The West Coast of Canada regional meeting of the Captain Cook Society on November 10, 2024, was again held using Zoom.  There were 26 attendees at this meeting from all around the world, with people from Australia, New Zealand, the UK, Germany, and of course, various places in North America, such as Springfield, CA, Seattle, WA, Toronto, ON and, last but not least, Vancouver Island and Mayne Island, BC. 

Our guest speaker was John Lutz, a professor in the History Department at the University of Victoria, BC, with a research focus on the Pacific Northwest from the 1770s to the 1970s.  He is the author of Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations,¹ and editor/co-editor of several volumes.²  John is the co-director of the award-winning Great Unsolved Mysteries in Canadian History website.³  With fellow CCS member Dennis Flewelling, John is working on a book about Pacific exploration in the 1790s, focusing on Thomas Manby, one of Captain Vancouver's midshipmen.⁴

Here is a brief summary of the presentation, which was called “First Contact, Second Thoughts: Indigenous Stories of First Encounters on the Northwest Coast”.

Have you ever wondered how the explorers managed to communicate with the indigenous people they encountered, and how those native peoples communicated to the explorers?   Beyond the visual cues, e.g., whether the natives were looking angry and pointing weapons at them, much guess-work must have been involved.  Over time, the stories handed down over generations have given us some understanding of these first encounters. 

Upon arriving at Yuquot (Friendly Cove) at Nootka Sound, Cook and his ships’ company were greeted by very friendly natives, the Nuu-chah-nulth people, paddling towards them in many canoes, singing and waving.  The natives’ accounts reveal that they believed the “moon man” had come down like two canoes.  They thought the ship was a spirit and, when shown a pewter plate glinting in the sunlight, that these men with white faces had brought down the stars.  The indigenous people did not worship one god but many mythical beings. 

The accounts of the European people exploring these places saw everything through their own filters of religious beliefs and history. 

When the Spaniard Juan Pérez made contact with the Haida people in 1774, the account of it said that the natives formed themselves into the shape of a cross and sang a motet. 

Maggie and Randy Komar

References

1. Lutz, John Sutton.  Makúk: A New History of Aboriginal-White Relations.  UBC Press.  2008.
2. Books he has edited/co-edited include
   Lutz, John Sutton (ed.).  Myth and Memory: Stories of Indigenous-European Contact.  UBC Press.  2007.Cook, Peter and Neil Vallance, John Lutz, Graham Brazier, and Hamar Foster (eds).  To Share Not Surrender: Indigenous and Settler Visions of Treaty Making in the Colonies of Vancouver Island and British Columbia.  UBC Press.  2021.
3. https://canadianmysteries.ca/
4. Flewelling, Dennis.  “Thomas Manby and Sexploration in the Pacific” in Cook’s Log. 2016.  Vol. 38, no. 3.  Pages 33–37.

Originally published in Cook's Log, page 46, volume 48, number 1 (2025).