by Scott Ridley
FROM LAND, GRAY HAD NOTICED that the Columbia’s topsails were reefed and the topgallant masts that stood above them were down. It was a sure sign that no one could climb to set the upper sails. Now, as he came on board, Gray could see widespread scurvy among the men. There is no record of the conversation between Kendrick and Gray, but the health of the crews and the condition of the sloop would have been foremost. Gray undoubtedly related the skirmish at Tillamook and that his journey had taken 103 days from Masafeuro to New Albion and another month along the coast to Nootka. The Columbia had been 109 days at sea from Juan Fernándes, making about the same forward progress as the Washington over the 7,457-mile journey.
IN THE AFTERNOON, GRAY GUIDED the Columbia into Nootka Sound. Before them sat a cluster of islands where the broad bay branched into large inlets running through gorges to the north and east. Although the sound was only six or seven miles across, with a large island in the middle, the raw expanse of the mountains and sky made it seem immense.
TEN YEARS EARLIER, JAMES COOK had arrived here with the Discovery and Resolution to take on water and make repairs. A canoe ventured out from the shore, and according to legend, the natives saw some of Cook’s men who were burned red by the sun and thought they were salmon in human form. Hearing of this, the local village chief sent out a spiritual leader to learn who these people were and what they wanted. Three canoes approached Cook’s ships, with two men in one, six in another, and ten in the last. When they got close enough, a man stood and made a long oration, throwing handfuls of feathers, while others in the boats cast red dust into the air. As the leader spoke, he shook a rattle and made forceful cries. When he finished, others stood and spoke briefly. Cook’s men called back to them, but the two groups didn’t understand each other. A breeze sprang up pushing the ships nearer to shore, and more canoes came out filled with curious men and women. Among the many canoes, one appeared remarkable for the bird’s head carved on its prow and the manner in which it was painted. A distinctive man stood in it—assumed to be the chief—with many feathers hanging from his head, and his face and body wholly painted. Shaking a rattle, he harangued the men on the ships in the same way as the first speaker.
One large canoe appeared, filled with men who began singing as they paddled, evoking an ethereal mood as evening fell. The men echoed the words of a lead singer and kept rhythm by clapping their paddles on the side of the canoe. Cook’s men responded with a fife and drum and then French horns, which the Mowachaht regarded with rapt attention. Despite the oncoming chill of a cold March night, many of the canoes stayed clustered around the ship until 10 P.M. As some of them departed, they made a circuit around the ships and the men sang out halloo, on a single note, drawing it out in the middle and letting the sound die away.
The people overcame their fear the next day and trading flourished. Cook was apparently using a Spanish map of 1774–75 that had been secretly acquired and identified this bay as San Lorenzo de Rada. Cook renamed it King Georges’ Sound. Later he asked a native the name of the place. The man repeated “itchmenutka, itchmenutka,” making a sweeping gesture with his arm. Cook assumed that “nootka” was the name of the whole sound. However, the man was saying that the ships should “go around” to the main village and better harbor. Nootka was the name ultimately recorded by Cook’s mapmakers. Despite the initial language barriers and misunderstandings, trade was vigorous over the next month, especially for furs that would provide warmth as the ships sailed north. Fabulous sea otter skins were purchased for bits of metal: buttons, odd coins, and nails; anything the men could scavenge or pry loose.
When the furs were sold later at Macao, stories of magnificent profits at Nootka spread by word of mouth at first and then through a few unofficial journals written by Cook’s men. With publication of Cook’s journal in 1784, the stories were confirmed. The British government began supporting merchant expeditions to Nootka at the urging of the scientist Joseph Banks, who inherited Cook’s mantle for Pacific exploration, and Alexander Dalrymple, the hydrographer for the East India Company and the British Admiralty. The first British trading ship, the Harmon, captained by James Hanna out of Macao, arrived at Nootka in 1785. Several others followed in 1786 and 1787 captained by George Dixon, Nathaniel Portlock, and James Colnett, all former officers under James Cook. Gray undoubtedly told Kendrick that two English ships lay there now.
JUST INSIDE THE SOUND, Gray led the Columbia toward a small, snug cove on the western shore. It was only a quarter mile long and a quarter mile wide and was protected by three small rocky islets hook ing northward. As they came around the islets, Kendrick could see the masts of the two English ships that Gray had described: Meares’s small, newly built schooner, Northwest American, and his brigantine, Iphigenia Nubiana, which was about the size of the Columbia. The late afternoon sun and long shadows from pines on shore stretched darkly over the edges of the cove as Kendrick dropped anchor in clear shoal water. After nearly six months apart, Haswell noted that at five o’clock in the afternoon the Columbia came to rest “within forty yards of us.”
Thick post frames of about twenty houses stood staggered along a bank on the western shore. This was Yuquot, what Cook called “Friendly Cove,” a seasonal village and ceremonial center where people had lived for more than four thousand years. It was now deserted. They had arrived too late in the season to trade, Gray told Kendrick. The fifteen hundred Mowachaht people who lived here had recently packed their canoes with the planks from their walls and roofs and had gone to their winter camp twenty miles up one of the inlets.
A View of the Habitations in Nootka Sound by John Webber. The village of Yuquot, on the shore of what James Cook named “Friendly Cove,” was a ceremonial center that had been occupied seasonally for more than four thousand years.
The two English ships were also planning to depart. Gray likely repeated to Kendrick that Meares said it would be madness to stay for the winter; the weather was horrendous, there was an endless haunting quality to the wilderness, and the natives were cannibals. Believing the Columbia lost, Gray said, he had planned to sail to Macao for trade goods and to return to Yuquot in the spring for furs. Wood was already stacked in the Washington’s hold for the voyage.
But Gray’s dream of an independent trading mission, if that was what he truly intended, vanished as Kendrick began issuing orders. Despite whatever joy he and Haswell may have felt at reunion with the Columbia, Gray was no longer in charge. After half the voyage on their own, they were back under Kendrick’s command. There is no record that Kendrick took Gray to task for going off on his own and risking the sloop, an argument that Haswell would have recorded. More likely, Kendrick recognized that there was too much at stake for continued strife, and better ways to manage the two headstrong officers. When asked by Gray what his plans were, Kendrick kept his own counsel and said he would announce nothing until the English ships had departed.
Out of self-interest as much as generosity, Kendrick sent ship carpenters Ridler and Hemmingway, his blacksmith Jonathan Barber, and his caulkers to help the captains of the two English ships, William Douglas and Robert Funter, prepare their vessels for sea.
In the native tongue the village name Yuquot means “the wind blows from all directions,” and the Americans got a taste of it now, as rain squalls battered them for several days, hampering their work. On September 28, the weather cleared and they buried Hanse Lawton onshore. Others with advanced scurvy, possibly including Kendrick’s sons, were quickly recovering.
October 1, 1788, was the anniversary of their departure from Boston, and Kendrick staged a formal celebration. Although the festivities did not include the orations and songs shared with loved ones on their last night in the channel of Boston Harbor, the event marked how far the men had come in the months since then. They had lost time at Cape Verde preparing the ships, resolving dissent within the crew by firing Woodruff and Dr. Roberts, and they had unfortunately lost the astronomer John Nutting overboard off the coast of Brazil in an appare
nt suicide, but all the other men who had departed from Boston were safe. Green and seasoned sailors had survived a passage that few dared. Kendrick’s sons had grown and hardened. And blessed with relatively good fortune, they had unwittingly escaped capture by the Spanish and more losses to scurvy. On this far side of the world, they could now begin the mission of trade and discovery Kendrick saw before them.
At noon, with all men on deck, James Crawford, the gunner on the Columbia, lit a taper and fired thirteen guns. The Washington did the same. British captain Robert Funter answered with seven guns from a makeshift house Meares had built onshore, and the Scotsman William Douglas fired six guns from the Iphigenia. The rumbling of the cannonade rolled through the sound, pealing off the mountainsides.
After the booming tribute, Douglas and Funter and their officers came aboard the Columbia for a feast. Among the Iphigenia’s crew were a Chinese man and a striking Sandwich Islander, a young chief named Kaiana, whom Meares had brought to Macao and Douglas was supposed to return to the islands. The handsome six-foot-four-inch warrior was gathering an arsenal of guns to take back, and undoubtedly enticed the Americans to barter while he told stories of the amorous Sandwich Island women. More serious discussion among the officers focused on the fur trade and also perhaps on the Nootka natives, who had been seen only in fleeting glimpses.
The Columbia’s first mate, Joseph Ingraham, ship’s clerk Richard Howe, and the furrier Jonathan Treat were invited to go along with Douglas on the North West American to a village on the east side of the sound to purchase fish and oil and whatever other provisions they might gather. They left the cove on October 14 and heavy wind and rain followed. After a few days, Ingraham and the others returned embittered. On the other side of the island was a village where Douglas’s armed crew had gone ashore and plundered all the fish and oil they could find in the houses, leaving the families with little food for the winter. In return, the crew had left the villagers with small pieces of copper. When they came upon canoes with men fishing, they would lower a boat and chase the canoe, firing on the natives as they fled. If Douglas’s men captured them, they would demand the fish in the canoe. Now the Americans knew why the Mowachaht quickly disappeared whenever they approached.
Douglas traded cannon to Kendrick for additional provisions, dismantled the makeshift house Meares had constructed onshore, and threw in boards from the roof for the Americans to use as firewood. On Sunday, October 26, Kendrick’s longboats towed the Iphigenia and North West American out of Friendly Cove. Douglas expected Kendrick to follow them to the Sandwich Islands. Natives watching the cove from the woods noted the English departure and word quickly spread. Haswell wrote that the Iphigenia had no sooner cleared the mouth of the sound than natives appeared and “flocked to us in great numbers with fish oil and some venison and a very friendly intercourse soon commenced by which we were plenteously supplied with provisions and some skins.”
With the English ships gone, Kendrick announced his decision. He took the broad authority Joseph Barrell had granted him to make judgments based on their circumstances and began to reshape the expedition. They were three years behind the earliest trading ship to visit this cove, as well as the ships of three of Cook’s officers and the wily John Meares. The competing ships made it necessary for the Americans to create an advantage for themselves. They needed to set up trade for the spring and talk with natives about what they might know of the great “river of the west,” the fabled Northwest Passage. Moreover, they needed to develop relationships that would allow them to establish an American outpost for the longer-term “Hudson’s Bay Company” effort Joseph Barrell had envisioned. If Kendrick had ever intended to make this a single trip and circumnavigation (which is doubtful, given his interest in the deeper goals of the expedition), that intent had changed.
Unlike the glancing contact and pillaging that would doom the success of other traders, Kendrick was going to immerse himself in the native world. They would winter here. He would spend time with the Mowachaht and learn their language. He would attempt to understand their ways and beliefs. Although Meares had claimed that Maquinna, the Mowachaht chief, was a fearsome cannibal, Kendrick would open an effort to befriend him. The men, in the meantime, were to deal fairly with the people and avoid all conflict and disputes, particularly over Mowachaht women.
As events at Tillamook had demonstrated, it was unknown and potentially deadly terrain they were entering. They knew nothing of these people and their customs. Encounters were rife with taboos, misunderstanding, and temptation for the crew to be lured into clandestine meetings and secret trading. Kendrick knew he could try to protect the men and contain what they did, but he couldn’t stop them. Despite any measures and cautions he may have laid down, it is likely that hidden trading and sex with the women at Yuquot took place soon after the English left. James Cook’s surgeon, David Samwell, had noted that six days after the Discovery’s arrival, Cook’s men had made known the acts they were interested in with native women. While Mowachaht customs required women to be modest and chaste, slaves captured from other villages were offered in what Nootka men soon learned was a very lucrative trade. Although some sailors reportedly feared oral sex because the women were cannibals, officers nonetheless purchased nights with the young women. Showing a hint of evil, Samwell, a Welsh parson’s son, recorded the pleasure he took in “cleansing a naked young Woman from all Impurities in a Tub of Warm Water, as a young Confessor would to absolve a beautiful Virgin who was about to sacrifice that Name to himself.” One girl was said to have been a week or ten days on board his ship.
Those first transactions had a lasting effect. When the ships Experiment and Captain Cook arrived in 1786, they were not greeted with the same ceremony and singing Cook had encountered. Instead, the men coming aboard promptly offered women as well as furs. It was a dire exchange. Slave women sold to the trading ships would return to their villages with venereal disease. The ships then moved on to other villages. The steady enticement of trading and the subtle perniciousness of disease brought outbreaks of sickness and sterility, jeopardizing the world that the Mowachaht had inhabited for millennia.
Kendrick tried to keep his men busy. He knew he couldn’t stop them from trading whatever loose metal objects they could gather for sex or furs in clandestine meetings, so he set them on preparations for the uncertain winter ahead. He sent one group to fell trees for a storehouse and shelter on shore, and others to cut and shape new spars. Part of his plan was to rerig the Washington with a second mast, making her a brigantine like the privateer Fanny he had rebuilt and captained a decade earlier. He also set men to work on a kiln to make charcoal for the blacksmith’s forge and bricks for a new chimney for the Columbia. They would need all the heat and shelter they could get. In his journal, Haswell scoffed at Kendrick’s undertaking, but had apparently learned from Robert Gray not to openly challenge their commander.
Aware of their hostility toward him, Kendrick shared little of his plan with Gray and Haswell. He formed a general strategy and anticipated which native alliances he would need to pursue, but much was uncertain and he needed to remain flexible. This adventure into the unknown wilderness was much the same as sailing with a vague awareness of one’s latitude but not longitude. Where they were headed would take them much farther and longer, and demand much greater sacrifice, than he could have imagined.
DESPITE FREQUENT RAIN AND CONSTANT WIND, natives came almost every day to trade fish, venison, oil, and a few furs. In return, they wanted copper, but Kendrick had only precious copper sheathing for the ships. Instead, he offered them “chisels"—strips of bar iron Jonathan Barber hammered on the forge and ground sharp on one edge. Although not bright and malleable like copper, tools such as these had high value for woodworking or weapons.
The furs received in exchange had been gathered and prepared with great difficulty. Elk, bear, and other furs came from deep inland over a trail eastward into the mountains. Here in the sound, sea otters had become increasingly
skittish and more difficult to capture or kill as hunting intensified. To approach and shoot an otter with arrows as it fed on fish or shellfish at the water’s surface and then to harpoon it to keep it from sinking or diving required great skill. Hunting was best on windless days when the sound was like glass and several canoes could track the otters underwater, keeping them down until they were exhausted and could be more easily shot or driven into nets. Once on shore, the extraordinary care taken in skinning, stretching, and drying a three-to five-foot-long prime pelt was largely left to the Mowachaht women.
In stark contrast to the luxurious sea otter furs they brought, the men often appeared garish to the Americans. They rubbed their bodies all over with an oily red pigment that had a fine claylike consistency. Their faces, which were full and rounded, with high cheekbones and small dark eyes, were stained black, bright red, or white. Fish oil mixed in the paint turned rancid after a time, yielding a strong odor that may have been just as rank as the sailors', who rarely bathed.
The natives’ ornaments differed by individual. Many had their ears pierced with bone, shells, tassels, or a piece of copper. Others had their noses pierced and strung through with a thin cord. Their long black hair usually hung loose, but could at times be bunched up and tied with a thread or branch of cedar at the top of the head, or tied in multiple thin braids. For ceremonies, some would add sandy mica to the paint, which made their faces glitter. For special occasions they also wore carved visors, or masks, some with human faces and hair, which made them seem ferocious or bizarre.