Maquinna
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Maquinna, (Muquinna, Macuina, Maquilla), was the name of the chief of the Nuu-chah-nulth people of Nootka Sound, during the heyday of the maritime fur trade in the 1780s and 1790s on the Pacific Northwest Coast. His people are known as the Mowachaht and reside today with their kin, the Muchalaht, at Gold River, British Columbia.
Maquinna was a powerful chief of the Nuu-chah-nulth peoples whose village, Yuquot, was located in Nootka Sound, which became the first important anchorage in the imperial jockeying for power and commerce as the era of the maritime fur trade began. Yuquot became known as Friendly Cove, and after first hosting Captain James Cook in 1776, Imperial Spain was quick to assert its authority, sending north scientific and mapping ships, and also orders to establish a Spanish fort at Friendly Cove on Nootka Sound. Ensuing events saw the seizure of a British subject and his Austrian-registered vessel by the Spanish, which provoked an international episode known as the Nootka Crisis.
Maquinna played a key role in relations between Spanish envoy Juan Francisco de la Bodega y Quadra, and his British counterpart, Captain George Vancouver, who negotiated the settlement of the Nootka affair and enjoyed Maquinna's hospitality at length. It is worth noting that the title by which he is described, Hyas Tyee, which was to find its way into the vocabulary of the Chinook Jargon, is the same as that used for king (although it simply means important chief).
One story tells how he and his brother, Callicum, performed a masquerade for Vancouver and Quadra in which the noble brothers acted out a pantomime of European dress and manners, improvising mock-Spanish and mock-English dialogue, all set in the customary style of the great potlatch theatre-dance culture of the Northwest Coast. Callicum was killed when he paddled out to a Spanish frigate, that was threatening to claim Yuquot, to show his anger. He was then shot by a seaman aboard the ship.
Callicum's death and many other details of life in Maquinna's court are told in the writings of John R. Jewitt, one of two sole survivors of a British ship whose crew was massacred by Maquinna's men. His The Adventures and Sufferings of John R. Jewitt is one of the first published glimpses into the social and cultural life of the Pacific Northwest peoples on record.
[edit] External links
[edit] References
- First Approaches to the North West Coast, Derek Pethick, University of Washington Press, July 1977
- The Nootka Connection: The Northwest Coast,, Derek Pethick, University of Washington Press 1980
- British Columbia chronicle,: Adventures by sea and land, G.P.V. Akrigg
