition to the world map; with the exception of the two poles, this was the last significant feature to be added to the earth’s portrait. There were two primary reasons. One was motivation: there wasn’t any. Although places as tiny and remote as the Spice Islands were internationally famous by the sixteenth century, the islands of the North Pacific, and any riches they might contain, were unknown to Europeans. The other reason was access: there was simply no direct route; even Tasmania was easier to get to. An overland journey from the Atlantic was not only extraordinarily dangerous, but it could take years, and travelling from Europe presented an even more daunting prospect. During the 1720s it took the naval explorer Vitus Bering three years just to get from Moscow to the Pacific in order to begin his voyage; even then, the yet-to-be-named Bering Strait and most of Alaska still stood between him and the Northwest Coast. The sea offered no better alternative. Unless you were sailing from the east coast of Asia, the only way to get to the North Pacific involved detouring to the opposite end of the planet and passing around either South America or Africa (depending on one’s direction of travel).

  The Chinese, who had ships capable of crossing the Pacific by 1200, wrote of a legendary place called Fousang, which is believed to have been the Northwest Coast. The English had a less elegant name for it: they called it “the backside of America,” and until it was accurately mapped at the end of the eighteenth century, it was subject to a series of cartographic indignities driven by misinformation, wishful thinking, and bald-faced lies. Quivira, the legendary city of gold sought by the Spanish during the mid-sixteenth century was rumoured to be there, along with various lost cities, the Northwest Passage and its mythical precursor, the Strait of Anian. While writing Gulliver’s Travels, the satirist Jonathan Swift chose the poorly understood region as a suitable location for Brobdingnag, the land of giants. Gulliver’s Travels was published in 1726, two years before Bering tested the important, if rudimentary, theory that Asia and North America were actually separate continents.

  The first European to set foot on the Northwest Coast and survive an encounter with the locals was Captain James Cook, who stepped ashore at Resolution Cove on the northwestern shore of Vancouver Island, on March 29, 1778. Vancouver Island is the biggest piece in the coastal puzzle; with its southern end nestled into a pocket formed by Washington’s Olympic Peninsula, it angles northwestward off the B.C. coast for five hundred kilometres. Cook’s purpose for landing there would prove prophetic: he needed logs. While en route from New Zealand, via Hawai’i, both his ships sustained heavy damage to their masts and spars. The explorers’ host on Vancouver Island was the powerful Nuu-chah-nulth chief Maquinna. He and his people wore cloaks made of sea otter skins and they lived in wooden houses that would have been recognizable to any European. Made of straight planks, with a smoke hole centred along a symmetrically peaked roofline, Nuu-chah-nulth bighouses would have appeared unusual only because of their great size and massive timbers. In addition to finding sea otters “as plentiful as blackberries” and gracious hospitality that augured well for future trade, another opportunity revealed itself deeper in the forest: trees the likes of which no Englishman had ever seen—an empire builder’s fantasy. But Cook, bound again for Hawai’i, wouldn’t live to see his discovery come to fruition.

  When Cook’s account of his third and final voyage was published in 1784, explorer-entrepreneurs, who had certainly heard rumours beforehand, took note and wasted no time in outfitting ships for the North Pacific. By 1785 the first vessel was on the coast, trading with the Native peoples, and nothing would be the same there again. These acolytes of Cook were called Nor’westmen (both the men and their vessels went by this name), and they were commercial explorers engaged in what were arguably the most ambitious, far-ranging, and culturally complex trading missions ever routinely undertaken. Their sole motivation was the pelts of a small sea mammal which had been classified not long before as Enhydra lutris, otherwise known as the sea otter. Their skins were the Golden Fleece of the North Pacific; the Chinese were paying a fortune for them. The Manchu dynasty of the eighteenth century, ruling over what they called the Celestial Empire, was the most advanced civilization on earth. With its enormous land area, the xenophobic society’s three hundred million citizens (then more than a third of the world’s total population) were largely self-sufficient. An exception was sea otter pelts which members of the upper class coveted above all other clothing; as much as 120 Spanish silver dollars might be paid for a single high-quality skin, the equivalent of about $2,400 today. So precious were these furs that crewmen on trading vessels had their belongings searched periodically to make sure they weren’t smuggling skins for their own gain, just as African diamond miners are searched today. While the East Coast cod, timber, and fur trades had been generating wealth for a century or more, the otter trade was the first northern commodity to send its exploiters into a bona fide frenzy, like gold, oil, or drugs.

  With traders approaching by both land and sea, it was the fur trade that first opened the West; beaver, fox, and ermine were all profitable, but sea otter skins were in a class by themselves. Alexander Mackenzie, a fur trader and partner in the British-owned North West Company, was the first European to cross the continent overland, arriving on the coast in 1793, directly opposite the southern tip of the recently named Queen Charlotte’s Isles (his journey was so arduous that no one has been able to duplicate it). Though he preceded Lewis and Clark by more than a decade, Mackenzie arrived to find dozens of ships already prowling the coast in search of otter skins, and many of them were American; as early as 1791, coins minted by the Massachusetts Bay Colony were seen dangling from the ears of North Coast Natives. John Jacob Astor, whose vast fur-trading empire has become the stuff of American legend, didn’t send his first expedition until nearly twenty years later (1810). By then the slow-breeding sea otter was already in decline.

  The sea otter, which exists only in the North Pacific, is unique among mammals; whereas the human head may be covered with one hundred thousand hairs—total, a sea otter can produce up to six hundred thousand hairs per square inch. So fine is their fur that it can be brushed in any direction; the result is a pelt of unparalleled softness. Lacking the insulating fat of other marine mammals, it is this dense mat of filaments, which the animals manually load with heat-retaining air bubbles, that allows these creatures to survive in North Pacific waters. Sea otters seldom go ashore, preferring to eat, sleep, relax, and copulate while floating on their backs. They carry flat stones in skin flaps under their forelegs which they place on their chests and use like anvils for breaking open shellfish (these stones are confiscated in aquariums because their owners will also bang them against the glass walls of their tanks). Sea otters are famously playful and affectionate, and they may float for hours holding “hands” with another otter. Mating, however, is a joyless exercise preceded by the male grasping the female’s snout in his teeth and flipping her, belly up, onto his stomach. Apparently, they were extremely easy to kill.

  The otter traders’ route took them, literally, around the globe on a highly profitable journey that came to be known as the Golden Round. While some traders embarked from colonial bases at Macau and Calcutta, many others shipped out from their home ports in the North Atlantic; from there, it took three or four months just to reach Cape Horn, a gauntlet of fog, icebergs, gale-force winds, and huge waves, all of which flow in the opposite direction of Pacific-bound ships. Square-riggers weren’t designed to sail into the wind, and for this reason it might take a month of tacking just to get around the Horn, an ordeal that exacted a heavy toll from ship and crew alike. Some captains simply gave up and turned their vessels around though one fur-mad trader made the journey in a thirty-three-foot schooner. From Cape Horn, just shy of the Antarctic circle, these vessels would tack northward again for thirteen thousand kilometres until they reached the thick fog, fickle winds, and ferocious currents of the Northwest coast. It was here, after half a year of hard sailing in cramped, vermin-infested condition
s, that the real work began, and there was no respite for travel-weary sailors. The coast’s overwhelming dampness not only led to frequent respiratory ailments but it rotted food, canvas, and rope at alarming speed. Poor visibility, along with fluky winds, whirlpools, and bizarre tidal upwellings made for hazardous coastal navigating. In some surge channels, tides run at speeds only slightly slower than Niagara Falls. Frequent losses of anchor and chain due to the region’s rough “holding ground” led one captain to recommend embarking for the coast with no fewer than five spare anchors and cables. The chronically foul weather further demoralized the crews, who employed a veritable thesaurus of gloomy descriptors to express their experiences there: “dreary,” “inhospitable,” “wretched,” “savage,” “barbarous,” and the “wildest of the wild” being but a few. Some of their shipboard experiences sound like they were conjured up by Hieronymus Bosch: ice-cube-sized hail would cause birds to drop, dead, from the sky. One sailor compared the seasickness he and his mates suffered en route to “shitting through one’s teeth.”