APPEARANCE OF THE NATIVES--ORNAMENTS--OTTER-HUNTING--FISHING--CANOES
In point of personal appearance the people of Nootka are among the
best-looking of any of the tribes that I have seen. The men are in
general from about five feet six to five feet eight inches in height;
remarkably straight, of a good form, robust and strong, with their limbs
in general well turned and proportioned, excepting the legs and feet,
which are clumsy and ill formed, owing, no doubt, to their practice of
sitting on them, though I have seen instances in which they were very
well shaped; this defect is more particularly apparent in the women, who
are for the most part of the time within doors, and constantly sitting
while employed in their cooking and other occupations.[74] The only
instance of deformity that I saw amongst them was a man of dwarfish
stature; he was thirty years old, and but three feet three inches high;
he had, however, no other defect than his diminutive size, being well
made, and as strong and able to bear fatigue as what they were in
general.[75]
Their complexion, when freed from the paint and oil with which their
skins are generally covered, is a brown, somewhat inclining to a copper
cast. The shape of the face is oval; the features are tolerably regular,
the lips being thin and the teeth very white and even; their eyes are
black but rather small, and the nose pretty well formed, being neither
flat nor very prominent; their hair is black, long, and coarse, but they
have no beard, completely extirpating it, as well as the hair from their
bodies, Maquina being the only exception, who suffered his beard to grow
on his upper lip in the manner of mustachios, which was considered as a
mark of dignity.
As to the women, they are much whiter, many of them not being darker
than those in some of the southern parts of Europe. They are in general
very well-looking, and some quite handsome. Maquina's favourite wife in
particular, who was a Wickinninish princess, would be considered as a
beautiful woman in any country. She was uncommonly well formed, tall,
and of a majestic appearance; her skin remarkably fair for one of these
people, with considerable colour, her features handsome, and her eyes
black, soft, and languishing; her hair was very long, thick, and black,
as is that of the females in general, which is much softer than that of
the men; in this they take much pride, frequently oiling and plaiting it
carefully into two broad plaits, tying the ends with a strip of the
cloth of the country, and letting it hang down before on each side of
the face.
The women keep their garments much neater and cleaner than the men, and
are extremely modest in their deportment and dress; their mantle, or
_kutsack_, which is longer than that of the men, reaching quite to their
feet and completely enveloping them, being tied close under the chin,
and bound with a girdle of the same cloth or of sea-otter skin around
their waists; it has also loose sleeves, which reach to the elbows.
Though fond of ornamenting their persons, they are by no means so
partial to paint as the men, merely colouring their eyebrows black and
drawing a bright red stripe from each corner of the mouth towards the
ear. Their ornaments consist chiefly of ear-rings, necklaces, bracelets,
rings for the fingers and ankles, and small nose-jewels (the latter are,
however, wholly confined to the wives of the king or chiefs); these are
principally made out of copper or brass, highly polished and of various
forms and sizes; the nose-jewel is usually a small white shell[76] or
bead suspended to a thread.
The wives of the common people frequently wear for bracelets and ankle
rings strips of the country cloth or skin of the metamelth painted in
figures, and those of the king or principal chiefs, bracelets and
necklaces consisting of a number of strings of _Ife-waw_, an article
much prized by them, and which makes a very handsome appearance. This
_Ife-waw_, as they term it, is a kind of shell of a dazzling whiteness
and as smooth as ivory; it is of a cylindrical form, in a slight degree
curved, about the size of a goose quill, hollow, three inches in length
and gradually tapering to a point, which is broken off by the natives as
it is taken from the water; this they afterwards string upon threads of
bark and sell it by the fathom; it forms a kind of circulating medium
among these nations, five fathoms being considered as the price of a
slave, their most valuable species of property. It is principally
obtained from the Aitizzarts, a people living about thirty or forty
miles to the northward, who collect it from the reefs and sunken rocks
with which their coast abounds, though it is also brought in
considerable quantity from the south.[77]
Their mode of taking it has been thus described to me:--To one end of a
pole is fastened a piece of plank, in which a considerable number of
pine pegs are inserted, made sharp at the ends; above the plank, in
order to sink it, a stone or some weight is tied, and the other end of
the pole suspended to a long rope; this is let down perpendicularly by
the _Ife-waw_ fishers in those places where that substance is found,
which are usually from fifty to sixty fathoms deep. On finding the
bottom, they raise the pole up a few feet and let it fall; this they
repeat a number of times, as if sounding, when they draw it up and take
off the _Ife-waw_ which is found adhering to the points. This method of
procuring it is very laborious and fatiguing, especially as they seldom
take more than two or three of these shells at a time, and frequently
none.
Though the women, as I have said, make but little use of paint, the very
reverse is the case with the men. In decorating their heads and faces
they place their principal pride, and none of our most fashionable beaus
when preparing for a grand ball can be more particular; for I have known
Maquina, after having been employed more than an hour in painting his
face, rub the whole off, and recommence the operation anew, when it did
not entirely please him.
The manner in which they paint themselves frequently varies, according
to the occasion, but it oftener is the mere dictate of whim. The most
usual method is to paint the eyebrows black in form of a half-moon and
the face red in small squares, with the arms and legs and part of the
body red; sometimes one half of the face is painted red in squares and
the other black; at others dotted with spots of red and black instead
of squares, with a variety of other devices, such as painting one half
of the face and body red and the other black.
But a method of painting which they sometimes employed, and which they
were much more particular in, was by laying on the face a quantity of
bear's grease of about one-eighth of an inch thick; this they raised up
into ridges resembling a small bead in joiner's work with a stick
prepared for the purpose, and then painted them red, which gave the face
a very singular appearance.
On extraordinary occasions the king and principal chiefs used to strew
over their faces, after painting, a fine black shining powder procured
from some mineral, as Maquina told me it was got from the rocks. This
they call _pelpelth_,[78] and value it highly, as, in their opinion, it
serves to set off their looks to great advantage, glittering especially
in the sun like silver. This article is brought them in bags by the
_Newchemass_,[79] a very savage nation who live a long way to the north,
from whom they likewise receive a superior kind of red paint, a species
of very fine and rich ochre, which they hold in much estimation.
Notwithstanding this custom of painting themselves, they make it an
invariable practice, both in summer and winter, to bathe once a day, and
sometimes oftener; but as the paint is put on with oil, it is not much
discomposed thereby, and whenever they wish to wash it off, they repair
to some piece of fresh water and scour themselves with sand or rushes.
In dressing their heads on occasion of a festival or a visit, they are
full as particular and almost as long as in painting. The hair, after
being well oiled, is carefully gathered upon the top of the head and
secured by a piece of pine or spruce bough with the green leaves upon
it. After having it properly fixed in this manner, the king and
principal chiefs used to strew all over it the white down obtained from
a species of large brown eagle which abounds on this coast, and which
they are very particular in arranging so as not to have a single feather
out of place, occasionally wetting the hair to make it adhere. This,
together with the bough, which is sometimes of considerable size and
stuck over with feathers by means of turpentine, gives them a very
singular and grotesque appearance, which they, however, think very
becoming, and the first thing they do, on learning the arrival of
strangers, is to go and decorate themselves in this manner.
The men also wear bracelets of painted leather or copper and large
ear-rings of the latter, but the ornament on which they appear to set
the most value is the nose-jewel, if such an appellation may be given to
the wooden stick which some of them employ for this purpose. The king
and chiefs, however, wear them of a different form, being either small
pieces of polished copper or brass, of which I made many for them in
the shape of hearts and diamonds, or a twisted conical shell about half
an inch in length, of a bluish colour and very bright, which is brought
from the south. These are suspended by a small wire or string to the
hole in the gristle of the nose, which is formed in infancy by boring it
with a pin, the hole being afterwards enlarged by the repeated insertion
of wooden pegs of an increased size, until it becomes about the diameter
of a pipe-stem, though some have them of a size nearly sufficient to
admit the little finger.
The common class, who cannot readily procure the more expensive jewels
that I have mentioned, substitute for them, usually, a smooth, round
stick, some of which are of an almost incredible length, for I have seen
them projecting not less than eight or nine inches beyond the face on
each side; this is made fast or secured in its place by little wedges on
each side of it. These "sprit-sail-yard fellows," as my messmate used to
call them, when rigged out in this manner, made quite a strange show,
and it was his delight, whenever he saw one of them coming towards us
with an air of consequence proportioned to the length of his stick, to
put up his hand suddenly as he was passing him, so as to strike the
stick, in order, as he said, to brace him up sharp to the wind; this
used to make them very angry, but nothing was more remote from
Thompson's ideas than a wish to cultivate their favour.
The natives of Nootka appear to have but little inclination for the
chase, though some of them were expert marksmen, and used sometimes to
shoot ducks and geese; but the seal and the sea-otter form the
principal objects of their hunting, particularly the latter.
Of this animal, so much noted for its valuable skin, the following
description may not be uninteresting:--The sea-otter[80] is nearly five
feet in length, exclusive of the tail, which is about twelve inches, and
is very thick and broad where it joins the body, but gradually tapers to
the end, which is tipped with white. The colour of the rest is a
shining, silky black, with the exception of a broad white stripe on the
top of the head. Nothing can be more beautiful than one of these animals
when seen swimming, especially when on the look-out for any object. At
such times it raises its head quite above the surface, and the contrast
between the shining black and the white, together with its sharp ears
and a long tuft of hair rising from the middle of its forehead, which
looks like three small horns, render it quite a novel and attractive
object. They are in general very tame, and will permit a canoe or boat
to approach very near before they dive. I was told, however, that they
are become much more shy since they have been accustomed to shoot them
with muskets, than when they used only arrows.[81]
The skin is held in great estimation in China, more especially that of
the tail, the fur of which is finer and closer set than that on the
body. This is always cut off and sold separately by the natives. The
value of a skin is determined by its size, that being considered as a
prime skin which will reach, in length, from a man's chin to his feet.
The food of the sea-otter is fish, which he is very dexterous in taking,
being an excellent swimmer, with feet webbed like those of a goose. They
appear to be wholly confined to the seacoast, at least to the salt
water. They have usually three or four young at a time, but I know not
how often they breed, nor in what place they deposit their young, though
I have frequently seen them swimming around the mother when no larger
than rats. The flesh is eaten by the natives, cooked in their usual mode
by boiling, and is far preferable to that of the seal, of which they
make much account.
But if not great hunters, there are few people more expert in fishing.
Their lines are generally, made from the sinew of the whale, and are
extremely strong. For the hook, they usually make use of a straight
piece of hard wood, in the lower part of which is inserted, and well
secured with thread or whale sinew, a bit of bone made very sharp at the
point and bearded; but I used to make for them hooks from iron, which
they preferred, not only as being less liable to break, but more certain
of securing the fish. Cod, halibut, and other sea fish were not only
caught by them with hooks, but even salmon.
To take this latter fish, they practise the following method:--One
person seats himself in a small canoe, and, baiting his hook with a
sprat, which they are always careful to procure as fresh as possible,
fastens his line to the handle of the paddle; this, as he plies it in
the water, keeps the fish in constant motion, so as to give it the
appearance of life, which the salmon seeing, leaps at it and is
instantly hooked, and, by a sudden and dexterous motion of the paddle,
drawn on board. I have known some of the natives take no less than eight
or ten salmon of a morning, in this manner, and have seen from twenty to
thirty canoes at a time in Friendly Cove thus employed.
They are likewise little less skilful in taking the whale. This they
kill with a kind of javelin or harpoon thus constructed and fitted: the
barbs are formed of bone, which are sharpened on the outer side, and
hollowed within, for the purpose of forming a socket for the staff;
these are then secured firmly together with a whale sinew, the point
being fitted so as to receive a piece of mussel-shell, which is ground
to a very sharp edge, and secured in its place by means of
turpentine.[82] To this head or prong is fastened a strong line of whale
sinew about nine feet in length, to the end of which is tied a bark rope
from fifty to sixty fathoms long, having from twenty to thirty sealskin
floats or buoys attached to it at certain intervals, in order to check
the motion of the whale and obstruct his diving. In the socket of the
harpoon a staff or pole of about ten feet long, gradually tapering from
the middle to each end, is placed; this the harpooner holds in his hand,
in order to strike the whale, and immediately detaches it as soon as the
fish is struck.
The whale is considered as the king's fish, and no other person, when he
is present, is permitted to touch him until the royal harpoon has first
drawn his blood, however near he may approach; and it would be
considered almost a sacrilege for any of the common people to strike a
whale before he is killed, particularly if any of the chiefs should be
present.[83] They also kill the porpoise[84] and sea-cow[85] with
harpoons, but this inferior game is not interdicted the lower class.
With regard to their canoes, some of the handsomest to be found on the
whole coast are made at Nootka, though very fine ones are brought by the
Wickinninish and the Kla-iz-zarts, who have them more highly ornamented.
They are of all sizes, from such as are capable of holding only one
person to their largest war canoes, which will carry forty men, and are
extremely light. Of these, the largest of any that I ever saw was one
belonging to Maquina, which I measured, and found to be forty-two feet
six inches in length at the bottom, and forty-six feet from stem to
stern. These are made of pine,[86] hollowed out from a tree with their
chisels solely, which are about three inches broad and six in length,
and set into a handle of very hard wood.
This instrument was formerly made of flint, or some hard stone ground
down to as sharp an edge as possible, but since they have learned the
use of iron, they have almost all of them of that metal. Instead of a
mallet for striking this chisel, they make use of a smooth round stone,
which they hold in the palm of the hand. With this same awkward
instrument they not only excavate their canoes and trays and smooth
their planks, but cut down such trees as they want, either for building,
fuel, or other purposes, a labour which is mostly done by their slaves.
The felling of trees, as practised by them, is a slow and most tedious
process, three of them being generally from two to three days in cutting
down a large one; yet so attached were they to their own method, that
notwithstanding they saw Thompson frequently, with one of our axes, of
which there was a number saved, fell a tree in less time than they
could have gone round it with their chisels, still they could not be
persuaded to make use of them.
[Illustration: INDIAN CANOES, VICTORIA, V. I. (TEMP. 1863).]
After hollowing out their canoes, which they do very neatly, they
fashion the outside, and slightly burn it, for the purpose of removing
any splinters or small points that might obstruct its passage through
the water, after which they rub it over thoroughly with rushes or coarse
mats, in order to smooth it, which not only renders it almost as smooth
as glass, but forms a better security for it from the weather; this
operation of burning and rubbing down the bottoms of their canoes is
practised as often as they acquire any considerable degree of roughness
from use. The outside by this means becomes quite black, and to complete
their work they paint the inside of a bright red, with ochre or some
other similar substance; the prows and sterns are almost always
ornamented with figures of ducks or some other kind of bird, the former
being so fashioned as to represent the head, and the latter the tail;
these are separate pieces from the canoe, and are fastened to it with
small flexible twigs or bark cord.
Some of these canoes, particularly those employed in whaling, which will
hold about ten men, are ornamented within about two inches below the
gunwale with two parallel lines on each side of very small white shells,
running fore and aft, which has a very pretty effect. Their war canoes
have no ornament of this kind, but are painted on the outside with
figures in white chalk, representing eagles, whales, human heads, etc.
They are very dexterous in the use of their paddles, which are very
neatly wrought, and are five feet long, with a short handle and a blade
seven inches broad in the middle, tapering to a sharp point. With these
they will make a canoe skim very swiftly on the water, with scarcely any
noise, while they keep time to the stroke of the paddle with their
songs.
FOOTNOTES:
[74] Yet they are by no means weak in the legs, a coast Indian being
capable of long travel in the bush without tiring. The Hydahs of Queen
Charlotte Island, and the Tlinkets and Kaloshes of the neighbouring
mainland, are splendid specimens of men, tall, comparatively fair,
large-headed, regularly-featured, and endowed with courage and
intelligence, though their morals leave much to be desired. All the
canoe Indians are very strong-handed, owing to the constant use of the
paddle. In a scuffle with one of them, it does not do to let him get a
grip; better prevent him from coming to close quarters, for in this case
the white man has little chance. The Klahoquahts are the finest-looking
of the Vancouver west coast tribes.
[75] I have rarely seen a corpulent Indian, and not one idiot, or a
cripple so deformed that he was incapable of earning his livelihood. It
is seldom that they are deformed from birth, and when they are, they
generally disappear, so as not to be a burden on the tribe. As a
facetious old savage remarked to me, when discussing that curious
immunity from helplessness in his tribe, "The climate doesn't agree with
them." The brother of Quisto, chief of the Pachenahts in 1865 (San Juan
Harbour), was much deformed in the legs, but he was an excellent
canoeman.
[76] Commonly the flattish nacreous portion of the Abelone, or Ear-shell
(_Haliotis Kamschatkiana_), known as _Apats-em_, which is pawned or sold
in times of scarcity. By constant removal and insertion, the septum of
the nose, through which it is fastened, becomes in time so large that it
will admit almost any kind of moderately-sized ornament. Feathers are
frequently inserted, and more than once I have seen an Indian, clad in a
blanket alone, denude himself of his single garment to hold biscuits or
other goods, and dispose of his pipe by sticking it in the hole through
his nasal septum, which, had times been better, would have been occupied
with a piece of shell, either square, oblong, or of a horseshoe shape.
[77] This is the well-known _Dentalium pretiosum_, or Tooth-shell,
generally known as the _Hioqua_. It is procured chiefly from Cape
Flattery, on the southern side of Juan de Fuca Strait, and from Koskeemo
Sound on the north. The "Aitizzarts" (Ayhuttisahts) probably obtained it
by barter with the tribes on that part of the coast. It is not much used
nowadays.--_The Peoples of the World_, vol. i. p. 60.
[78] This is powdered mica of the black variety. It is obtained in
various places, from veins exposed, for the most part in the beds of
streams.
[79] These seem to be the Nimpkish, from the Nimpkish River, south of
Fort Rupert, on the eastern shore of Vancouver Island, who still
frequently cross the island by a chain of rivers and lakes to Nootka
Sound. This is confirmed by Jewitt writing in another place that they
lived somewhat in the interior. It is doubtful whether he knew that the
country in which he lived was an island. At all events, he never
mentions it by that name. This route I have described in "Das Innere der
Vancouver Insel" (Petermann, _Geographische Mittheilungen_, 1869).
[80] _Enhydra lutris_, or "Quiaotluck," now so rapidly decreasing in
numbers that it can scarcely escape the fate of Steller's Rhytina.
[81] For an account of the habits and history of these valued animals,
the reader is referred to _The Countries of the World_, vol. i. p. 304.
[82] The harpoon is at present a little different in construction. Pine
resin, not "turpentine," is used for the purpose described, and the tips
of deers' horns are utilised for the barbs. The most remarkable fact
about the west coast of Vancouver Island whaling is its use of inflated
sealskins to impede the motion of the animal through the water. This is
an Eskimo contrivance in use by the Alaskans and other extreme northern
tribes, from whom the West Vancouverians seem to have borrowed it. In
Sproat's _Scenes and Studies of Savage Life_, p. 226, there is an
excellent description of whaling as practised in that part of Vancouver
Island. The species pursued is usually finbacks, though a "black fish"
with good whalebone is occasionally captured.
[83] The honour of using the harpoon is a hereditary privilege, enjoyed
by only a few men in a tribe, and previous to the whaling season the
crews have to practise all manner of ascetic practices in order to
ensure good luck in the venture.
[84] This porpoise Dr. Gray considered, after examining a skull which I
brought to the British Museum in 1866, to differ little, if at all, from
the _Phocæna communis_ of the Atlantic; but Dr. (afterwards Sir) W. H.
Flower (_List of the Specimens of Cetacea_, etc., 1885, p. 16) seems to
be of a different opinion.
[85] This "sea-cow," of which Meares also speaks as an animal hunted by
the Nootka people, though rarely seen so far south, must, one might
think, be another name for the seal or "sea-calf," were not the latter
expressly referred to by name. The sea-cow, dugong, or manatee is not
found in these seas, and the _Rhytina Stelleri_, once so abundant on
Behring Island in Behring Strait, is generally considered to have been
exterminated in the interval between 1741-1768. This, however, is hardly
in accordance with fact, for, as evidence collected by Nordenskjöld
proves, they were occasionally killed in 1780, while one was seen as
late as 1854. It is therefore by no means improbable that in 1803 a few
stragglers were still waiting their end on the shores of Vancouver
Island. The sea-lion (_Eumetopias Stelleri_) is a seal also verging on
extinction, the _Otaria ursinus_ being now the fur seal of commerce (and
politics) in that part of the North Pacific.
[86] A species of cedar (_Thuja_) is the wood used.