RAVEN’S
CRY
Come all ye bold Northwestmen who plough the raging main. Come listen to my story, while I relate the same. ’Twas of the Lady Washington decoyed as she lay At Queen Charlotte’s Island, in North America.
On the sixteenth day of June, boys, in the year ’91, The natives in great numbers on board our ship did come. Then for to buy our furs of them the captain did begin; But mark what they attempted before long time had been.
NEW ENGLAND BALLAD
BEFORE YOU START THE STORY
“IN THE YEAR ’91”—1791—THE SECRET WAS OUT.
It had been out for several years. Captain Cook had stumbled on it. And when his journal was published, the world had gasped.
Russian merchant adventurers had been getting sea otter skins from the native Aleuts in the North Pacific for years. And they had been selling them to the mandarins of China for fabulous prices, keeping the trade a secret.
By mere chance, Captain Cook’s seamen had picked up a few pelts along the North Pacific coast of America and had then sold them in China for such staggering sums that they had threatened mutiny when their captain refused to sail back across the Pacific for more furs.
It was almost unbelievable. Chinese merchants would pay hundreds of dollars for one sea otter pelt.
“And you can buy prime pelts for a few glass beads,” astounded merchants told their partners. A glitter brightened their eyes. “Why, a man could be wealthy in no time!”
Englishmen and Americans rushed ships into the marine fur trade. And on each voyage they picked up two fortunes instead of one. First, they bought furs for a trifle and sold them for a fortune in China; then they filled their empty holds with Chinese tea and silk and porcelain to sell for another fortune back home.
It was a time for the founding of family affluence. Too many people saw that. Competition grew fierce along the North Pacific coast. Rival traders bribed the native people with liquor. They imprisoned chiefs to force a village to sell its furs. After all, they told their shipmates, these were only savages; they did not really matter; they didn’t have fine feelings like civilized human beings.
“Besides,” captains said, “we’ll never run into this particular bunch of heathens again.”
The savages responded with “treachery.” Occasionally they became so “bloodthirsty” that they had to be taught a lesson.
Captain Kendrick of the Lady Washington taught them one such lesson “on the sixteenth day of June, boys, in the year ’91.” The old New England ballad tells the story, but only one side of the story.
The other side is just as exciting; and it starts a little earlier. The native story begins at a time when the only sailing ships venturing along the wild northwest coast were those of explorers, like Captain Cook, who were searching for the fabled Northwest Passage to the Orient. And, like the ballad, it begins “at Queen Charlotte’s Island, in North America.”
So, if you would like to know the other side . . . “Come listen to my story, while I relate the same.”
ONE
IT WAS THE SPRING OF 1775.
Storms of seagulls eddied and whirled, flashed and dipped and screamed along the west coast of Haida Gwaii, a large group of offshore islands—the Queen Charlottes—lying fifty miles south of the Alaskan fringe.
Haiias and Yatz, tall Haida Indian boys, stood near the northwestern tip of the largest, northern island. A bracing wind lifted their hair. Sunlight brightened the Eagle crests tattooed on their lithe but full-chested bodies. It glinted on their copper armbands as they stood scanning the wild seacoast that stretched away to the southwest.
Haiias had brought the younger boy along the trail from K’yuusdaa village, where they were visiting. Now he glanced at him in sudden speculation. He parted his lips to speak; but closed them to watch the seagulls, and then the sea.
Offshore, the swells of the Pacific broke on the reefs in a fury at being stopped after thousands of miles of unbroken ocean.
Inshore, a herd of sea otters sunned themselves on the rocks, and frolicked in the surf.
The taller boy, Haiias, watched the embattled reefs. His eyes held a sea rover’s joy in the greatness of his sea. Then his gaze ranged farther out. He peered expectantly along the horizon.
Unaware of this suppressed excitement, Yatz watched the sea otters. Never before had he seen so many of them; and never had he seen them so nearly betraying their other, their human, selves. Little family groups caressed one another fondly. Young sea otters romped awkwardly on the rocks, tossing kelp bulbs; and as they moved, their loose glossy coats rippled in the sunlight. Play was more graceful in the sea. And treading water like human beings, mothers threw their pups into the air and then caught them with a glee that set Yatz laughing. “My heart feels good,” he said, watching them.
Haiias smiled indulgently at him; Yatz was newly arrived from a small east coast village. He turned to watch the herd, too; but his thoughts were different. His eyes lingered on the dark pelts that were so eagerly sought in the intertribal trading of the northwest coast. All the chiefs in the north wanted lustrous black sea otter cloaks. Tlingits from Alaska would give you copper for the skin; Tsimshian and Nisga’a from the nearby mainland would exchange boxes of eulachon fish grease, and mountain goat horns to steam and carve into spoons. “You see a chief’s cloak for yourself?” he teased Yatz.
The other shook his head seriously, and his eyes saddened for a moment. Then he shrugged off his foolishness. Sea otters were glad to give up their fur blankets, he knew, as long as the sea hunters made themselves worthy of such a gift, before and after hunting. “They seem so very human,” he murmured to his companion, then immediately flushed. Haiias was training as a sea hunter. “I heard of one carrying her dead pup around for days,” he said in lame apology. “They said she wailed and grieved like a human mother.”
“Mothers,” said Haiias lightly.
“Mothers,” echoed Yatz, sighing. He reddened at the other’s sharp glance. An heir to a Haida chieftainship did not betray a weak longing for his home. He hid his embarrassment in an affectionate tussle with his dog.
Then he straightened himself with pride. His home was in his uncle’s Eagle House at Hiellen near Rose Spit. There was no better place in the world to be. The world had no prouder blood, he had been told, than that of the Eagle chiefs of the Sdast’a•aas Saang gaahl lineage.
People had dubbed their clan “Sdast’a•aas” because its members were as numerous and as ever-increasing as maggots on the carcass of a dead whale washed up on a beach. Yatz smiled now at the amusing flattery of the clan name. Maggots! And Saang gaahl, the name of the noblest family in the big Sdast’a•aas clan, was equally flattering and amusing. People had named the family “Saang gaahl” because, like a saang ga diving bird, it made so great a noise with its feasting.
All the Sdast’a•aas were allowed to carve an Eagle at the top of their totem poles; all could paint an Eagle on their possessions. High-ranking members owned additional crests they used to decorate immense cedar houses which, they had long since discovered, were the biggest and handsomest houses in the world. They had many cherished crests to ornament the fifty-, sixty-, and even seventy-foot dugout cedar canoes which, they had also discovered, were the largest and by far the most beautiful canoes in the world. They had many chiefs’ names in the Sdast’a•aas families; and of these none was as honored as the Saang gaahl family’s Gannyaa and 7idansuu, names belonging like Haiias and himself at Hiellen, head village of the Sdast’a•aas Eagles.
Still the boy’s thoughts kept racing back to the east coast of Haida