12/30/2023 0 Comments Captain cook nootka soundJewitt suffered a serious head injury but his life was saved by Maquinna, who saw how useful it would be to have an armourer to repair weapons. At a signal, the Nootka attacked, and all but two of the white men were killed. On 22 March 1803, the day before Boston intended to set sail, many Nootka came aboard to trade and were given dinner. The ship Boston taken by the savages at Nootka Sound Salter gave Maquinna a fowling piece (shotgun) as a present, which was somehow broken, leading to harsh words from the captain and suppressed rage on the part of Maquinna, who decided to take revenge for offences committed by previous European ships over the years. Generally, there was cordiality and friendliness between his people and the visiting ships, although Captain Salter took the precaution of having them searched for weapons before allowing them to come aboard. (Jewitt throughout his memoirs refers to Maquinna as a king, and those subordinate to him as chiefs.) Because of the frequent British and American trading ships, Maquinna had learned enough English to communicate. The next morning, 13 March 1803, several people from Nootka village, including Maquinna, came aboard to trade. Salter decided to stop a few miles from any habitation to get wood and water. Ten weeks after passing Cape Horn, Boston reached Woody Point in Nootka Sound. The captain shot an albatross with a wingspan of 15 feet (p. 20). The crew, tired of subsisting on salt meat, caught porpoises, which they called "herring hogs" (p. 19), and sharks, which they considered fishes. Catherine on the coast of Brazil (today's city of Florianópolis), then around Cape Horn, and straight to Vancouver Island, avoiding the Sandwich Islands (now Hawaii). A month's sail took them to the Island of St. Part of his job while on board was to make hatchets, daggers, and knives "for the Indian trade" (p. 15). The ship left British waters in convoy on 3 September 1802. He and the captain persuaded his father, and he signed on for thirty dollars (around $600 in 2020) a month. Jewitt was offered the chance to settle in the United States at the end of the voyage if he wished. They were to sail in a triangle: first to the Pacific Northwest coast of North America to trade furs there then to China for further trading and finally to the home port in New England. In 1802, an American captain, John Salter, invited him to sign on as an armourer to a round-the-world trip on his ship Boston, out of Boston, Massachusetts. Jewitt read the voyages of explorers such as Captain Cook and became acquainted with sailors both of these sources of stories made him wish to travel. 1798) the family moved to Hull, then one of the main ports and trading centres of Britain, where the Jewitt business picked up a lot of custom from the ships. Jewitt pleaded with his father to be allowed to learn metalwork instead, and eventually he was allowed to do so. After two years, his father withdrew him from school in order to apprentice him to a surgeon at Reasby, in the neighbourhood of the great traveller and naturalist Sir Joseph Banks. He learned Latin, higher mathematics, navigation and surveying. Accordingly, from the age of 12, John attended an academy at Donington in Lincolnshire that provided an "education superior to that which is to be obtained in a common school" (p. 6). ![]() Jewitt's father was a blacksmith and trained his eldest son for that trade, intending that his younger son go into one of the learned professions. ![]() ![]() The memoir, according to the Dictionary of Canadian Biography, is a major source of information about the indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest Coast. ![]() The Canadian Encyclopedia describes Jewitt as a shrewd observer and his Narrative as a "classic of captivity literature". John Rodgers Jewitt ( – 7 January 1821) was an English armourer who entered the historical record with his memoirs about the 28 months he spent as an enslaved captive of Maquinna of the Nuu-chah-nulth (Nootka) people on what is now the British Columbia Coast.
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