The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest (11 page)

According to the native ideal common among most Coast Indian tribes, The Trees and The Rocks were thought to be as endowed with spirit and beauty as The People. When British civilization, then less than 1,800 years old (dating to the point of the early Roman invasions) landed on these shores in the form of fur-trading mariners, they met a people who had been building wood-framed homes, conducting religious ceremonies rich in theater and myth, creating artwork as startling as twentieth-century Cubism, and feeding themselves quite nicely, for nearly ten thousand years.

Before the arrival of Europeans, more than eighty thousand people lived in the land now called British Columbia, perhaps half of them on the coast of Vancouver Island in permanent villages enriched by a prosperous fishing industry. They dried and smoked enough fish to live comfortably through the winters, supplementing their diet with berries, seaweed cakes, roots. Cedar, the mighty Western Red with its waterproof, mildew-resistant qualities, was the source of all life, hollowed into forty-foot war canoes, shredded and twined into dresses, hats, baskets, mats and baby diapers. Their houses, most of which were much bigger than the typical home found on the island today, were built of planks cut from the big cedars. The tribes of the northern part of the island used more than 110 species of plants for food, tools, twine and art. They also traded in slaves and waged short, vicious wars with other native peoples, and killed the second of newborn twins.

“The vices of these savages are very few when compared to ours,” wrote José Mariano Mozino, a Mexican-born botanist who visited the island more than two hundred years ago. “One does not see here greed for another man’s wealth, because articles of prime necessity are very few and all are common. Hunger obliges no one to rob on the highways, or to resort to piracy.” The natural bounty was so great that the natives actually fought some wars with food, trying to outdo one another with culinary gifts at their potlatches.

When Captain James Cook of the Royal Navy arrived in 1778, his men were sick with scurvy, having found little along the Northwest Coast to
add to their diet of hardtack and pickled pork. The natives taught them how to brew spruce beer and catch salmon. What gave the Salish such a bad reputation was one particular feast with Cook’s men, an imaginative meal that didn’t go over well and may have doomed the tribes for centuries afterward. Cook’s two British ships were looking for the Northwest Passage, that great geographic myth of four centuries, and they were in dire need of repair when they anchored in Nootka Sound on the western shore of the island in the spring of 1778. They tied up at a place Cook called Friendly Cove, known to the natives as
Yuquot
, meaning “Place-That-Is-Hit-by-Winds-from-All-Directions.”

The sketch of Yuquot left behind by John Webber, Cook’s official artist, shows several big houses perched up on the shore, half-clad natives tending their canoes, and the well-dressed emissaries of Her Majesty, Cook’s men, greeting them with flag and handshake. A good enough start. Cook proceeded to repair the
Discovery
and the
Resolution
and to inquire about the local stock of animal pelts. From a book published in 1783,
A Journal of Captain Cook’s Last Voyage
, by John Ledyard, one of Cook’s officers, we pick up what happened next:

These Americans are rather above the middle stature, copper-coloured and of an athlete’s make. We saw no sign of religion or worship among them, and if they sacrifice it is to the God of Liberty. Like all uncivilized men they are hospitable, and the first boat that visited us in the Cove brought us what no doubt they thought the greatest possible regalia, and offered us to eat; this was a human arm roasted. I have heard it remarked that human flesh is the most delicious, and therefore tasted a bit, and so did many others.

Cook tried to dissuade the natives from this beastly custom, or so he said. There is some dispute over whether the roasted human arms were a joke, a warning to scare the big white ships away, or a legitimate snack of high nutrient value. In any event, the natives of Vancouver Island, now widely recognized as one of the most advanced of all aboriginal North American peoples, were tagged as cannibals. A few years later, an American trading-ship captain said of them: “A more hideous set of beings, in the form of men and women, I had never before seen.”

Cook himself, of course, was hardly a paradigm of civility. With Cook was Captain William Bligh, and the two leaders made a spectacle of flogging their men, regularly and with great relish. Long before Bligh
became famous for uprisings against him, his men nearly mutinied on the voyage to the Northwest Coast. His legacy here is a small tuft of land off the west shore of Vancouver Island—wind-flogged Bligh Island. Bligh’s name will continue to be cursed into the next century: a reef in Alaska’s Prince William Sound, also named for Cook’s chief officer, snagged an Exxon tanker on March 24, 1989, causing the worst oil spill ever in North American waters.

For the Northwest, Cook’s voyage was the most consequential of all the early European trips. He was not only the first British subject to set foot on what would become British Columbia—a minor accomplishment, considering where else he’d been—but also the first non-Indian to realize a substantial profit from a resource of the Pacific Northwest. While charting the west side of the island, after missing both the mouth of the Columbia and the entrance to Puget Sound, Cook purchased 1,500 beaver skins. He also picked up sea otter furs, which fetched $100 apiece in China, the equivalent of two years’ pay for the average seaman. To the mandarins of Canton, the sea otter was a cloak of gold. Easily killed as they played while swimming on their backs, with a two-inch-thick hide, the otter wore the most valuable coat of fur in history. If you took all the hair on the average human’s head and compressed it down to one square inch, you would have the thickness of the sea otter’s pelt. In the trade marts of the Pacific Rim, one human slave was generally worth two sea otter pelts. When Robert Gray of Boston built a schooner in Nootka Sound in 1792, he sold it to the Spanish for seventy-five otter furs.

Cook, whose statue is second in prominence only to Queen Victoria’s in the capital city’s inner harbor, was killed by natives while wading offshore in Hawaii, where the British went for cheap labor and winter sun. When his ships returned to England in 1780, word of the valuable fur trade spread; the rush was on, and the end was near for the native culture. Captain John Meares arrived in May of 1788, loaded with fifty Chinese laborers who built a trading post at Friendly Cove. The next year the post was taken over by the Spanish, who claimed that most of Northwest America had been given them by the Pope three hundred years earlier. England and Spain nearly went to war over the seizure at Friendly Cove, which gives some idea of how much sea otters meant to the treasuries of both countries. The dispute was settled by treaty awarding the property to England, for a considerable sum. Captain George Vancouver was sent out to reclaim the land and resume the search for the Northwest Passage.

He didn’t find the River of the West, but Vancouver discovered that
this sylvan slice of property was an island, not the mainland coast. In the spirit of cooperation, he named it for himself and for the Spanish explorer Señor Don Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra (although Don Juan’s name was quickly dropped).

Between 1785 and 1825, about 450 European ships arrived on the wild shores of the island to trade; more than a quarter-million sea otter pelts were taken from the Northwest Coast to China. Many English sailors and many English merchants got very rich; the Coast Indians lost their way of life, corrupted and diseased by the trading tools of the Empire, especially Nicholson’s London Dry Gin—“bottled and guaranteed by the Hudson’s Bay Company.” By 1885, two-thirds of British Columbia’s native population had disappeared.

There were, of course, a few rebellions. Chief Manquinna of Nootka Sound attacked the
Boston
in 1803, killing all but two men, whom he took as slaves. The ill-fated
Tonquin
, piloted by the ill-tempered Captain Thorn of Boston, was burned in 1811 and all his men were murdered. The fierce Haidas of the Queen Charlotte Islands, with their huge war canoes which gave them a raiding range of six hundred miles, fought battles until the late 1880s and even skirmished into the twentieth century. Unlike the Yanks, the leaders of the Hudson’s Bay Company—originally chartered by King Charles in 1660—never waged war against the native people. But then, after a while, they didn’t have to: smallpox and alcohol did to the majority of traditional inhabitants what a few British naval officers never could.

When the Hudson’s Bay Company scouts went looking for a northern foothold to hold off the Yankee wagon train invasion of the Oregon Country in the 1840s, they found only a handful of native women gathering camas bulbs on the rich plateau where Victoria now sits. The setting, at the southern tip of the island in a protected harbor under the Blue Hole, close to the mouth of the Fraser River, and close to the Pacific and Puget Sound, seemed a perfect place for the Western World’s oldest monopoly to dig in. Even before a single log was cut for the fort, one of the company’s Gentlemen Adventurers called the setting “An exact copy of English park scenery.” When the island was declared the British Colony of Vancouver Island, the boys in the fur trade were rewarded with complete government control, for a nominal fee of seven shillings a year—the first time the Gentlemen had ever been given actual governing powers. They promptly raised the Union Jack and the flag of the Gentlemen’s Company, an emblem with two elk holding a cross above the Latin motto
pro pelle cutem
. Roughly translated—“You give your skin to get a skin.”

Victoria was to be no ordinary colony. No Irish castoffs, no hardscrabble exiles from other parts of the Empire, no Yankee religious fanatics, none of the indentured servants who toiled in the tobacco plantations of the British colonial South or the chained convicts sent to the penal colony of Australia. The company wanted only gentlemen to settle the toe of the Empire—generic gentlemen who could become Hudson’s Bay Company Gentlemen. When the settlement was platted, one of the first things company factor James Douglas did was to set aside the stunning sweep of land on the bluff above the strait as Beacon Hill Park. In contrast to the founding of American towns, growth was controlled and orderly; speculation was discouraged. They set up four large farms as part of the Puget Sound Agricultural Cooperative; before long the Gentlemen were growing enough food to sell to the Russians up north and the Yanks in the south. Furs moved in and out of the post, although the sea otter, slow to breed and bearing only a single pup every two years, was fast disappearing.

By the time Winthrop arrived in 1853, the then ten-year-old fort consisted of seventy-nine dwellings, twelve stores, a library and 240 settlers. Winthrop didn’t stay long; he was in a hurry to get back south and catch a caravan to the East. The Yankee traveler did not comment on what the Gentlemen had done with their settlement. The natural setting, however, drew a brief, favorable note from him: “The arm of the sea upon which Victoria is, looks beautiful in the sunny afternoon, with the smoke just obscuring the rocky, barren shores and veiling the white houses of the village.” The weather, he said, was “like a New England October … warm and cloudless.”

In Victoria today there is but one building left intact from the time of Winthrop’s visit—Helmcken House. Cloaked in cedar shingles, it is surrounded by tall oaks and even taller totem poles—a blend of two arborist traditions, serene in its setting, an island of the past in the bustle of modern Victoria. I walk among the totems and oak trees, then sit on the porch of Helmcken House, seeking the distant scent of that Boston man from the last century. I find that we share an American distaste for royalty—the idea of glorifying someone whose most significant achievement is surviving the act of birth. Winthrop had a practical Yankee’s loathing for the English, their formality and their trappings of class. What particularly annoyed him was all those English names on top of the high mountains of the Northwest: Baker, Rainier, St. Helens, Hood. Who were these people? Civil servants, British bureaucrats, hacks and bean-counters who might turn down the next voyage of discovery if not sufficiently
flattered by the royal cartographer. The landmarks belong to their native names, Winthrop argued, not the “cockney misnomers” of “somebody and nobody” who had never seen the place.

The Gentlemen’s idyll at Victoria lasted barely a generation; gold was discovered in the lower Fraser River valley a few years after Winthrop left. And though the Hudson’s Bay Company at first tried to control who could go into the new mines, the dam quickly burst. More than thirty thousand prospectors, most of them non-tea-drinking, non-Queen-worshipping and non-tweed-wearing, came through the genteel island fort in 1858 on their way to the goldfields of the British Columbian mainland. Perhaps Victoria could have become a prettier version of London, but the railroad never crossed the Strait of Georgia. Instead, Vancouver was established as the road’s western terminus, leaving Victoria cut off from the trends and action of the continent. By the start of the twentieth century, the city’s influence had peaked. Though Victoria remained the capital, Vancouver soon passed it in population. There were a few last efforts to keep the British influence. The province was now, of course, a part of the Dominion of Canada, but by 1903 some government leaders were seeking more English immigrants to offset an influx of Russians. Two large horse-drawn exhibition vans toured depressed districts of rural England, looking for emigrants—this time, however, they didn’t have to be gentlemen to qualify.

By 1917, Raymond Chandler found the toe of the Empire “dullish, as an English town would be on a Sunday, everything shut up, churchy atmosphere and so on.”

Victoria will never give up England; by a quirk of history, the town’s fate is now tied to maintaining the image of its past. With its huge Parliament Building lit up at night, the horse-drawn tallyhos, the double-decker buses, the city looks like a kind of English Disneyland. The ancient Empress Hotel buzzes with tourists. I see a man videotaping the hotel’s rose garden, concentrating on one blossom. Inside the Empress, there is a long waiting list for the chance to pay twelve dollars and sip high tea, considered the quintessential Victorian experience.