They still kept hovering about the Boats & being apprehensive they would be endeavouring to commit Depredations during the Night, I … ordered a Musquett to be fired, but so far was it from intimidating or alarming them, that they remained stationary, only exclaiming Pop at every report in way of Derision.
Many years later, when white settlers and missionaries began to travel aboard Indian canoes as passengers, they were baffled and irritated by the strange, slow, halting progress of even the simplest voyage. The natives apparently had no idea of how to get from A to B without making detours to L, P, and Y along the way. The whites, who conceived of the sea as an empty space, expected their canoe to go in a straight line, a compass course, from departure point to destination, and could not fathom why Indian pilots should insist on frittering away precious time in a succession of stops, starts, and unnecessary diversions. A lot of ink was expended by settlers on the theme of Indian laziness and superstition—for why else should a passage of a few miles, in sheltered waters, be habitually protracted into a whole day of intermittent paddling, talking, and unscheduled visits ashore?
The Bostonian James Swan built a cabin on Shoalwater (now Willapa) Bay in 1852. Bluff and easygoing, he greatly admired the seamanship and boat-building skills of the Quinault Indians with whom he settled, and from whom he bought a dugout canoe 46’ long and 6’ wide. “These canoes are beautiful specimens of naval architecture,” wrote Swan. “Formed of a single log of cedar, they present a model of which a white mechanic might well be proud.” Yet even the tolerant Swan grew impatient with the stop-go style of Indian navigation. He described a typical day aboard a canoe:
When in the canoe, all hands will paddle vehemently, and one would suppose the journey would be speedily accomplished, the canoe seeming almost to fly. This speed will be kept up for a hundred rods, when they cease paddling, and all begin talking. Perhaps one has spied something, which he has to describe while the rest listen; or another thinks of some funny anecdote or occurrence that has transpired among the Indians they have been visiting, that has to be related; or they are passing some remarkable tree, or cliff, or stone, which has a legend attached to it, and which the old folks never can pass without relating to the young, who all give the most respectful attention. When the tale is over, the steersman gives the word “Que-nuk, que-nuk, whid-tuck” (now, now, hurry), when all again paddle with a desperate energy for a few minutes, and then the same scene is again enacted.
There were innumerable deviations from the course:
I noticed that the Indians were all heading in towards the beach instead of proceeding at once to Gray’s Harbor. I asked the Indians why we were going ashore, and received for reply the invariable “Klo-nas,” or “I don’t know”; a term which is fully as expressive and as often used as the Mexican Quien sabe.
Swan resigned himself to the fact that “hurrying [Indians] up continually only vexes them to no purpose” and took comfort in his whiskey flask and waterproof bag of cigars.
Myron Eells—the costive Methodist missionary and humorless teetotaler who sermonized long and tediously on the evil effects of tobacco—was a frequent passenger in the canoes of his Skokomish parishioners. As Swan attributed the breaks and detours in the voyage to the canoeists’ passion for gossip and storytelling, so Eells put them down to unregenerate paganism. Whenever his Indians stopped the canoe and began to talk among themselves, he believed they were “doing tamahnous” (Eells’s word for what later anthropologists usually transcribe as tamánamis—variously “secret knowledge,” “special power,” or “guardian spirit”). A contrary wind prompted a halt for “tamahnous”; so did a steepening sea, or a passage past a whirlpool, tide race, or dangerous rock. When the myopic gospeler lectured them on the folly of persisting in their old heathen ways, they paid him no particular attention. Rather, they took to lecturing him.
Water monster. They believe that there is a great water animal, which has overturned canoes, and eaten up people, but which cannot be killed. I have noticed that they seem to think it dwells at places where naturally the navigation for canoes is more than ordinarily dangerous, as at Point Wilson, near Port Townsend, where the tide rips are very bad, and at a dangerous place near Duckaboos, on Hood Canal. When passing these places in canoes, I have often been told to keep still and not say a word for fear of arousing the monster, and have also been told how he has sucked under whole canoes in these places.
Myron Eells was no sailor. In a canoe, he had to do what he was told. So the minister, famous for his garrulous moralism, was silenced, made to crouch, stock-still, holding his breath, so as not to wake the monster.
More than fifty years later, the Reverend Eells was still clearly remembered by old people who had been children aboard those canoes. In 1934, a student of anthropology at the University of Washington, William W. Elmendorf, interviewed a Skokomish elder, Henry Allen, who spoke of Eells as “that awful man.”
People didn’t like him very well. He was collecting Klallam words from some Klallam Indians who were visiting here one time. I had to translate for him. So he would ask them for words like father, mother, house, dog, and so on. And those people didn’t think much of Eells, so they would give him all sorts of dirty, nasty words, and he would write them down in a book. Then he would try and use some of those words, thinking he was talking Indian, and people would just about bust trying to keep from laughing.
Allen’s most cheerful memory of Eells was of watching the minister and his family become miserably seasick in a canoe on passage up Juan de Fuca Strait, from Neah Bay to Port Townsend:
It got so rough that the minister’s family all huddled together under a blanket and got sick. They emptied a basin regular from under that blanket.
Often sick and frightened, and nearly always impatient with the slow and convoluted progress of the journey, the whites were feeble observers at sea. On land, they took copious notes on almost everything the Indians did, from cooking to basketwork. They painstakingly described the construction of cedar canoes and fishing gear. But once the canoes were afloat, some affliction descended on these industrious amateur ethnologists, who suddenly went blind to the details of native navigation, except to complain about its failure to acknowledge the self-evident supremacy of the straight line.
Most accounts of nineteenth-century voyages contain hints of disagreement and bad feeling on the canoe. Some escapades are unwittingly comic, as when the Belgian missionary Father Augustin Brabant described how a heavy sea got up off the entrance to Clayoquot Sound, on the west coast of Vancouver Island, and his benighted crew first tried to calm the waves by smacking them with the flats of their paddles, then tried to appease them by throwing food into the water. For this they got a severe talking-to from their priest, who deplored their primitive superstitions. Father Brabant had the true solution. “I put the matter into the hands of Saint Lawrence,” wrote this master of higher magic. The canoe landed up safe, but swamped, on an outcrop of serrated rocks. “I named the place St. Lawrence Reef,” said Father Brabant, with proprietorial smugness. The Lawrence Islets (they look like a set of jagged black molars) lie on the north side of what is now Brabant Channel.
Two worldviews were in collision; and the poverty of white accounts of these canoe journeys reflects the colonialists’ blindness to the native sea. They didn’t get it—couldn’t grasp the fact that for Indians the water was a place, and the great bulk of the surrounding land mere undifferentiated space.
The whites had entered a looking-glass world, where their own most basic terms were reversed. Their whole focus was directed toward the land: its natural harbors, its timber, its likely spots for settlement and agriculture. They traveled everywhere equipped with mental chainsaws and at a glance could strip a hill of its covering forest (as Vancouver does, again and again, in his Voyage) and see there a future of hedges, fields, houses, churches. They viewed the sea as a medium of access to the all-important land.
The civilization of the coastal Indians was centered on a thin ribbon of shoreline between the water and the woods. Their grandly substantial wooden houses, with family crests painted on their fronts, flanked by carved totemic posts and poles, faced out to sea, their backs turned to the forbidding land. Going into the forest was distinctly more dangerous than going to sea: its hazards were more unpredictable and less easily avoided than the maelstroms and krakens of the deep. Wolves, cougars, and grizzly bears lurked in the woods. The tangled overstory blocked out the sun, and people quickly became disoriented as they were forced to double back around snags and fallen trees, to clamber through the head-high undergrowth of fern, bramble, and salal.
Into the near forest ventured hunting parties, trusting to safety in numbers. Adolescents, on a ritual quest for sklakletuts or tamánamis, went alone, to test themselves in an alien and scary environment, much as their Anglo counterparts might run off to sea. Beyond the forest rose the mountains, in jagged planes of bare rock and ice—the habitat of the universally feared thunder-eagle, and of other fantastic, legendary creatures known for their casual, jocose brutality to mankind. The deeper one went into the woods, the closer one came to the nightmare domain of cruel superpowers whose parts were enacted by masked dancers at firelit winter ceremonies: the horned and snarling double-headed sisiutl; kwekwe, the earthquake-maker; bookwus, the forest giant; hokhokw, a bird-monster. Adepts at metamorphosis, such beings could manifest themselves in the humble guises of a frog or a river otter, could soar on wings as powerful as those of eagles, could tear apart human flesh with the claws and teeth of bears. They belonged to the haunted netherworld of fearful imagination—a place Indians readily identified with the depths of the forest and the unscalable mountains above the timberline.
Reading through Franz Boas’s monumental collection of tales from the Kathlamet, Kwakiutl, Salishan, Bella Bella, and Tsimshian tribes, it’s striking how consistently the terms “inland” and “seaward” are used by the storytellers. When characters go “inland,” it almost invariably signals a dangerous adventure in unknown territory. “Seaward” marks the return to safety and home.
The relationship between land and sea is nicely glossed in the opening lines of a Tlingit story, “The Man Who Entertained the Bears,” collected by Swanton in 1904:
A man belonging to the Raven clan living in a very large town had lost all of his friends, and he felt sad to think that he was left alone. He began to consider how he could leave that place without undergoing hardships. First he thought of paddling away, but he said to himself, “If I paddle away to another village and the people there see that I am alone, they may think that I have run away from my own village, from having been accused of witchcraft or on account of some other disgraceful thing.” He did not feel like killing himself, so he thought that he would go off into the forest.
While this man was traveling along in the woods the thought occurred to him to go to the bears and let the bears kill him.…
The sea is too social for this lonely outcast. His canoe would be noticed, his presence become an object of gossip. For him, the sea is not the void, the ultimate anonymous refuge, of white culture; he can no more escape to sea than I can escape to my suburban mall. It is to land, to the obliterating darkness of the forest, that he must go for solace or suicide.
The sea was the canoe-Indians’ workplace, their open market, and their battleground. Intertribal marriages were brokered there, where friends met and deals were struck. It was the front doorstep on which visitors were formally greeted, as the Nootka Indians greeted Captain Cook off the entrance to Nootka Sound, standing up in their canoes, throwing feathers and red ochre into the sea, and making speeches, followed by a song. “After the tumultuous oration had ceased,” Cook wrote, “one of them sung a very agreeable air, with a degree of softness and melody which we could not have expected.” Here, on the exposed coast, where the invariable westerly swell heaps up alarmingly as it feels the shallow bottom at the entrance to the sound, you’d have to be a Nootka Indian to stand upright in a canoe, let alone make speeches and sing tunefully on your feet.
The sea provided the Indians with a neighborhood, around which they loitered, scuffed their heels, and traded small talk. While its lower depths harbored beings, like Komogwa, as dangerous and mercurial in character as those of the deep forest, the water’s surface was a broad public arena on which most of daily life took place. George Vancouver, keeping an anxious watch on the comings and goings of the canoes, their apparently random, zigzag routes, might usefully have cast his mind back to his native town of King’s Lynn, where on the Saturday market in the long shadow of St. Margaret’s he must have seen the same patterns, advances, retreats, crossings-over, and deviations that sociable pedestrians practice everywhere. Indians were moving on the sea exactly as whites moved on dry land; but the whites steadfastly failed to wise up to this basic transposition of land and sea, place and space.
When the German geographer Aurel Krause was working on an Alaskan survey for the Bremen Geographical Society in 1881, he took time out to research and write an anthropological monograph on the Tlingit tribe. He was scathing, in a heavy, schoolmasterish way, about the dim intellect of his subjects. “Their power of understanding is limited.… The tales of the origin of things are full of lively imagination, but lack all sensible understanding and scarcely show any comprehension of the universe.” Krause illustrated this tough judgment by describing the Tlingits’ pathetic grasp of geography:
In spite of the fact that the Tlingit is constantly surrounded by nature, he is only acquainted with it as it offers him the necessities of life. He knows every bay that lends itself to fishing or the beaching of a canoe … and for these he has names; but the mountain peaks themselves, even though they are outstanding on account of their shape or size, are scarcely noticed by him.
This unwittingly revealing observation suggests that the mountains, in Tlingit cosmology, occupied the same space as the ocean does in the cosmology of Europeans like Aurel Krause. They represented the formless and primordial flux, “that state of barbaric vagueness and disorder out of which civilization has emerged and into which, unless saved by the efforts of gods and men, it is always liable to relapse,” as W. H. Auden wrote of the ocean. They were utterly inhospitable to mankind. The terrible thunder-eagle, chaos incarnate, had his eyrie there. The mountain peaks, in all their meaningless variety, were unnameable. But the Tlingits had a thousand names for the sea.
Thatcher Pass was a hole-in-the-wall aperture between islands. Riding the flood tide, the boat slipped through the crevice and entered a nearly landlocked basin of water, smooth as oil, silvered in the diffuse and misty morning light. A deer stood motionless, spindle-shanked, on a shelf of black rock at the southwestern tip of Blakeley Island, as if posed there for deliberate scenic effect. Nine or ten of the San Juan Islands were strewn negligently about the place, the smaller like crumbs of fruitcake, balanced on their exact reflections, while the bigger ones—Blakeley, Lopez, Orcas, Decatur—lent their inky, evergreen color to the sea at their feet.
Motoring into the San Juans, I felt I’d trespassed rudely into the middle of a painted canvas. A luminist waterscape by Martin Johnson Heade or George Caleb Bingham? Not quite. Too manicured and self-consciously pretty for that, it was clearly the work of a later and more sentimental artist. With its mirror-still water, rocks, and fir trees, its view of distant snowcapped mountains, this was an authentic Bob Ross.
I’d seen him paint it one Sunday afternoon on channel 9. It took him 25 minutes, start to finish. On his PBS series, “The Joy of Painting,” whose name nicely put art on a par with
other Joy of activities like cooking and sex, Ross showed one how to turn scenes from wild American nature into paintings that would grace the walls of any discriminating Chinese restaurant. The programs were aimed at elderly viewers with little or no experience of paints and brushes, and the words that cropped up most frequently in Ross’s titles for his works—Serenity, Solitude, Golden, Quiet, Retreat, Hideaway, Seclusion, Lonely, Autumn, Winter—were all descriptive of the state of retirement itself.
For this particular painting, Ross laid on mountains of Prussian Blue and wreathed them deftly in Titanium-White mist, chatting companionably as he went along. “These gorgeous things … Just gorgeous! You can see a range of mountains like this, it looks like God was certainly havin’ a good day when he made it.” His slight southern accent, exaggeratedly soft and slow, was a large aural dose of Valium. Fiftyish, bearded, with a great fuzzy thornbush of hair that some topi-arist had trimmed to a perfect globe encircling his friendly face, Ross had the manners of a middle-aged boy—the sweet, capable son who never misses his Sunday visit to the old folks’ home. On his palette he swizzled up a mixture of Midnight Black, Alizarin Crimson, and Satin Green, then conjured a low promontory of second-growth firs, reaching out into the water from the right-hand side of the picture. The trees, skinny and evenly spaced, less than twenty years old, were the kind that tugboatmen, rafting them up and down the Inside Passage, derisively called “peckerpoles.”
I skirted the promontory, smashing reflections as I went. The foreground trees, paler and more detailed than the rest, were picked out in Sap Green and Yellow Ochre. Slabs of rock, breaking the surface of the water along the shoreline, were set, bricklayer-style, by Bob Ross with a palette knife loaded with Van Dyke Brown.
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