2. First Encounters

In March 1778, when he made landfall on the Oregon coast—referred to as Nova Albion by the British in recognition of seadog Francis Drake’s 1579 claim for his sovereign Queen Elizabeth I at Drakes Bay, California—Cook observed that the land appeared high and craggy and mostly covered with snow. There were prodigious flocks of birds. As to the weather, it was squally, with fogs and frequent showers of snow, hail and sleet, making it dangerous to approach an unknown coast where no known shelter existed. This last he would have to find (and he did) at Nootka. There he took on wood and water, and repaired spars and rigging.

Such were the conditions when he passed the Strait of Juan de Fuca’s entrance that he thought it unlikely a strait existed there. Generally speaking, therefore, mariners from the outside world avoided this coast in wintertime, leaving the Native inhabitants in quiet isolation. All the same, James Cook put Friendly Cove, or Yuquot (“Where the wind blows”), on charts for all time, and where he had sailed, others would come in his wake. Cook concluded that the local peoples derived much from sea animals, and he found evidence of whaling implements though he did not see whaling carried out. Here was a marine culture dependent on ritual replenishment. Not only was the larder filled, so to speak, but it gave the Nuu-chah-nulth a position of power in trade with non-whaling cultures along the coast.¹⁹

Cook’s arrival at Nootka in stormy late March 1778 is such a demarcation in the history of British Columbia that one is tempted to call the time before his visit “Before Cook,” or BC, and the years after AC. In the BC era the coast was an absolutely Aboriginal world; AC, the contact and interaction of societies changed the old order almost beyond recognition—and very quickly as well.

Cook’s ships and ship companies were greeted cordially, with masked performances and extensive orations. Not only was there an easy interaction of races, but there was also a mixing of technologies, for the Industrial Revolution sailed into Nootka Sound with Cook’s ships and with the trading vessels that followed in their wake. At the time of Cook’s arrival, the Indigenous peoples were related in various ways, and ownership of beaches, land and resources were delineated, defined. Forests and banks were tribal possessions, sometimes linked by close relations to hereditary chiefs. The search for power and prestige was driven by possession of the natural world’s resources.

Europeans were driven by different expectations. Cook came to the coast in search of a northern passage that would shorten the distance and sailing time from England to Asia. This potential trade route had been a grail, real or imagined, of mariners for a couple of centuries by the 1770s. A passage had been shown on Ortelius’s chart of 1570, and this may have encouraged those who advised Francis Drake to search for a “Strait of Anian.” He was more intent on piracy than exploration, however, and from Nova Albion’s Drakes Bay he sailed via the Pacific and the Moluccas, trading for spices en route to England. Before the end of the sixteenth century, Juan de Fuca, sailing for Spain, contended to have sailed where Drake failed, finding a strait at the forty-seventh parallel of latitude. Spanish reports also indicated a current from the east of Japan that would bring ships across toward the Aleutians, then into the Gulf of Alaska and south.

Twenty-five years before Cook sailed for the North Pacific, Vitus Bering and Aleksei Chirikov, for Russia, had examined the Alaska coast from about Mount St. Elias south toward the Queen Charlotte Islands (Haida Gwaii). Because their work was cursory, Cook was ordered to follow the coast northward from 45 to 65 degrees north, searching especially for a passage to Hudson Bay. Cook’s River (Cook Inlet) proved a blind alley, and passing through the Aleutian Archipelago he entered the Bering Sea, sailing north then east to appropriately named Icy Cape, the limits of his exploration before fog, high winds, drifting ice and the approaching season of darkness caused him to go south to winter quarters. From this he never returned. However, he left a vast amount of new knowledge in the form of navigational and scientific data, including significant ethnographic details of the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples of Nootka Sound and of other Natives to the north in high latitudes.

We need to expand our understanding of the state of geographical knowledge at this time, to remember how little Europeans knew of the greater northwest (of course, the Indigenous Peoples were familiar with the area all along). In 1776, the year Cook set forth from England in the British warships Resolution and Discovery in quest of a western entrance to the Northwest Passage, the Pacific flank of North America was largely terra incognita to Europeans—and the subject of much speculation. Curious outsiders held various views of what the country consisted. The River of the West was reputedly there—later located and named the Columbia River. In Cook’s time, rumours were rife of passages and straits through this mountainous western flank, and the most charming and seductive of these, already alluded to, was advertised in the 1625 publication (by Purchas in London) of Michael Lok’s interview in a bar in Venice with an intrepid though shadowy Kefalonian pilot known to the Spanish as Juan de Fuca. Fuca claimed that in 1592 he had taken part in an expedition that discovered a broad strait, between 47 and 48 degrees N latitude—remarkably where the gateway strait eventually proved to be—that led to a great inland sea.²⁰ Encouragement to find the elusive strait was provided by the allure of a 20,000 pounds sterling reward to the finder of any northern passage “for vessels by sea between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean—a North West Passage.”²¹ Cook sailed with high expectations.

As students of Northwest history, we need to be reminded of the Spanish presence that features in this dramatic age. Spain claimed Vancouver Island, the continental mainland and adjacent waters by virtue of the doctrine of discovery, and we will look at this claim later in the book. Spain pursued its interests through marine discoveries and occupation.

In 1769 the port of San Blas in New Spain (now Mexico) was established for the renewal of Spanish control of its northwestern frontier, where missions and presidios had been established. San Blas was a marine depot, a place of supply and a location to build ships and send them to sea to guard shipping. Closer than Acapulco to the China trade, San Blas was to be the beachhead and base of supply for the expanding frontier.

In 1775, naval vessels on exploration and supply sailed northward from San Blas. Bruno de Hezeta in the frigate Santiago, accompanied by the schooner Sonora under Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, anchored near Point Grenville, in what is now Washington State, on July 14. Hezeta landed and took possession for the Spanish crown. Local Natives killed a boat’s crew from the schooner.²² In succession came Bodega y Quadra’s voyage to the Gulf of Alaska, and later Alejandro Malaspina’s reconnaissance, followed by Dionisio Alcalá Galiano and Cayetano Valdéz’s 1792 voyage that came precisely at the time Captain George Vancouver was in search of a northwest passage (and determining the insularity of Vancouver Island). Spain had been at war with Britain from 1779 to 1783, and the rivalry between the two powers had not been quenched thereafter. When San Blas was made operational, it gave a clear indication that a challenge would be made to British aspirations in the Pacific. Oddly enough, when the Spanish under Esteban José Martínez established control at Nootka, they had expected to find Russians there. But John Meares was there instead, and Martínez decided to check this threat. This is the essential background to Meares’ voyages.

No name in Northwest Coast histories conjures up more conflicting perspectives than John Meares. Here’s an irony of history: Meares Island is named for a person known generally as a scallywag. The charge is partly true. Seldom is a place name associated with a person of questionable veracity—honour usually triumphs in such things! Meares Island, however, carries the name of a person who claimed all sorts of geographical discoveries subsequently shown to be false. His “alternative facts” were part of his undoing: truth caught up with him.

At face value he seemed at the time both an officer and a gentleman, as his fellow mariner Charles Duncan attests, but “stabs in the back” destroyed his professions of friendship.²³ On the other hand, as we shall see, he was not so shady as many have claimed. He delighted in literary fights with his opponents, never shying away from a spat. His principal biographer, J. Richard Nokes, entitled his lovely book Almost a Hero.²⁴ That is a worthy title. The most injudicious treatment of him comes from none other than Judge F.W. Howay, who was disinclined to place any great reliance on Meares’ writings, which is fair enough. However, Howay regarded Meares’ volume as mere propaganda to help him wring a large payment from Spain in connection with the seizure of his ships at Nootka, which is an exaggeration and, more importantly, denies the valuable descriptions of Native persons, ways of life, environments and resources.²⁵ Judge Howay was no imperial historian and did not understand London’s politics.

Many of Meares’ actions commend him to us. Not least was his careful policy to win friends among Indigenous allies on the Northwest Coast, measures designed to protect them from undesirable interests. He was ethnographically conscious, too, a great recorder of detail. He was as curious as he was fascinated by what he saw, and he possessed superb skills as an organizer.²⁶ He was, besides, a man of great initiative and enterprise, and he served his own memory well, wanting to be recognized for his achievements: in short, he was a first-rate propagandist.

He is admittedly a complex figure, and, I say, all the more attractive for that! Many of the world’s more compelling personalities are complex in their nature and outlook. You could say the same about his contemporary James Colnett, of whom more later. At Clayoquot Sound, which he got to know so well, Meares was commercially aggressive, friendly in all relations with the locals and, like James Cook before him, altruistic and humanitarian in his dealings.

Meares was not the first to sail to the Northwest Coast following Cook’s suggested plan. His enterprise has obscure origins. Likely he convinced some agency houses of the East India Company in Calcutta, trading to Canton (now Guangzhou), to finance a trial expedition. He needed provisioning and supplies from Manila, exchanged for Indian items. He faced many British rivals, some who sailed from India, others from Macau, still others from London. When rivalries presented themselves, he often made accommodations and contracts. But, by right of success, he assumed a position that spoke for others whose interests were threatened by the Spanish, and he gave the exalted appearance that he was the only begetter of trade between America and Asia. He became the national representative of the wronged party who must be vindicated.²⁷ In London, his star shone brightly over British commercial affairs on the far Pacific shores. In short, he became a crusader for national commercial interests.

At this same time, on the Indian subcontinent, the British were pressing for further commercial privileges. The Mughal empire faced decay, and local rulers could not withstand British and French military power. The Battle of Plassey in 1757 was pivotal in countering the French and giving the East India Company control over Bengal. The Company’s financial power and managerial skills expanded mightily, just at the time that Meares was drawn into the orbit of its marine activities. Around Bengal developed an Asian trading system with links to the old ports and new entrepôts of Southeast Asia. Manila in the Philippines, in Spanish hands, had links to North America by way of the annual Manila galleon. Here was a golden link across vast oceanic spaces. Tentacles of power and influence, based on trade and seaborne commerce, stretched out from Bengal, aided and abetted by the powerful and aggressive merchant traders who were seeking new markets and new fields to conquer. In a way they were part of the dramatic liberation of the old order of the East India Company, which is why Meares had so little opposition from the Company and so much support from ministers of the British government.

Meares made two expeditions to the Northwest Coast. In what he calls his “introductory voyage,” he sailed from Bengal in March 1786 in the Nootka, accompanied by the Sea Otter, under Captain Tipping. Provisions were hard to obtain, and the scheme seems slim on the ground, underfunded and undersupplied. Both vessels, to make ends meet, found themselves diverted: the Sea Otter to take on opium for Malacca and the Nootka to take the paymaster general of the King’s forces in India to Madras. In any event, they reached the high Alaskan islands in August, late for coastwise trading, and found themselves surrounded by a fleet of canoes busily whaling. Meares, hearing that rival British vessels were in the vicinity, decided to winter in Prince William Sound, spending much of it ice-bound. Many of his sailors died of scurvy and others of drink.

Captain Nathaniel Portlock of the ship King George and George Dixon of the Prince of Wales, chancing upon Meares there, charged him with poaching. Portlock, a high-handed fellow, demanded that, after restoring his crew’s health and repairing the Nootka, Meares leave the sea otter coast, sail to the Sandwich Islands and then make for Canton. This Meares was obliged to do, and with a weakened and smaller crew and a creaky vessel he made his destination. So ended Meares’ first voyage to America.²⁸ He had few difficulties with the various Alaskan Natives, but his quarrels with Portlock and Dixon had commenced, and they dogged him all his life. He had got nowhere near Nootka—or Clayoquot, for that matter—but he had learned that the Russians were well entrenched in Alaska.

Undaunted, Meares made new plans in Canton. In January 1788, with the help of British India merchants, he bought the Felice Adventurer, 230 tons, and the Iphigenia Nubiana, 200 tons, the latter to be commanded by Captain William Douglas. Both vessels were “snows”—that is, they were somewhat like brigs (two-masted square riggers), but having a square mizzen and trysail set on a separate (or gunter) mast close aft the mainmast. Felice, as she came to be known, had a crew of fifty; the Iphigenia, forty. These vessels sailed under Portuguese flags. They first called at the Philippines for supplies and trade goods, but the crew was wracked with illness. The two ships parted company in the Philippines, arriving separately on the Northwest Coast. The Iphigenia headed for Alaska as planned, taking a great circle route. They dodged typhoons in Japanese waters, which are climactically the world’s most unstable. Picking up the Kuroshio—the Black or North Pacific current—the vessels made swift passage in the vicinity of the Aleutian Islands. This same current brought Japanese sea drifters to Acapulco in 1617, the Hojunmaru to near Cape Flattery in 1834, and a fishing boat to Puget Sound in 1926; other episodes occurred of Japanese wrecks stranded and picked up in the North Pacific.²⁹ In any event, Meares reached Nootka Sound on May 11, 1788. He immediately set to work building a house for his men and stores. Half his crew were Chinese, some of whom he was to leave there with others to build a schooner, the North West America, forty-five tons, successfully launched that September.

While these projects were advancing at Yuquot, Nootka Sound, Meares raised anchor and proceeded south in the Felice. His object was Wickaninnish Sound, so named by Captain Charles Barkley of the Imperial Eagle, who had been there a year earlier, trading with Wickaninnish. Historians believe that Meares had Barkley’s logbook and charts, so we may say that he was retracing Barkley’s discoveries. Meares, rightly, did not claim he was first to bring a ship into the port off today’s Meares Island and Tofino; nevertheless, his account is rich and detailed. It is our primary reference.

Two days south of Nootka, the Felice was spotted by Wickaninnish and his people. Meares says that he was about six miles offshore when a small flotilla of canoes came out to the ship. Wickaninnish was welcomed on board. Followed by the canoes, Wickaninnish piloted the Felice safely through the reefs south of Wickaninnish Island to anchor right in front of his summer village, E-cha-chist. Meares thought it was three times as large as Yuquot in population. For seven days Meares carried out trading there, but then it blew such a gale that he decided to shift to more protected waters at the soonest possible instant. On June 20, 1788, he writes, “In the evening it moderated, when the ship got under sail, which was no sooner observed by Wicananish than he came on board, and safely piloted us into the harbor, which we named Port Cox, in honour of our friend John Henry Cox, Esq.—But not choosing to trust entirely to the skill of the chief on the occasion, the boats were sent ahead to sound, particularly on the bar.”³⁰ This proved a prudent measure. Thus it was that the Felice passed through Duffin Passage, which is bounded on the west side by Felice Island, named after the ship, and on the east by the Esowista Peninsula of Vancouver Island. In the distance Meares spied a mountain shaped like a “sugar loaf,” which is now called Lone Cone and is on the island that bears his name.³¹

In his amusing Voyages, one of the most sought after books of early voyaging in the Pacific, Meares provides an admirable first look at the great sea otter chief Wickaninnish and his world of Clayoquot Sound. His account is full of brilliant ethnographic detail. Not least among the reasons why we should look on Meares in a better light is the fact that none other than the distinguished hydrographic surveyor Captain George Henry Richards, RN, when assigning place names in the early 1860s, decided that the island should be named for the person who put it “on the map.” But readers will have to decide for themselves—and might prefer the Native name for the island, Hilhooglis.

Let’s look in greater depth at this complex fellow Meares. Commander John Meares, Royal Navy, was born in England in 1756, just as the French and British entered the last phase of their desperate struggle for Louisburg and Quebec. Some officer in the navy would have sponsored his admission into the Service, for patronage largely controlled these matters. He passed his examination for advancement to lieutenant on September 17, 1778. By this time, age twenty-two, he had been at sea, first as a volunteer first class, then able seaman and midshipman, for no fewer than six years, ten months, and one day. He was promoted to lieutenant in the navy in 1778, the same year James Cook made his visit to Nootka Sound and Alaska. Unemployed, like so many other junior officers, by the coming of peace after the war of the American Revolution, Meares took to merchant voyaging. He had commercial instincts and adventurous leanings. No moss gathered under his feet. We subsequently find him in Calcutta, forming a company to exploit the northwest America trade in sea otter, which was then the ermine of Asia.

It’s easy to dismiss John Meares, and many a historical assessor has done so. Maquinna,³² the Mowachaht chief, called him “Aita-Aita Meares” or “Liar Meares.” This has acquired broad currency by recipients contending that all Native evidence is sacrosanct. The circumstances leading to this epithet are as follows: In his attention-getting Memorial to the British government after Martínez captured Captain Colnett’s ships in 1789 (see Chapter 3), Meares maintained that he had bought land from Maquinna the year previous.³³ This was accepted by the British ministry of the day. Further, in 1792, during negotiations with the Spanish at Nootka, the mate who had been with Meares, Robert Duffin, attested to the purchase, maintaining that Maquinna had sold an entire cove to Meares. At this time, summer 1792, Maquinna enjoyed excellent relations with the Spanish—especially Bodega y Quadra, the Spanish commissioner—and when Duffin’s report was translated to him, Maquinna burst out with the words “Aita-Aita Meares.”³⁴ Other persons wanted to discredit Meares, cut him down to size: Robert Gray and Joseph Ingraham, both Boston traders, declaimed they had never heard of any transfer of land at Friendly Cove to Meares. Others may have done likewise.

Meares is one of the most controversial figures in the history of the British Empire. It has been said that he was “brave to a degree, but tricky in the extreme, his seamanship questionable, his reputed discoveries and ‘butter pat maps’ as unreliable as they were laughable.”³⁵ He was disparaging of the cartography of the French navigator Maurelle, while Captain Dixon and Mrs. Barkley both questioned his honesty and integrity, in that instance standing square with Maquinna.

Truth to tell, there are as many John Meareses as there are stories about him. He does not fit easily in a box or, from the biographer’s point of view, coffin. If you examine all the manuscripts and particularly corporate records and British government files, you will come to see him in a larger and more generous context as a formidable trader and agent of commerce, for it was he who first projected a scheme to establish what was called in his day a factory at Nootka Sound, a beachhead of commercial empire. Call him an imperialist, if you will: the world is full of such people. The point is that he wished to establish a solid means to trade with the West Coast peoples, linking Asian ports with North American consumers and traders. Yes, he got into a squabble with the Spanish, who disliked his intrusion—and the whole set off the Nootka Sound crisis and a furious row in the British Parliament. His testimony about events at Nootka in 1789, when Spanish officials seized British vessels and cargoes, became of material value to the British government in forcing Spain to concede its vaunted and well-proclaimed monopoly of trade and navigation in the Pacific Ocean. This was a monumental event.

And Meares holds a particularly important place in Clayoquot Sound history, for it was his favourite trading area. His efforts there drove a secondary wave of commercial interest, this one taken up by none other than Captain James Colnett, who was connected to Meares by commercial arrangement, and whose story is as remarkable as that of Meares. I have thought time and again how easy it is to dismiss these persons of the past; how easy it is for the armchair historians of our age to think them just fools or imperialists or racists.

Meares had a keen business sense. When he sailed from Nootka to Canton in 1788, he had stowed in his ship as many spars as could safely be carried. He knew these would fetch good prices in Canton, where timber was in high demand, especially spars suitable as masts, yards, bowsprits and the like. Meares initiated timber exports to Asian ports, no small claim to fame. In addition, before his departure, he had directed one of the ship’s carpenters to go into the woods near Nootka and select “a stick,” as they were called by sailors, for a new mast for the Iphigenia. A stout party felled and hauled out just such a piece. In addition, various new yards were acquired as replacements or spares for his ships. Meares left Vancouver Island with this lasting impression: “the woods of this part of America are capable of supplying, with these valuable materials, all the navies of Europe.”³⁶ Meares could foresee the future greatness of these forests in the evolution of shipping and trade, and the availability of spars added to Britain’s interest in Vancouver Island as a seat of British naval and commercial power.³⁷

This historian marvels at the number of sea miles Meares put under his keel in his voyages to and from the Northwest Coast. From Calcutta, Prince William Sound in Alaska seems almost half a world away. The distance from Canton or Macau to the coast was less, of course, but nonetheless a long and taxing passage. These mariners learned of the ocean currents and prevailing winds and how to exploit them. They knew methods of survival at sea, they prepared for long voyages, and they invariably depended on information gathered from others who had gone before them. Merchant traders by sea were not hydrographic surveyors along the lines of Captains Cook, Bligh or Vancouver, sticklers for scientific detail and comprehensive examination in search of solving geographical puzzles. But merchant traders such as Meares or Colnett or Duncan did add to the knowledge of the far shores. And not only did they share this information between themselves; they also made sure that those persons connected to the British Admiralty were informed of new findings. As an example, Charles Duncan’s revolutionary findings of Cape Flattery, Tatoosh Rock and Fuca’s Pillar found their way into a January 1790 official chart published by the authority of Alexander Dalrymple, the Hydrographer of the Admiralty. More specific to Clayoquot Sound is Duncan’s May 1788 sketch chart of the waters and village site of Ahousat, a copy of which survives in the British Columbia Archives.³⁸

It took me years of study and brooding to realize that the merchant mariners were not only a harbinger of commerce but also immensely important in the collection of geographical data. Put differently, I like to think that the commercial sector contributed remarkably to the little-by-little accumulations of the chart. It is not that the official naval expeditions did not do important work in this regard, but when you think of Cook only looking at Nootka Sound and, besides, missing the Strait of Juan de Fuca, supposed to exist according to armchair geographers, you realize that most of the coast, particularly the west coast of Vancouver Island, came into focus on the chart by the evidence provided by the sea otter traders. Meares and Colnett brought naval knowledge to their navigational and trading requirements, and blended this with a spirit of commercial enterprise. As I have said before, with thanks to the lead provided to me by John S. Galbraith, the dean of commercial frontiers of empire, the merchant sector was far more important in the creation of official policy than the statesmen and bureaucrats in offices in Whitehall, London, who are credited with the policy as finally laid down. We see this in Meares’ several voyages.

The global nature of trading in Meares’ time was new—that is, recent to that later part of the eighteenth century. It was characterized by a web of connection between “country merchant traders,” working in conjunction with, but outside the chartered limits of, the East India Company, and foreign agents representing Spanish, Philippine and Portuguese commercial enterprises. Supplying bullion to China and slaves to Mozambique, and acquiring sea otter pelts at Clayoquot formed part of this rapidly expanding global British reach. Macau was the outstation of the East India merchant traders and agents in eastern seas, and the place for the re-flagging of British ships. This is why Meares came to the Northwest Coast displaying a Portuguese flag.

At this time the sea otter was the world’s most valuable fur animal. It ranged the coasts of the Pacific Ocean in an almost unimaginably long arc extending from Japan’s islands to Baja California. The kelp and shellfish beds of the rocky shores of the northern Pacific Ocean were its essential habitat, and the sea otter could seldom be found in interior channels such as Puget Sound. The otter’s lustrous coat was prized, by the large Manchu upper class of North China, not for its warmth but for its beautiful appearance. “A full grown prime skin,” recounted an American trader, “which has been stretched before drying, is about five feet long, and twenty-four to thirty inches wide, covered with very fine fur, about three-fourths of an inch in length, having a rich jet black, glossy surface, and exhibiting a silver color when blown open.” This marine mammal allowed the British, Americans and others to tap the China market by a seaborne trade directly to Canton via Macau, thus competing favourably with Russian traders of northern latitudes, who were obliged to carry on a commerce with the guarded Chinese by way of the gateway fort at Kyakhta in Siberia. The Chinese accepted the sea otter pelt as a substitute for cash and precious metals, and a direct trade from the Northwest Coast to the Celestial Empire was initiated and flourished.³⁹

As it does today, trade to China depended on the vagaries of the market and the concurrence of the Chinese merchants and bureaucrats. In those days, the fan-kwei, foreign devils, were denied entry to the country. All trade had to be conducted at authorized houses on the strand, so the island of Macau, six miles south of Canton, under the Portuguese flag, became the offshore place of exchange, storage and communication. Sea otter pelts could be sold from Macau through the agency houses at Canton to the Chinese—until the market became satiated by the mid-1800s.

For 170 years after its discovery in Kamchatka in 1741 by the Bering expedition, the sea otter found itself hunted relentlessly in Aleutian waters. Profits made in the Chinese market were unbelievably high, and the Russians exploited the sea otter grounds unmercifully: they enslaved the Aleuts, pressing them into service to hunt the sea otter and fur seal. Wildlife biologist Karl Kenyon estimated that the unregulated killing of sea otters resulted in a take of half a million, a nearly unfathomable number.⁴⁰ By the end of the nineteenth century the North Pacific sea otter populations had virtually disappeared. Since 1911 the taking of sea otters in North American waters has been forbidden by international treaty.

Spain, like Russia, was advancing on the shores of these seas. In Alta California, the Spanish and Russians took many sea otter using rifles or, in the Russian case, the enslaved Aleuts using spears. In 1769 the first mission on the coast of California was set up at San Diego. San Carlos de Monterey was settled in years thereafter, and others followed—all on the same plan though varying in size—a square occupied by a Church, administrative buildings, apartments for priests, a guardhouse and places of storage. There were garrisoned presidios (such as San Francisco), or towns, and farms, vineyards and gardens. All this flourished in a warm environment where good soil and water for irrigation could be found. It would not work on the rocky and forested Northwest Coast. Accordingly, supplies had to be shipped in, though at Nootka gallant attempts were made to grow vegetables and keep goats and cattle. The missions and presidios were run by a civic administration; Nootka was run by the Spanish navy, its real naval. Acapulco, Huatulco and San Blas were places for shipbuilding and repair and provisioning.

Alta California was a province of the Viceroy of Mexico. The cross and the sword marched side by side in this first phase of Spanish empire in the coastal southwest, and secularization, though authorized in 1813, did not occur until 1833. In short, old Spain ruled in Mexico and Alta California, and this explains why Spanish officialdom kept close eyes on all that went on in distant Nootka and in Alaska. Americans did not arrive as settlers in the Sacramento River area until 1840.

Boston traders came to Alta California too, in the bullock hide and tallow trades, which were ancillary to agriculture and animal husbandry. These facts illuminate how different were the trades of the forested Northwest Coast, where (as in our case) sea otter and timber were dominant in emerging economies. The northern boundary of Alta California was 42° N, and north of that was the “Oregon Country.” It will be noted that Drake’s Nova Albion had been proclaimed at Drakes Bay, near 38° N, but in an area then unsettled and unoccupied by Imperial Spain.

These were not matters to concern Meares. More important to him was the web of British imperial trade relations as practised and enforced by the East India Company and the South Sea Company. Meares (and his backers) had read the published accounts of Captain Cook’s third voyage, which included Cook’s visit to Nootka Sound in March and April 1778. These readers comprehended, just as the voyage account had advertised, that vast profits could be realized if sea otter pelts, said to be the most beautiful of all animal skins, could be sold either through Russian access to Beijing or via the difficult arrangements through officials near Canton. Here was trans-Pacific trade in the making, a critically important chapter in Canadian history. (It is worth remembering that the modern as well as prehistoric history of Canada’s West Coast began in Asia, not in Europe.⁴¹ Indeed, a 1794 chart of the North Pacific by Lieutenant Henry Roberts, RN, shows the area immediately north of present-day Whistler, British Columbia, as “Foo sang of the Chinese Navigators about the Year 453.” When the Chinese came to the Fraser and Cariboo goldfields in the mid-1800s, they called the country “Land of Shining Mountains,” and later “Gold Mountain.”)

The reader must understand this: that Meares did not come to establish a colony but a base of operations. A “factory” was the name in those days—the sort of thing the Portuguese and Dutch had here and there in eastern seas. It was a combined house, storeroom, lockup for supplies and equipment, and, in this case, a place for ship repair or ship construction, with a ways running down to the low-water mark. There was little need to fortify it; Meares had no pretensions of being able to defend it from a Native assault or a torching in the dead of night. No, this was not a colony, but it is accurate to say that it was a beachhead of empire. The Spanish did not like it; nor did they like the British ships that arrived there—and this sparked off the Nootka Sound crisis, a story for another time and place.

Maquinna and the Mowachaht and Muchalaht peoples had no objection to Meares being in possession of this small section of beach. They were glad to have the trade. They knew, too, that if Meares came there, and came again in future years, other traders would arrive in their ships. Makúk was a good thing. They welcomed it. Empire was not thrust upon them; they invited it. Of course, they could not imagine the future. Meares and Maquinna lived in the present. Less than a hundred years later, in 1858, a distant queen decreed that this territory on the western edge of the continent would be called British Columbia. Subcomponents Vancouver Island and Meares Island, which is really a tributary to Vancouver Island, naturally followed the imperial ordering. Administratively, Meares Island was regarded as a dependency of Vancouver Island.

If the British Empire has long since passed, the hydrographic record it left us is perhaps its greatest legacy. Meares, who possessed the characteristically superb techniques of the mariners of that age, was a fine draftsman and surveyor. His noted Voyages to the North-West Coast of America, published in London in 1790, told of his passages in the ship Nootka in 1786 from faraway Bengal, India. This was one of the earliest commercial voyages to that part of the world, preceded by James Hanna in the brig Sea Otter, from Macau, in 1785.

Meares’ book also contains an account of his second voyage to the Northwest Coast, this time begun from Macau. It contains enchanting coastal views—elevations, more correctly—of the coastline in and about Nootka Sound. Meares left for posterity a fine plan of the harbour, entitled “A Sketch of Port Cox in the District of Wicannanish.” There is no doubt who possessed this district: Wickaninnish did. And on this same chart you can identify Lone Cone, lying there a little whimsically in horizontal fashion, as if slumbering, and held in embrace by numerous inlets of this wending maze of rock and water and forest.

June 1788 found Meares probing the coast south of Nootka Sound in search of sea otter pelts. On the 12th of that month, he says he “saw a high mountain over the entrance of Wicananish.” It was too late in the day to investigate. Moreover, a storm was coming on, all too familiar on this storm-lashed coast. The weather changed quickly, becoming squally and violent, and he therefore ordered the crew to close-reef the topsails. He decided to stand off from the shore in consequence of the advancing evening gale, the customary precaution when sailing off a dangerous lee shore. All that night the vessel kept well offshore, the prudent thing to do while awaiting the morrow.

At daybreak on the 13th he says, “The remarkable hill above Wicannanish appeared very plain in the form of a sugar loaf . . . As we stood in for the shore, several canoes came off to us from a cluster of islands . . . in most of which there were upwards of twenty men, of a pleasing appearance and brawny form, chiefly clothed in otter skins of great beauty.” Meares marvelled at the great speed of the canoes. He noted, too, the fact that the Native peoples had no fear of coming aboard the trading vessel. There were two chiefs in the group of canoes, Hanna and Detootche. Both he found extremely handsome. The former was perhaps age forty and, Meares said, “carried in his looks all the exterior marks of pleasantry and good humour.” The latter was young, beautiful, graceful and possessed of fine qualities of the mind. Then as now the local peoples were hospitable, friendly: “They appeared to be perfectly at ease in our society, shook every person on board by the hand, and gave us very friendly invitations to receive the hospitality of their territory. They were extremely pressing that the ship should go in among the islands.” All boded well for future good relations here. These chiefs, as others of the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples, were conscious of self-esteem and how others saw them. Indeed, the acquisition of wealth was a central feature of their existence. Formal recognition by others motivated them to higher degrees of acceptance. As one anthropologist put it, the conscious effort to improve upon one’s heritage was the sole kind of rivalry known to the Nuu-chah-nulth.⁴² This is a charming revelation, and I have thought long and hard about it. Interestingly, these chiefs came head to head, so to speak, with similarly motivated Europeans, mainly British, and American merchant trading captains.

Meares, driven by commerce—for he had to make his expedition “pay”—was in search of the great chief Wickaninnish and his residence. Like Maquinna in Nootka Sound, Wickaninnish (also spelled Wikianinnish, Wickannish, Huikainanici, Quiquinanis, and other variants in the historical record) was the dominant headman, or chief, of Clayoquot Sound.⁴³ Other chiefs acknowledged his sovereignty or were otherwise at war with him.⁴⁴ But at that time Maquinna stood ahead of him in power and wealth. There may be many reasons for this, but one of them surely is that James Cook’s visit had given Maquinna preference in terms of putting Nootka Sound literally on the map. His rising dominance paralleled the early years of the maritime fur trade. Maquinna, as we might expect, was quick to exploit this new arrangement with the outsiders, be they British, Spanish, American or other. He had his summer village at Yuquot and his winter residence at Tahsis; similarly, Wickaninnish had his summer village at Wicaninish on the island on the south side of the southeast entrance to Clayoquot Sound and his winter residence at Opitsat.

Wickaninnish, who now enters our story, was a robust and good-looking fellow, advanced a little beyond the prime of life.⁴⁵ He was an imposing figure, and Meares was to find that he lived in a state of munificence much superior to any of his neighbours. His name means “having no one in front of him in the canoe.” Like Maquinna, Wickaninnish made all arrangements for trade, and he consolidated and enriched his position, for the maritime fur trade brought him unimagined wealth, thus increasing his esteem and influence among his people. He was good at manipulating trade between and among foreign vessels. In so doing the price of furs rose, and his profits increased. Further, situated as he was in relation to inland nations, he served as an intermediary trader and prospered on that trade also, marking up the price of goods for those coming within the orbit of the new coastal trade.⁴⁶ It could be that he surpassed Maquinna in wealth and power during the period discussed in this book, and Lieutenant Peter Puget, on Captain George Vancouver’s expedition of 1792 and 1793, made bold to style Wickaninnish as “the Emperor of all the coast . . . from the Streights of Fuca to the Charlotte Islands.”⁴⁷

Wickaninnish and Maquinna were closely related. For instance, Maquinna’s eldest child, a daughter named Apānas (who in 1792 was proclaimed successor to the dominions and authority of Maquinna after his death), was betrothed to the eldest son of Wickaninnish.⁴⁸ The intermarriage of their children and kin helped reduce the internecine rivalry that was so extensive on the Northwest Coast.

To find Wickaninnish, Meares shaped a course for the outer islands, or islets, seeking a channel that would lead him into some safe anchorage. From several miles offshore, all he could see appeared as a maze of rock and water with, alas, no discernable channel. Then canoes arrived from inshore. In them were two chiefs, to whom Meares gave trinkets, a gift offering. The canoes took their leave while Meares gingerly pursued his course toward what appeared to be an opening. But still the way was uncertain. All this changed when, about noon, Wickaninnish arrived in a small fleet of canoes. He undertook to pilot Meares’ ship into his harbour. It was now an easy sail; the vessel entered and came to anchor in a roadstead Meares thought wild in appearance. Nearby was a village, and it is shown on Meares’ plan. There, upon invitation, the English mariners were treated to a feast of unimagined delicacies. Meares was dumbfounded by what he saw: heaps of fish, seal skins filled with oil, and a fire burning under a vast vat for the making of whale-flesh stew or broth, “that delicious beverage.” The house was magnificent, the roof supported by trees “of a size which would render the mast of a first-rate man of war [battle ship] diminutive”—such a lovely imperial comparison. The visitors entered through a decorated door on which was displayed a huge image. Inside stood raised platforms, and uniformly arranged human skulls festooned this royal apartment. Wickaninnish, the supreme host, made every attempt to make Meares happy, and he was successful, for these two headmen, as it were, made a compact that the one would collect skins and the other would return during the next trading season to take in the prize cargo reserved for him. This is one of the first recorded contracts of Northwest Coast trade.

Meares presented Wickaninnish with six brass-hilted swords, a pair of pistols, a musket and powder to seal the relationship. He gave a fine suit of clothes to the chief’s brother. Only then did the trading commence, and it proceeded amicably. Meares offered other items, and in return procured 150 fine sea otter skins. All had to go through Wickaninnish. Property was the key thing. Captain Cook had noted in his journal that everything had value to the Northwest Coast Natives: “there was not a blade of grass that had not a seperated owner so that I very soon emptied my pockets with purchasing, and when they found I had nothing more to give they let us cut where ever we pleased. Here I must observe that I have no where met with Indians who had such high notions of every thing the County produced being their exclusive property as these; the very wood and water we took on board they at first wanted us to pay for.”⁴⁹ The trading process also had exasperated Cook. Not only did these people place highest regard on property; they had also, as George Woodcock put it, an “almost obsessive concern over the proper inheritance of titular rights, were much more historically minded than most primitive peoples, and they maintained reliable oral traditions extending back over many generations, so that we can also assume that the way of life the early explorers encountered must have existed unchanged for at least two or three centuries preceding their arrival.”⁵⁰ There is little to quarrel with here, for cultures rarely take radical departures, and cleave to old ways as long as they can, even clinging to ancient ways of historical understanding and homiletics, or rhetorical patterns.

Meares found Wickaninnish a tough bargainer, and even says that he was probably duped by his trading practices. He does not say cheated, only duped by their cunning—that is, he was outsmarted. Perhaps he was expecting something of an easier arrangement. As well, time was on Wickaninnish’s side, for sooner or later his mariner visitors must depart, and he knew they did not want to go away empty-handed or with insufficient cargo for a profitable voyage. As to the people of Wicaninish village, Meares thought them superior in industry and activity to those of Nootka Sound.

Thus it was that this little-known place—the land of Wickaninnish, the chief, the village and the waters in and around Meares Island—was written into the European record as something different from Yuquot and Nootka Sound—a place apart, so to speak, one less travelled, of course, but one dominated by astute traders. Meares had no trouble with these people. He admired them, mixed easily with them. Others, as we will see in the next chapter, had different experiences.

Before closing this chapter, we need to make one observation of importance: Cook called Nootka Sound “King George’s Sound.” This locale, put on the chart authorized by the British Admiralty, soon became the rendezvous of shipping in these latitudes. And as a place of rendezvous, ship repair, trade, etc., it holds pride of place in coastal history, and, indeed, the history of the Pacific Ocean. However, and this is the central point, by 1792 the great collections of furs were not made there, but rather at such distant locations as Prince William Sound, Queen Charlotte Islands, Nass River and Cape Classet. In the secondary category of trade importance, as the Spaniard Moziño attested in that year, stands Clayoquot.⁵¹ In his view, Nootka only attracted foreigners because there they could supply themselves with water and firewood at no risk; it was also a place to gather news of ships coming and going, and of international affairs swirling about the Sound. Outsiders had come to “possess” Meares Island and adjacent waters as a trading realm different from Nootka, important in its own right—a destination, a collecting place and a location at which to barter away the trade goods of the world for the sea otter skin. How long would this last?