First Invaders: The Literary Origins of British Columbia

By Ronsdale Press

The names Cook and Quadra ring a bell for most of us, as do Bering and Vancouver, but how much do we know about the Greek-born navigator, Juan de Fuca or the Machiavelli of the maritime fur trade, John Meares? British Columbia's earliest authors and explorers are skilfully introduced, for the first time collectively, by Alan Twigg. This is a compelling account of the characters, events and intrigues that comprised British Columbia's earliest literary history prior to 1800.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Ronsdale Press
• Release date: Sep 1, 2004
• ISBN: 9781553800866

Book preview

FIRST INVADERS

OTHER BOOKS BY THE SAME AUTHOR

Intensive Care: A Memoir (Anvil Press, 2002)

Cuba: A Concise History for Travelers

(Penguin Books, 2002; Bluefield Books, 2000)

Twigg’s Directory of 1001 BC Writers (Crown Publications, 1992)

Strong Voices: Conversations with 50 Canadian Writers (Harbour, 1988)

Vander Zalm, From Immigrant to Premier (Harbour, 1986)

Vancouver and Its Writers (Harbour, 1986)

Hubert Evans: The First Ninety-Three Years (Harbour, 1985)

For Openers: Conversations with 24 Canadian Writers (Harbour, 1981)

FIRST

INVADERS

The Literary Origins of British Columbia

ALAN TWIGG

FIRST INVADERS

Copyright © 2004 Alan Twigg

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a

retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without prior written

permission of the publisher, or, in Canada, in the case of photocopying or other

reprographic copying, a license from Access Copyright (the Canadian Copyright

Licensing Agency).

RONSDALE PRESS

3350 West 21st Avenue

Vancouver, B.C., Canada V6S 1G7

www.ronsdalepress.com

Typesetting: Get To The Point Graphics, in New Baskerville 11 pt on 14.1

Cover Design: David Lester & Alan Twigg

Paper: Ancient Forest Friendly Rolland Enviro – 100% post-consumer

waste, totally chlorine-free and acid-free

Ronsdale Press wishes to thank the Canada Council for the Arts, the Government of

Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (BPIDP), and

the Province of British Columbia through the British Columbia Arts Council for their

support of its publishing program.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Twigg, Alan, 1952-

First invaders : the literary origins of British Columbia / Alan Twigg.

Includes bibliographical references.

ISBN 1-55380-018-4

1. British Columbia—Discovery and exploration—Early works to 1800.

2. Explorers—British Columbia—Biography—Early works to 1800.

3. British Columbia—History—Sources. I. Title.

FC3821.T84 2004      971.1′01      C2004-904954-2

At Ronsdale Press we are committed to protecting the environment. To this end we

are working with Markets Initiative (www.oldgrowthfree.com) and printers to phase

out our use of paper produced from ancient forests. This book is one step towards

that goal.

Printed in Canada by AGMV Marquis

To Ruby Twigg,

ninety-nine years young,

still fetching her firewood

"One morning, very early, some of the men got up to go

hunting, and as they went outside the houses and looked over

the water, they saw something that they could not

understand…. They ran along the houses, calling to the rest

of the tribe, ‘Come out and see what is in the water. It must be

a new island that has come in the night.’"

—TSTASS-AYA (JENNY WYSE)

AS TOLD TO BERYL CRYER, CIRCA 1930;

NANAIMO MUSEUM

Petroglyph depicts arrival of a European

ship near Nanaimo.

"The Indians didn’t know what on earth it was when the ship

came into the harbour…so the Chief, Chief Maquinna, he sent

out his warriors…. So they went out to the ship and they

thought it was a fish come alive into people…. So they went

ashore and they told the big Chief: ‘You know what we saw?

They’ve got white skin. But we’re pretty sure that those people

on the floating thing, there, that they must have been fish.’"

—WINIFRED DAVID

RECOUNTING NUU-CHAH-NULTH VERSION OF CAPTAIN COOK’S ARRIVAL

FROM NU-TKA: CAPTAIN COOK AND THE SPANISH EXPLORERS

ON THE COAST, SOUND HERITAGE, 1978

CONTENTS

I

PRECURSORS

Jonathan Swift

Hui Shen

Juan de Fuca

Francis Drake

Richard Hakluyt

Samuel Purchas

Vitus Bering

Sven Waxell

Georg Wilhelm Steller

Gerhard Müller

Aleksei Chirikov

Arthur Dobbs

Denis Diderot

II

SPANISH

Juan Pérez

Juan Crespi

Tomás de la Peña y Saravia

Bruno de Hezeta

Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra

Francisco Mourelle

José Mariano Moziño

Alejandro Malaspina

Tomás de Suría

Dionisio Alcalá Galiano

Manuel Quimper

Jacinto Caamaño

José Espinosa y Tello

III

FRENCH

Jean-François de La Pérouse

Etienne Marchand

François Péron

IV

COOK & CREW

James Cook

John Rickman

Heinrich Zimmerman

William Ellis

John Ledyard

James King

James Burney

David Samwell

John Webber

William Bayly

James Trevenen

George Gilbert

V

TRADERS

James Strange

Alexander Walker

John MacKay

Frances Barkley

John Meares

George Dixon

Nathaniel Portlock

John Nicol

William Beresford

James Colnett

Esteban José Martínez (not a trader)

Andrew Bracey Taylor

VI

AMERICANS

Robert Gray

Joseph Ingraham

Robert Haswell

John Bartlett

Ebenezer Johnson

John Boit

Charles Bishop

VII

MAPMAKERS

George Vancouver

Archibald Menzies

William Broughton

Edward Bell

Alexander Mackenzie

This is the earliest depiction of contact with Europeans in British Columbia, drawn by John Webber in 1778. The Mowachaht tried to direct Captain James Cook towards Yuquot by shouting go around, go around, but Cook misinterpreted their words and gestures, giving rise to the word Nootka.

FOREWORD

I pressed on, taking fresh trouble for granted.

—CAPTAIN BODEGA Y QUADRA

The first European to reside in British Columbia was the Irish soldier John MacKay who voluntarily wintered at Tahsis in 1786—seventeen years prior to the capture of John Jewitt, the American blacksmith who survived the massacre of the crew of the Boston to become known as the white slave of the Nootka.

The first European woman to visit B.C. was eighteen-year-old newlywed Frances Barkley who circumnavigated the globe with her husband, making a lasting impression at Nootka Sound with her long red hair in 1787.

MacKay and Barkley were two of approximately 50 people who recorded their experiences as some of the first invaders to the Pacific Northwest prior to 1800. These commercially-minded or imperialistic Europeans and Americans were not invaders in the military sense, but their visits were invasive in terms of introducing radically new technologies, customs, foodstuffs, diseases and religion.

The surveyor Vancouver. The scientists Moziño and Menzies. The gentlemanly Bodega y Quadra. The persecuted scholar Malaspina. La Pérouse, the first Frenchman in B.C. Their adventures all generated publications that now collectively represent the literary beginnings of British Columbia.

The British Admiralty instructed 18th-century sea captains to confiscate all personal journals at the end of exploratory voyages. Sailors were likewise prohibited from divulging where they had gone until permission was given to do so. Four of Captain James Cook’s crew nonetheless beat England’s most celebrated mariner to the literary punch.

John Rickman published his travelogue anonymously in 1781; Heinrich Zimmerman published in German in 1781; William Ellis published in 1782; and the remarkable John Ledyard—the Marco Polo of the United States—published his account of visiting Nootka Sound in 1783.

Cook’s posthumous chronicle appeared to much acclaim in 1784. It confirmed the murdered sea captain’s reputation as the world’s foremost navigator and suggested that Britannia ruled the North Pacific waves. In fact, Spaniards had reached British Columbia ahead of Cook—in 1774—when Majorcan sea captain Juan Pérez opened the world’s last unmapped temperate zone to exploration and European settlement.

Pérez contacted the Haida at the north end of the Queen Charlotte Islands on July 18, 1774, and his pilot produced the first crude map of the B.C. coastline to be drawn from observation.

Whereas Captains Cook and Vancouver came, saw, and published, Spain and Russia didn’t broadcast their voyages. Their secrecy partially accounts for the imbalance in general knowledge of the first European approaches to B.C. to this day.

Documents are still being brought forth from Spanish, Russian and Chinese archives for translation. Meanwhile the stories of how and why scurvy-ridden sailors reached the North Pacific in the 1700s make for a fascinating hodge-podge of fact, fantasy and vainglorious quests.

In the Age of Reason, philosophers, scholars and scientists sought to dispel myths and ignorance; self-interested lobbyists such as Arthur Dobbs, Alexander Dalrymple and Joseph Banks simultaneously encouraged irrational enterprises based on speculative maps. It proved to be a fatal mix.

The Strait of Anian and the Northwest Passage were just two of the maritime philosopher’s stones. After Francis Drake dubbed the California coast Nova Albion, an opportunist named Lorenzo Ferrer Moldanado reported in 1588 that he had sailed from Iceland, across the top of Canada via Davis Strait, to the land of Quivara in the Pacific. Other expeditions searched for Gama Land (supposedly seen by the Portuguese navigator Joaõ de Gama in 1590), Company Land (supposedly seen by an unnamed Dutch captain), and the land of Jesso (also depicted on numerous maps).

Somewhere north of Nova Albion, mariners hoped to enter the Sea of the West that Juan de Fuca had supposedly sailed within for 20 days. But most sailors were rewarded only with paralyzing cold, malnutrition, disease, harsh discipline, storms or death. The rudimentary memoirs of simple seamen such as John Nicol and Ebenezer Johnson make for fascinating but sobering accounts.

One of the most obscure literary connections to B.C. arose from the visit of the French scientist François Péron. The more I uncovered the writings of such men—and Frances Barkley—the more I wished I had known about them earlier, particularly the Spanish scientist Moziño and the American adventurer Ledyard.

In school I was never taught that Juan de Fuca was a Greek named Valerianos. If I ever had a lesson about the Nootka Incident, it didn’t register. Until three years ago, I knew precious little about the most fascinating 18th-century character of them all, Chief Maquinna, or the Machiavelli of the maritime fur trade, John Meares. (The modern Mowachaht of Nootka Sound contend that Meares intentionally gave their ancestors blankets infected with disease.)

First Invaders culminates with Alexander Mackenzie’s overland trek to the Pacific Ocean in 1793. It was a feat of stamina that marks the beginning of the mainland fur trade and the close of the first chapter of British Columbia’s literary origins.

By literary origins I mean words on paper. Petroglyphs and oral storytelling have resulted in many wonderful books to date— from the anthropological probings of Franz Boas to the sophisticated analysis of Robert Bringhurst—but First Invaders is the first cumulative accounting of those who described Canada’s West Coast in published writing resulting from visits made prior to 1800.

Letters from the late 1700s are unrepresented, as are 17th century illustrators such as George Davidson, John Sykes, Pierre Blondela, Gaspard Duché de Vancy and Sigismund Bacstrom. With few exceptions, I’ve limited First Invaders to materials that are available in a book format. Excluded materials therefore include James Hanna’s Journal of 1785; Ebenezer Dorr’s Log and Journal of the Hope, 1790–1791; the fragmentary Log of the Margaret, 1792–1793; Bernard Magee’s Log of the Jefferson, 1791–1795; Thomas Manby’s Remarks on Vancouver’s Voyage and his Log of the Chatham; and J. Aisley Brown’s Log of the Discovery.

This book constitutes the first volume of a literary history of British Columbia. People from all over the world come to visit Friendly Cove at Nootka Sound where Captain Cook came ashore in 1778. I hope this compilation makes Canadians curious, too.

I’m most grateful for the critical input of Robin Inglis, director of the North Vancouver Archives, and Hispanic Studies professor Derek Carr; the editorial contribution of Edward Von der Porten; the spadework of many preceding authors—such as Derek Pethick, Herbert K. Beals, Derek Hayes and Jim McDowell, to name only a few—and contributors to the invaluable British Columbia Historical News.

My thanks go to my friend and colleague David Lester (design), my sons Jeremy (maps) and Martin (computers), agent Don Sedgwick and publisher Ronald Hatch, who made this collaborative process into a pleasure. Financial support was received from the B.C. Arts Board.

I wish to also acknowledge Grant and Lorraine Howatt of Nootka Air in Gold River who took me to Friendly Cove in rough weather, and Ray and Terry Williams, the Mowachaht protectors of Yuquot, for their hospitality and trust. —A.T.

According to archaeologist R.L. Carlson, Yuquot has the longest continuity of Nuu-chah-nulth habitation—4,200 years.

Yuquot (Friendly Cove), 1920.

Yuquot (Friendly Cove), 2004.

Jonathan Swift portrayed the West Coast of North America as a land of giants.

I

PRECURSORS

Jonathan Swift

Hui Shen

Juan de Fuca

Francis Drake

Richard Hakluyt

Samuel Purchas

Vitus Bering

Sven Waxell

Georg Wilhelm Steller

Gerhard Müller

Aleksei Chirikov

Arthur Dobbs

Denis Diderot

JONATHAN SWIFT

The first literary reference to British Columbia in English literature occurs in the second book of Gulliver’s Travels, a fictional work by satirist Jonathan Swift, in which Gulliver sails up the northwest coast of America in 1703 to a land of giants called Brobdingnag.

This land of giants was located north of New Albion in an area roughly approximate to the locale of British Columbia. Gulliver’s ship is caught in a storm so that the oldest sailor on board could not tell in what part of the World we were.

Swift blended some known geography into his creation by incorporating the findings of world traveller William Dampier, referred to by Gulliver in the text as my cousin, Dampier.

The term New Albion was derived from the secret voyage of Sir Francis Drake in 1579 when he was searching for a Northwest Passage back to England. In those days the dastardly Drake was the scourge of the Spanish, having plundered tons of silver and gold, so Queen Elizabeth had to be circumspect about backing the first Englishman to circumnavigate the world.

Only three copies of Drake’s original Queen’s Map were made. All copies have been destroyed or lost. Drake’s charts were kept secret but his term New Albion did begin to appear on some maps that attempted to depict the western coast of North America. The first public map to record the presence of Drake on the northwest coast of America was published in a book by Richard Hakluyt in 1582.

When Swift required a setting for a mythical faraway land of giants more than a century later, New Albion was appropriated. The myth of British Columbia as a land of giants, home to the elusive Sasquatch, also has some literary roots in the journals of John Ledyard, the young American seaman who sailed with Captain Cook.

Map in Gulliver’s Travels depicts Brobdingnag, New Albion and Francis Drake Port.

John Ledyard wrote: The 15th we altered our course in search of some islands, which the Russians said were inhabited by people of a gigantic size, who were covered with hair; but who notwithstanding were very civil, and would supply us with cattle and hogs, with which their island abounded.

BOOKS: Travels Into Several Remote Nations Of The World. In four parts. By Lemuel Gulliver, First a Surgeon, and then a Captain of several Ships (London: B. Motte, 1726).

HUI SHEN

It is a near certainty that Japanese or Chinese people arrived on the northwest coast long before any European. —HISTORIAN DEREK HAYES

The numismatic evidence [study of coins] from both British Columbia and Alaska does not support an ‘ancient Chinese’ connection with the eastern Pacific coast. —ARCHAEOLOGIST GRANT KEDDIE

Just as we increasingly accept that Vikings visited the eastern shores of North America long before Christopher Columbus, historians and archaeologists are increasingly willing to consider that sailors from Asia might have reached the western shores of North America long before Juan Rodríquez Cabrillo made the first European voyage along the coast of California in 1542.

The supposition that Chinese mariners might have reached the shores of British Columbia has been based mostly upon the retrieval of trading coins in B.C. and Alaska, some of which can be dated from pre-contact dynasties in China. The Chinese were using the magnetic needle and navigating by the stars prior to the birth of Christianity. It is conceivable Asian mariners could have reached North America from China using the currents of the Pacific Ocean. Archaeologists and anthropologists in California have claimed that manganese-encrusted stone anchors discovered near Palos Verdes and off Point Mendocino in California during the 1970s are ancient Chinese artifacts but these findings have been contradicted by other scientists who claim such stone anchors and line weights were left by Chinese American fishermen in the 19th century.

The cover of Gavin Menzies’ book 1421: The Year China Discovered The World.

Spaniards in the Gulf of California reported seeing large Chinese junks at anchor in 1544. In a controversial book entitled 1421: The Year China Discovered The World, a retired British submarine commander named Gavin Menzies has claimed a Chinese mariner named Zheng He visited the West Coast of America about one lifetime prior to Columbus. Zheng He (1371–1435 A.D.) was a eunuch whose ships ventured to Arabia and East Africa. Such expeditions were made with flotillas of more than 300 ships under the direction of Emperor Zhu Di during the Ming Dynasty.

Louise Levathes’ study When China Ruled The Seas: The Treasure Fleet of the Dragon Throne, 1405–1433 (Oxford University Press, 1996) is one of several books that has documented the far-reaching accomplishments of Chinese mariners such as Zheng He (Cheng Ho), Zhou Man and Hong Bao during the early 15th century. Menzies has added a mish-mash of conjectures to Levathes’ research to suggest the Chinese also reached America, Antarctica and even Europe. A media feeding frenzy ensued when Menzies’ book appeared, but his research has been ridiculed as inconclusive and fanciful by academic experts.

Even more elusive are the earlier maritime wanderings of the monk Hui Shen, sometimes spelled Hoei-Shin. In The Jade Coast (2003), biologist Robert Butler repeats the common assertion that Hui Shen visited a distant land to the east that they called Fusang quo in the fifth century. This land of Fusang, Fu-Sang or Fou Sang was often included on European maps during the 18th century in areas that have roughly approximated the location of Vancouver Island.

American historian Charles Chapman refers to Hui Shen in his chapter "The Chinese Along the Pacific