The Good Rain: Across Time & Terrain in the Pacific Northwest by Timothy Egan Page B

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 Blighbecame 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