The Resolution and Discovery continued to plough through the churning seas and thick fog, finally sighting the coast of Oregon on 6 March 1778. Cook leaves us in no doubt about the conditions the two ships were enduring – of the two landmarks he named, one he called Cape Foulweather. Although he struggled to make land, Cook’s presence was important for Britain’s colonial aspirations. When Sir Francis Drake had hauled his ship, the Golden Hind, ashore in 1579 at the spot now known as Drakes Bay, just north of San Francisco’s Golden Gate, he claimed the continent in the name of Queen Elizabeth I from ‘sea to sea’ and south to Spain’s territories in Mexico. Drake named it New Albion, which is the name Cook used when he wrote that he had spied ‘the long looked for coast of Albion’.
As far as Spain was concerned, Drake – who had been sent to the Pacific expressly to attack Spanish settlements and flotillas – was a blackguard and a crook. Any claims he made on the American continent were null and void, and Cook’s appearance in their territory was a threat to their dominion. What they couldn’t know was that Cook’s greatest concern as he fought his way through the dreadful weather was simply staying afloat. The Resolution was far from resolute, and unless he found a safe place to repair the ship, Cook feared it would founder.
On 29 March, Cook found refuge. And not a moment too soon. On the west coast of the island that would one day be named for the man who accompanied Cook on his second and third voyages and would become a renowned navigator in his own right – George Vancouver – Cook found an anchorage that was blessed with everything he wanted and needed. Nootka Sound.
SAM NEILL
Cook turns in from the ocean and he’s immediately surrounded by canoes with strange people he’s never seen before. They start shouting at him – ichme nutka, ichme nutka, or something like that. What they’re trying to say is ‘Go in further . . . go round the island . . . there’s a better place to anchor!’ What he thinks they’re saying is – ‘We are Nootka! We are Nootka!’ Big mistake, of course – but the name persists to this day.
Of course, the area’s appeal was not lost on the Mowachaht people who lived there. Beneath the shade cast by the enormous trees that Cook knew would give him the timber he needed to repair his ships, the Mowachaht lived in huge houses that were the largest permanent homes in the Pacific.
Cook described the Mowachaht lands as the richest and most abundant region he had encountered, and the locals knew the value of what they had.
When Cook dropped anchor, he did so near the tribe’s summer retreat. Given its name – ‘Yuquot’, meaning ‘wind comes from all directions’ – it’s little wonder the Mowachaht chose not to live there in winter.
RAY WILLIAMS, Mowachaht Elder
The real name is Yuquot – where the four winds blow. This is our special place. The ancestors of the Mowachaht people are here and I choose to stay here because I want to put my heart and soul into believing this is Yuquot territory. I believe in protecting this land here.
It wasn’t the first time that the Mowachaht had seen Europeans. In August 1774, the Spanish explorer Juan Perez had stopped by on his voyage to check for troublesome British or Russian interlopers along the north Pacific coast of Spain’s American territories. He didn’t encounter any Europeans, but he did make contact with the locals.
The extraordinary welcome Cook received when he arrived in Perez’s wake was unlike any he had experienced in the Pacific. Masked Mowachaht approached the two British ships in canoes, shaking rattles and chanting and howling in a cacophony that must have echoed around Nootka Sound. The second lieutenant, James King, appointed himself music critic and judged the fanfare ‘by no means unpleasant to the ear’. How to respond when confronted with a spontaneous serenade? ‘We judged they might like our music,’ King wrote. In an age before phonographs, records, or streaming services, if you wanted to hear music, you had to play it yourself – or go to church. So most people could sing or play a tune. The crew picked up their instruments and struck up a tune. The Mowachaht people seemed impressed and responded with another ditty of their own. The finale? Cook rallied the French horn.
SAM NEILL
It always puts a shiver up my spine when I’m in the exact spot Cook was. Particularly in a place like Nootka Sound where almost nothing has changed at all. In Resolution Cove, the two ships were anchored – the Resolution and the Discovery. They set up an observatory on a rock you can still see today. One thing that’s certainly very different today is that there must have been a cacophony of noise – people beating drums, singing, shouting at each other . . . language all over the place. The place was full of people. But today, it’s just me, and it’s almost entirely silent.
In addition to being musical impresarios, the Mowachaht turned out to be the canniest dealmakers in the Pacific. By this point, Cook thought he had it all worked out. He was pretty sure he knew what would tempt the locals. Metal was a sure-fire winner, for example, as were red feathers. But Cook was basing this largely upon his experiences with Polynesian people. Things would be different in Nootka Sound.
The interactions between Cook and his men and the Mowachaht were largely amicable because the locals were more than happy to engage in trade along terms the Europeans understood. There were none of the gift-giving rituals they found so confusing in Polynesia. The Mowachaht people were experienced traders in regular contact with other indigenous American populations, and they also had a strong concept of property and ownership that tallied with British beliefs. This extended to sex, which the sailors on board pursued as vigorously here as they had elsewhere in the Pacific.
SAM NEILL
For Cook’s men, sex in Nootka was not nearly as readily available here, as it had been elsewhere. But it was still available. The randy surgeon Samwell took advantage of that. It was transactional by nature, of course, but a rusty nail wouldn’t do the job here. A pewter plate seemed to work its charms, though – it’s difficult to overstate how valuable metal was to societies like this one. The sex itself must have come with its own challenges, given the proclivities of the locals who were inclined to smother themselves with a thick layer of animal fat in order to stay warm in these somewhat inclement climes. The mind boggles.
For Cook, both pros and cons stemmed from the locals’ commercial sophistication. Yes, he could get what he needed in Nootka Sound and the rate of exchange would be on terms he could understand; not to mention, the pilfering that had driven Cook to distraction in Polynesia didn’t exist here. But on the flip side, the supply and demand balance sheet was tipped very heavily in favour of the Mowachaht. And they knew it.
For the first time anywhere in the Pacific, Cook was expected to pay for the grass he needed to feed his animals.
SAM NEILL
Here’s a little family story I’ve always enjoyed. A great uncle of mine was having his honeymoon in Florence and he and his wife woke up early one morning to a terrible sound outside. They pulled back the shutters and outside there were a couple of Italian street urchins torturing a cat. He called the concierge and said, ‘Here’s some lira, give it to those kids so they let the cat go.’ The cat was released, but the next morning they woke up to an even worse noise. When they opened the shutters there were about a dozen urchins torturing about a dozen cats, all looking up at the window for lira. It’s all about trading when it comes down to it. And the Mowachaht were pretty canny traders, too. Cook needed grass for all the livestock on board, so he sent men to cut grass. Suddenly a bloke turns up and makes it clear that they need to pay for the grass, so he pays. And the next thing you know, there’s about a dozen blokes all wanting payment and it looks like everyone owns a different blade of grass. Once Cook has spent all his money, they told him he could cut whatever he wanted.
The locals expected far more valuable items than the knick-knacks that had served Cook so well elsewhere on his travels.
CAPTAIN JAMES COOK
[T]hese people got a greater middly and variety of things from us than any other people we had
visited.
The Mowachaht also took control of trade with the British vessels. Rather than the British visiting Yuquot village, as had been the norm elsewhere in the Pacific, the locals were the ones who initiated the visits to the ships anchored in Resolution Cove.
Views on the West Coast of America. Coastal profiles engraved after drawings by John Webber and William Bligh, 1785. David Rumsey Map Collection, David Rumsey Map Centre, Stanford Libraries
The one person on board the British ships who willingly surrendered to the Mowachaht demands was the expedition’s artist, John Webber. These days it might seem like an extravagance to include a resident artist on a maritime expedition, but it’s impossible to overstate how important Webber – and the other artists who travelled with Cook on his previous voyages – were to the endeavours.
SAM NEILL
The importance of having a great artist on board was fully borne out on the first two voyages with Parkinson and Hodges. And so on the third voyage, Cook ensured he had someone really wonderful with him – that was the twenty-four-year-old John Webber who was, arguably, the most accomplished artist of all those who travelled with Cook.
There’s good reason for the saying that a picture tells a thousand words. In the eighteenth century, when literacy rates in Europe were extremely low, the best – and often the only – way to feed the public appetite for what they saw as exotic and unfamiliar was via the pictures Cook’s artists produced to illustrate the printed accounts of his voyages. John Webber was like an Associated Press photographer and New York Times journalist rolled into one. And judging by Webber’s prolific output in Nootka Sound, this place was deemed exceptionally newsworthy.
Webber’s drawings and the engravings taken after them, along with those of the artists who accompanied Cook on his previous two voyages, became what might be described as an eighteenth- and nineteenth-century image bank. They were templates that other artists copied – unapologetically and often without acknowledgement – in countless publications across the Western world. Webber’s vision of the Pacific was adopted to represent European ideas and perceptions about the region for well over a hundred years; his compositions weren’t superseded until photography became commonplace at the turn of the twentieth century. Webber’s vivid depictions of a pristine wilderness inhabited by people untouched by Western civilisation fed a rampant nostalgia for a pre-industrial time and a way of life that was perceived to be simple and unadulterated. At the same time, of course, the aforementioned Western ‘civilisation’ set in motion events and established a regime that would do its best to dismantle the traditional indigenous existence Webber had recorded.
RAY WILLIAMS
A lot of our people have been destroyed and many things were taken away from our way of life. The Department of Affairs ordered the authorities to take our children away from us to residential schools because they wanted to control our way of life. They tried to take our system away – our beliefs, our culture, our language – all because they wanted to control us. But we don’t want that. We want to control our way of life and keep doing what we’ve always done – a thousand years back – just like our ancestors did. Because we’re going to be here forever. Best to stay in this system here with our own way of life and our own beliefs. When I’m gone, my grandchildren got to remember those things.
Of course, the Mowachaht were anything but ‘simple’. And when Webber decided one day to draw a house, he was approached by a man who was ‘seemingly displeased’. The man blocked Webber’s view of the house until the artist sliced a metal button off his coat and offered it to him. Only once his coat had been relieved of all its buttons was he permitted to draw undisturbed.
It turned out the Mowachaht had something else to offer in the exchange, beyond the day-to-day necessities Cook needed to replenish and refurbish his ships: Enhydra lutris. The sea otter. It is a ridiculously cute creature that chose as its home the waters of Nootka Sound. It’s blessed with the thickest fur of any mammal on earth. The average human head has about 2200 hairs per square inch; the sea otter has up to one million. That’s sixteen times denser than mink. Unfortunately for the otters, that made them very, very desirable to purveyors of warm – and expensive – coats.
By the nineteenth century, sea otter pelts were known as ‘soft gold’ – the Chinese would pay a king’s ransom for them. Cook and his men had struck gold on the Pacific coast. When they arrived, it’s been estimated 300,000 sea otters populated North America’s west coast. Within a decade of Cook’s visit, British fur traders descended on the region – including several men who had sailed on the Resolution and Discovery and wanted to make their fortunes. But as was their way, the European fur traders had no ‘off’ button. Eighteen thousand or so otters were slaughtered each year until the species was driven to the brink of extinction in Nootka Sound by 1830.
It wasn’t just the sea otter whose fate was sealed by the arrival of Europeans who were determined to exploit the natural riches of the North Pacific.
RAY WILLIAMS
The people arrived in our land at the time that the government was formed, and they ordered First Nations people to live on a reservation to make room for the newcomers to live there. They came ashore and raided our smokehouses and made our men drunk and raped our women because they wanted to control our way of life and take our beliefs and our language away. They sent boxes of food – shipped it up here – and each family had the same kind of food . . . They wanted us to be dependent on them. Now today it’s totally different because it really messed up our system and our way here. It’s not right.
When Cook arrived at Nootka Sound, it was dotted with the long houses that were the traditional communal living spaces of the Mowachaht people. He left after a month or so, having repaired and restocked his ships. What came in his wake would disrupt Mowachaht lives forever.
SAM NEILL: How many people left speak Mowachaht?
RAY WILLIAMS: On my hand, I can probably name seven or eight people in our nation that can speak the language.
In 1789, the Spanish arrived in the Sound and built a fortress – Fort San Miguel – at the entrance of the place Cook called Friendly Cove. It was intended to protect the settlement of Santa Cruz de Nuca – the first Spanish settlement in British Columbia established to assert Spanish claims over the region. Predictably, the new settlers chose as their base the Mowachaht village of Yuquot, which was completely levelled to accommodate the fortress.
After altercations with British and American fur traders, a war between Spain and Britain was narrowly averted and the fortress abandoned in 1795 according to the terms of the Nootka Convention. As the fur trade boomed and destructive government policies in centuries to come intruded on the indigenous way of life, the impact on the Mowachaht was catastrophic.
The indigenous Alaskan population endured the same seismic shift in fortunes as experienced by the Mowachaht in Nootka Sound.
AARON LEGGETT, Dena’ina Tribe, Historian
The Russians arrived here in the 1790s. But probably the greatest impact that led to a change in the power dynamic came with the introduction of European diseases in the 1830s. There was a terrible smallpox epidemic from 1836 to 1839 where it’s estimated about half of my people died from this illness. In about three years 2500 people of a total of 5000 disappeared. This was also the time when the Russian Orthodox Church was starting to get a foothold in this area. If you went to church, you got inoculated and when you didn’t die, you attributed that to the power of Christ. Sometimes people ask why I want to speak Dena’ina. Well, this is the language that has been spoken here for over two thousand years. I say, when English has been spoken here for two thousand years, we can give up on Dena’ina. So we’ve only got nineteen hundred more years to go.
A century after Cook arrived, 90 per cent of the Mowachaht population had been wiped out.
Cook’s adventures in Nootka Sound drew to a close when he directed his two ships to weigh anchor in April 1778.
SAM NEILL: Te
ll me what you think about Captain Cook?
RAY WILLIAMS: Captain Cook was good in a way and bad in another way. He was bad because after he arrived, diseases came here – syphilis, whooping cough, chicken pox, German measles.
SAM NEILL: Were there any good things about Captain Cook?
RAY WILLIAMS: Yes, there were good things about Captain Cook because he brought nails and hammers to our people. It made it easier for our people to build our homes – the long houses. Our people used to have to pack their lumber in canoes to carry it from location to location. But Captain Cook saw that and so his idea was to make a good relationship with our people by bringing nails and hammers and saws to make it easier for our people, instead of moving the lumber each time.
*
From Nootka Sound, Cook’s ships sailed headfirst into a week-long storm. Slowly progressing north, they hit monumentally cold conditions. As they approached Alaska, it was April – northern spring. But the world was blanketed in snow and the sea blocked with ice.
To keep his British American first lieutenant, John Gore, happy, Cook agreed to explore an opening that Gore was certain was a passage, but Cook was equally certain was an enclosed body of water. However, Cook indulged him – not without reservations – and when, as Cook had expected, they found themselves hemmed in at the end of the body of water now known as Cook Inlet, Cook named it ‘Turnagain River’.
The Pacific Page 26